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The rumours have followed him around for years: Keith Murray, working alongside LL Cool J, is widely suspected of having dissed Tupac Shakur in Cool’s track ‘I Shot Ya.’ Pac certainly thought so, and, not long before he died, he confronted Murray about it—and a tussle is said to have broken out.

Murray is probably most famous for being a member of Def Squad, but he also got people’s attention by appearing on LL Cool J’s song ‘I Shot Ya’ and its remix, which brought Prodigy, Fat Joe and Foxy Brown on board, too. Both versions of the song were pure East Coast, and they were released in 1995—in other words, as the East-West feud was really heating up.

When Tupac heard it, he had a suspicion that the song was a diss aimed at him. The Notorious BIG had only recently released his song ‘Who Shot Ya?,’ which was widely believed to be a taunt against Pac following his shooting in 1994, which he survived. A bunch of East Coast rappers releasing a song called ‘I Shot Ya’ certainly seemed to be backing Biggie’s ‘Who Shot Ya?,’ so Tupac, reasonably enough, came to a certain conclusion—and he wasn’t happy.

At some point following the release of ‘I Shot Ya,’ Tupac and Keith Murray happened to be in the same place, so Pac, annoyed by what he believed to be a slight against him, approached Murray. This much is true, but what happened next has been subject to much speculation over the years. According to some, Pac and Murray got into a fight.

Murray has since denied that this is how things played out. Appearing on the Thisis50 YouTube channel in 2012, he claimed that no violence occurred during their encounter. They had what he described as a “heated exchange” while discussing the meaning of ‘I Shot Ya,’ but that, apparently, was all there was to it.

“That’s some dumb shit to say that I beat Tupac Shakur up,” Murray said during the interview, before claiming that the rumours of a fight had emerged because of an interview he had given shortly after the incident. According to Murray, the clip that was broadcast was presented out of context and people got the wrong idea.

“If you look at the clip,” he said, “you’ll see that I never said that I beat Tupac up; I said that we squared off… because when he got shot [in ’94], he thought that we all made that record ‘I Shot Ya’ with LL Cool J… about him. When I seen him, I said, ‘Nah, we ain’t talking about you,’ we shook hands at the end of the night and that was that.”

If the track genuinely wasn’t about Pac, and if that rumour about the two of them fighting wasn’t true, it’s understandable that Murray would be angry about how things were reported. In his chat on Thisis50, he railed against the media outlet he felt had wronged him. “The media think they real slick, too,” he said. “They would word a clip different than what it is in the clip, and a lot of that shit is going on.”

Murray claimed that he wouldn’t have dissed Pac in a track, and that, to the contrary, they were fine with each other. “I would never disrespect Tupac,” he said. “When I first met him, it was in New York. I seen him, and I said, ‘You the shit,’ and he said ‘No, you the shit.’”