Congratulations are in order. On Monday, November 2, 2026, rapper Tom MacDonald announced on X that he is marrying his longtime girlfriend and creative collaborator, Nova Rockafeller. “I’m getting married to my best friend…AND dropping a New Music Video on Friday ❤️,” he wrote. Tom really never misses throwing in a music announcement!
I’m getting married to my best friend…AND dropping a New Music Video on Friday ❤️ pic.twitter.com/7BztkqbmJP
— Tom MacDonald (@IAMTOMMACDONALD) November 2, 2026
Nova, in her signature style, within minutes asks her followers whether she should “still give people the middle finger or do I use the finger with 5.5 VVS carats on it?” She also joked that people should “check on your friends I know the news of my engagement will devastate thousands 💔,” and promised to “shake up a can of Mountain Dew and spray it all over my house like champagne.”
So do I still give people the middle finger or do I use the finger with 5.5 VVS carats on it?
— Nova Rockafeller (@NovaRockafeller) November 2, 2026
Also please check on your friends I know the news of my engagement will devastate thousands 💔
— Nova Rockafeller (@NovaRockafeller) November 2, 2026
How they met, in Tom’s words
Tom has said he’s told the story “like a million times.” In a fan Q&A, he explained that it began with a cold email. Nova was putting on a rap show in Edmonton, Alberta, and Tom, who was out of pro wrestling at the time, had been quietly writing raps for years.
I started googling her name… I think I found her Myspace… and then found her email and I sent her an email and I said, “Hey, I heard that you’re putting on a rap show, can I rap on your show?” And she was like, “Well, send me some of your music and if it’s dope you can perform.”
Tom MacDonald, Q&A, 1:16
Two days later he met her on Whyte Avenue to help put up posters for the show.
Tom told the same story in his long-form PragerU interview. He said Nova “was like the only female in Canada putting on rap shows,” and when he asked other rappers where the shows were, “they told me, ‘Oh, talk to this girl named Nova.'” His demo tracks “sucked,” he joked, but “luckily for me, she was a kid at the time, too, and her sense of taste was probably about as bad as my own.”
“That’s how I met Nova,” he said. The show sold out. Nova’s brother was the DJ, and Tom performed a song called “Throw Your Drink at the DJ.” Someone actually threw a drink at Nova’s brother. “Probably not the best first impression ever,” Tom laughed.
On Jillian Michaels asked when he met Nova, Tom said, “We’ve been together in a romantic relationship for like 10 or 11 years… but I’ve known her for like 17 or 18.”
The brain-tumor scare that brought them back together
Their first meeting didn’t lead straight to romance. In a joint interview clip with Off The Record, Tom said the two “hadn’t talked in years and years and years.” admitting he kept turning down Nova’s invitations to potlucks and parties. Nova’s answer: “You didn’t like me for a while.” according to Tom, they would get in arguments every time we hung out “for like a year.”
Then came a health scare. Tom said doctors thought he had a brain tumor and sent him for an MRI and CAT scan. It turned out to be severe sinusitis and a deviated septum.
I was like, oh my god, I have to like reach out to everybody who I’ve been ignoring for like the last five years now that I know I’m gonna live… and Nova was the first person I called.
Tom MacDonald, Off The Record
“And now here we are like four years later,” he added. The clip ends in classic Tom-and-Nova teasing. Nova told him, “If I didn’t talk to you, Thomas, your life would be so boring.” Tom said he does “jaw workouts every day like 18 hours a day because she never shuts the [expletive] up.”
Nova’s Words
Nova told her side in a January 2021 post on her blog titled “Why I quit rapping.” She wrote it after a major-label deal fell apart and she sank into depression and drinking. When she wanted to write again, she knew who to call:
I called Tom, my favorite person of 10 years, practically begging him to come over and write songs. I just wanted inside his brain. He didn’t care that my lyrics were sad, his were sad too… Everything he wrote spoke to my heart. A month later we’d started a band, named it GFBF, written an entire album and fell in love.
Nova Rockafeller, “Why I quit rapping” (archived)
South Central, the dollar store, and “Dear Rappers”
From there, Nova wrote, “He moved in to my crappy house in South Central, we started shooting music videos, and I felt like magic was real – ignore the fact that we could barely make rent and did all of our grocery shopping at the dollar store. I could see my FUTURE again.”
Then everything changed. “One night he wrote ‘Dear Rappers’ and within a few months literally everything had changed,” she wrote. “My boyfriend was suddenly famous.” GFBF went on hold, and Nova was candid about how hard that was for her. She also described how she threw herself into building his career:
I shot and directed all of his music videos, I created his website and helped with his store, I’d cowrite on his hooks and I helped him navigate the music industry because I didn’t want to see him get fucked over the same way I did… We toured the entire country 4 times, charted on billboard and we have hundreds of millions of views.
Nova Rockafeller, “Why I quit rapping” (archived)
The post ended with her return to music: the video for “Hey You” and her album Scared of Heights, released in January 2021.
“I just wrote the song that’s going to change our lives”
In the PragerU interview, Tom said Nova signed with a major hip-hop label and moved to Los Angeles. After his visa came through, he followed, but he spent about a year in therapy getting stable first:
Nova remembered me as this like really bright, outgoing, like cool guy that was rapping… and I didn’t want to go to Nova fresh in the United States to sort of like this disheveled shell of like who I once was… So, about a year after being here, I reconnected with Nova, and I moved into her house in Crenshaw.
Tom MacDonald, PragerU, 27:59
He was blunt about how poor they were. “We couldn’t pay the rent and do groceries in the same month,” he said. Some months the power was shut off and they lived “by like flashlight.” He ran an extension cord to a neighbor’s garage to keep “$25 of 99 cent store food” from spoiling. On Jillian Michaels’ show he said that in those days he and Nova were “in this little crack shack making awesome music that nobody ever heard.”
Then came “Dear Rappers.” According to Tom, “Nova was sitting in her bedroom and I opened the door and said, ‘I just wrote the song that’s going to change our lives. Set up the camera. I need to shoot this.’ So she set up everything and it was just a gray backdrop. We had one light and we shot the video for Dear Rappers.” He told Jillian Michaels that Nova taped “a piece of red plastic” over “a $20 light from Amazon.” When the first $11,000 check arrived, he said, “I run into the house and show Nova, ‘We just got $11,000. Like is this a joke?'”
Tom has credited Nova with the business side too. “Nova’s like, hey, like, you got to get your [expletive] on Spotify,” he told Jillian Michaels. “So Nova goes ahead, creates an online store that sells Tom MacDonald t-shirts and gets my music uploaded onto all these streaming platforms.” Then “a check comes in the mail for $11,000.”
That South Central house even came with a ghost story. In a 2020 blog post, “Have you ever seen a ghost? (ft. Tom MacDonald)”, Nova described a 2 a.m. night when “we had just turned off That 70s Show and snuggled into bed.” She added, “(Tom is the little spoon if anyone is wondering).” The ceiling-fan light kept switching itself on, and Tom jumped up shouting, “Something is touching me!” Nova then handed the keyboard to Tom to tell his own ghost story from a 2012 music video shoot in the abandoned town of Tranquille, Canada.
The do-it-yourself power couple
In another blog post on directing music videos, Nova said she “never even really touched a camera until about 2 years ago.” She picked one up because Tom’s career “was exploding exponentially, we needed content FAST and didn’t have the cash to pay a $2500 day rate.” She wrote that Tom “has dug graves in our front yard, stood on top of cop cars, I have hit him in the face with pies, and yes, we even rented a unicorn for the day,” and that she wants him to watch every finished video “and feel like the coolest motherfucker alive.”
Tom has given her the same credit. Asked in another Q&A how Nova learned to make videos, he said, “the same way that I learned how to make beats… we just taught ourselves.” He added, “Our entire careers have literally just been one giant learning curve and one giant do-it-yourself adventure.”
“It’s all been Nova and I from the inception of this thing,” Tom told PragerU. “Nova is an incredibly talented writer… she’s still way better than me.” He described the operation simply: “It’s just Nova and I.” On The Fighter and The Kid, he put it this way: “I make all the beats, Nova shoots all the videos… two-man team.” The hosts introduced her as “your best friend and now your girl.”
I covered that partnership for National File in 2021 in “Rapper Tom MacDonald Calls Out ‘Performative Wokeness'”.
But it isn’t just the two of them. It’s family
Tom and Nova may call themselves a two-man team, but the people around them are family. Tom told Jillian Michaels: “My entire label is me, my girlfriend, my sister, and my brother-in-law. It’s four of us.” Outside of work, he said, “My family is like my folks, my sister, my brother-in-law. Like that’s my circle.”
His younger sister, Jenna, is at the center of it. In the PragerU interview, Tom said, “I have one sister, Jenna, who actually works for me now, works at Hangover Gang and handles my e-commerce and stuff.” On The Fighter and The Kid he explained how she got there. She was a nurse in Canada during COVID, working without proper protective gear, and she called him in tears on her lunch break. “I was like, go in there right now and tell them that you quit, leave, get on a plane and come to LA,” he said. “She went in and quit and then flew out here.”
Now her and her husband, they set up the lights for Nova and I on our music video shoots, they run our e-commerce, they do customer service, they pack all the albums.
Tom MacDonald, The Fighter and The Kid, 52:39
We all collectively design the t-shirts and the merch.” The family helps with the slogans too. Tom said his sister made a shirt that read “I’m not always right but I’m never left,” and that the merch lines are “stuff that like myself and Nova and my sister, like we came up with.”
When Tom wrote “Dear Rappers” and needed money to promote it, he told Jillian Michaels he had to “swallow some pride” and borrow from “my baby sister,” then called his mom. His parents, he said, have “always been like my number one fan, biggest supporters… If I told my dad… I want to make sand castles for the rest of my life, he’d be like, I’ll buy a ticket to Florida and get you a bucket.” He said his dad told his mom to “give them the 200 bucks.” On PragerU he described pooling those loans: “Me and Nova, we have like $400 and our rent is like 650.”
Making music together
Over the years the pair have released a long run of collaborations with Tom, including “Pillz” (2017, as GFBF), “Sober” and “Bad News” with Madchild (2020), “Gang Gang,” “No Good Bastards,” “Church,” and “Heart Emojis” (2021), “In God We Trust” (2022), “Chrome” with Adam Calhoun (2023), and “Goodbye Joe” (2024). Here are two of those videos.
“No Good Bastards” was written by Tom, Nova, and Brandon Hart. The video was shot by Tom and Nova:
“Goodbye Joe” (2024) was co-written by the pair and edited by Nova:
In 2023 the couple teamed up with Adam Calhoun for “Chrome”:
A love song years in the making
In a January 2023 interview, DiscoverAirdrie reported on a chart-topping pop song MacDonald wrote for Nova. The interviewer said the song was “a long time coming” and wrote that “when he talks about Nova you can feel the love for her radiating from him even through a screen.” The same piece pointed readers to his then-new single “Ghost.”
Leftover.news says congratulations!
From a roach-infested apartment in Crenshaw to a 5.5-carat ring, Tom and Nova have built their careers and their life side by side.
Tom also says his first music video as a fiance is coming this Friday.
Congratulations, Tom and Nova. Love is winning. 🤍
