Tina Knowles Opens Up About Secret Breast Cancer Battle

Tina Knowles is opening up about her experience with breast cancer. In separate interviews on April 22, the mother of Beyoncé and Solange Knowles revealed that she secretly battled breast cancer after receiving a stage 1 diagnosis in her left breast in July 2024.

“I'm getting emotional because it was like, you know, I've always tried to take care of myself, and I just was in disbelief,” she told Gayle King on CBS Mornings.

Knowles explained that she missed her mammogram during the pandemic and rescheduled it last year. “It was stage 1, which I thought was the earliest stage,” she said. “When I told my sister, she said, ‘No, actually, there's a zero.’ So if I had gone for my mammogram, I would've got it at the zero stage. Thank God, it was still very small, hadn't spread. It was a very slow-spreading cancer.”

Speaking to People, Knowles said she grappled with whether she would share her cancer journey in her new memoir, Matriarch. “I decided to share it because I think it's a lot of lessons in it for other women,” she said. “Sometimes we get so busy and wrapped up, but you must go get your test. Because if I had not gotten my test early, I shudder to think what could have happened to me.”

How Did Beyoncé & Solange React?

In her book, Knowles shared her daughters’ reactions, saying Beyoncé “took it well” and wanted to stay positive. “I could already feel her mind racing, focusing on this as a task to tackle with precision,” she wrote. Meanwhile, Solange told her, “Mom, we are going to take care of this.” Along with niece Angie Beyince and “bonus daughter” Kelly Rowland, those girls “became [her] team.”

Knowles underwent a lumpectomy in late 2024 to remove the cancer, and her “team” was all at the hospital. “I was nervous, and so they just started just joking with me,” she told King, adding that Solange showed her silly TikTok videos and her daughters sang “Walk With Me,” a sentimental family hymn. “They sung that song, and I went in there feeling, just like God's got me,” she recalled.

As she told People, the operation went well, and Knowles is currently cancer-free. “I’m doing great,” she said. “Cancer-free and incredibly blessed that God allowed me to find it early.”