When Beyonce and Jay-Z posed together on the red carpet at the Met Gala in May 2014, they appeared to be the picture-perfect couple.
They had been married for six years when a funny incident occurred – Beyonce’s large ring slipped off her finger, prompting Jay-Z to playfully kneel down and pick it up as if proposing. Onlookers couldn’t help but laugh at the amusing sight.
However, this light-hearted moment was soon overshadowed by a shocking event that unfolded just days later. A video surfaced, revealing one of the most dramatic celebrity altercations ever captured on camera.
Footage from a CCTV camera, acquired at the time by TMZ for a hefty sum of $250,000, depicted Beyonce, her sister Solange Knowles, and Jay-Z entering an elevator after attending a Met afterparty at The Standard, High Line hotel in Manhattan.
At first, all seems well in the silent and grainy black-and-white surveillance footage. Solange, then 27, walks into the elevator on the 18th floor in her sherbet orange Phillip Lim gown followed by Beyonce, then 32, and Jay-Z, then 44. They are accompanied by a large security guard.
But before the doors have even fully closed, things take a turn. Solange jabs her finger towards Jay-Z and appears to start shouting angrily, before throwing herself towards him, hitting and kicking.
Beyonce, backed into the corner, remains eerily motionless as Jay-Z tries to lay a subduing hand on Solange’s arm. Having none of it, Solange knocks his hand away and escalates her attack, shoving and hitting her brother-in-law before throwing her clutch bag at his head.
The large security guard eventually manages to restrain Solange and pull her off Jay-Z – but is unable to stop her furiously kicking out at the rapper with her four-inch stilettoes.
At no obvious moment in the 58-second assault does Jay-Z retaliate, only grabbing Solange’s foot at one point in an apparent attempt to stop her kicking.
Beyonce, meanwhile, appears surprisingly nonplussed, only stepping in briefly to help separate her husband and sister. Even then, she appears more focused on keeping the train of her black, bedazzled Givenchy gown out of harm’s way.
The guard then hits the security stop button, halting the elevator on floor 12 of the hotel with the doors closed, presumably to prevent it from heading to the ground floor where the paparazzi are waiting.
Here the video cuts, before restarting as the elevator reaches the lobby and the doors open. Beyonce and the security guard are seen exiting first, and things appear finally calmed. But as Solange walks past Jay-Z she appears to be reminded of her fury, and hurls herself at him once again, smacking her bag into him until the guard returns to push them apart.
As they exited the hotel that night, photographers captured Beyonce doing her best to plaster a broad smile across her face. Solange and Jay-Z were less composed.
Solange stormed ahead of her sister, while Jay-Z followed behind looking rather sheepish as he held a hand to his face and then his stomach where his dress shirt had come untucked. Jay-Z then got into one car alone and drove away, while Beyonce and Solange got into another.
Rumors of what sparked the heated family feud have run wild for the last decade. And indeed, Sunday’s bombshell legal filing – which named Jay-Z, now 55, as a defendant in an amended lawsuit against disgraced media mogul Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs and accused Jay-Z of raping a 13-year-old girl in 2000 – has dragged the incident back into the limelight.
In a shared statement soon after the 2014 incident, the trio attempted to move forward.
‘Jay and Solange each assume their share of responsibility for what has occurred,’ they wrote. ‘They both have apologized to each other and we have moved forward as a united family… At the end of the day, families have problems and we’re no different. We love each other and above all we are family.’
But fans remain unconvinced. After all, this wasn’t the first time whispers of trouble in the Beyonce-Jay-Z marriage had surfaced.
The year before, claims had arisen that Jay-Z had cheated on Beyonce with a range of celebrity women, from pop star Rita Ora to Gwenyth Paltrow – both of whom strongly denied the rumors.
But the most common name that came up was fashion designer Rachel Roy, now 50, the ex-wife of Jay-Z’s business partner, Damon Dash.
Some of Beyonce’s fans claimed the elevator fight had started after Roy had ‘provoked’ Solange at the afterparty.
Gossip – that neither Jay-Z nor Beyonce responded to – soon followed, with sources suggesting to Page Six that the couple might break up, saying: ‘They are trying to figure out a way to split without divorcing… They made the classic mistake of thinking a child would change everything and help to rekindle the initial fire, and it didn’t.’
Their daughter, Blue Ivy, was two-years-old at the time.
Beyoncé then seemed to add fuel to the flames, appearing to reference the elevator incident in a 2014 remix of her song ‘Flawless’, singing: ‘Up in this b**ch, like elevators. Of course, sometimes s*** go down. When it’s a billion dollars on an elevator.’
She then made what many interpreted to be an entire album about Jay-Z cheating: ‘Lemonade’, in 2016.
Several of the songs on the album referenced infidelity, with lyrics like ‘Death to side chicks’ and the infamous: ‘He only want me when I’m not there. He better call Becky with the good hair’.
Fans pounced on the ‘Becky’ character and immediately pointed the finger at Rachel Roy, flooding her social media with abuse and accusing her of being the other woman.
Roy then added to the furore with a now-deleted Instagram post captioned: ‘Good hair don’t care, but we will take good lighting, for selfies, or self truths, always. Live in the light #nodramaqueens.’
However, she later denied the cheating allegations, telling People magazine: ‘My Instagram post was meant to be fun and light-hearted, it was misunderstood as something other than that. There is no validity to the idea that the song references me personally.’
Roy aside, it took another year for the rumors about Jay-Z’s infidelity to be confirmed, with Jay-Z finally admitting to New York Magazine in 2017, shortly after Beyonce had given birth to their twins, that he had been unfaithful.
‘So even with women, you gonna [sic] shut down emotionally, so you can’t connect… In my case, like, it’s deep. And then all the things happen from there: infidelity,’ Jay-Z said.
After that, Beyonce seemed to have forgiven Jay-Z and their marriage was back on stable ground, with the rapper telling New York Magazine that they had used their music as ‘therapy’ to heal.
Now, the family is once again thrown into the spotlight of controversy. But, with Jay-Z furiously denying the rape allegations against him, Beyonce is – so far – steadfastly standing by her man.
On Monday night, the pair appeared arm-in-arm alongside their now 12-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy, at the premier of the Lion King prequel ‘Mufasa’.
Following the glitzy event, a source told Page Six: ‘She’s sticking by Jay… [she] has no intention of leaving [him].’
As for Solange, while she hasn’t expressed support for Jay-Z, an insider stressed her loyalty to her older sister: ‘Solange let Beyoncé know she’s there for her sister and is available to talk anytime she needs.’
She will be there for her sister ‘no matter what’.
