The one Beyoncé rumour that Jay-Z believes should have been “off limits”
Jay-Z and Beyoncé have, for pretty much the entirety of this millennium, been one of the celebrity world’s biggest couples. That has come with its pros and cons.
While their shared uber-fame has served both their careers well and made them wildly rich, it has also meant a feverish fixation on their private lives. Every genuine issue the couple has faced has been subject to comment and speculation, while plenty of outright lies and fantasies have been circulated, too. Conspiracy theories stalk the Carters, but there was one in particular that drove Jay-Z, a man ordinarily protective of his private family life, to speak out. This one had gone too far.
When Beyoncé informed the world that she was pregnant at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2011, it was, predictably, a big deal. The celebrity media ecosystem went into overdrive, pumping out endless stories about this unborn child and its famous parents—and, sure enough, then the conspiracy theories started. Some people out there just refused to believe Beyoncé was actually pregnant, and they weren’t content to keep that opinion to themselves.
It started when Beyoncé appeared on a TV show in Australia. She was wearing a dress for the recording that, when she sat down, folded in such a way as to make her belly appear to compress. It looked odd, perhaps, but most reasonable people might have just thought to themselves, oh, her stomach looked a little bit weird there, and left it at that—actually, most truly reasonable people wouldn’t have been so excitedly obsessing over this pregnant celebrity’s body in the first place, but hey ho.
A small few out there travelled down another route entirely. They began to spread rumours that Beyoncé, in fact, was lying and wasn’t really pregnant at all. Her baby bump, they decided, was actually the result of a fake belly concealed beneath her dress. It was all a giant ruse.
We might think that celebrities have the ability to ignore this stuff, but, really, they’re still people at the end of the day. Some of the weird talk does get through to them, as Jay-Z himself made clear in 2013, during a chat with Vanity Fair.
“It’s just so stupid,” he said of the fake pregnancy rumour. “You know, I felt dismissive about it, but you’ve got to feel for [Beyoncé]. I mean, we’ve got a really charmed life, so how can we complain? But when you think about it, we’re still human beings. And this is a time like… forget Beyoncé, forget the person—a mother carrying her first child, and this is the thing they have to deal with?”
What really stung for Jay-Z is that, rather than being confined simply to the darker, weirder regions of the internet, this pernicious rumour was powered by the mainstream celebrity media itself. “Certain things should be off limits,” he said of the media’s behaviour during this period. “I have thick skin, I understand; I go outside, you want to take my picture, fine. But there should be some kind of human-decency boundaries. This is a mother with a child.”
The story had a happy ending, despite the weird rumours. Blue Ivy was born in early 2012, happy and healthy, and she has now followed her parents into show business. That makes sense. She’s been exposed to global attention since before she was even born.