The guy claiming he made up rumors about Rihanna and Jay Z never actually worked for her. According to the singer’s team, and the guy he said hired him, Jonathan Hay is basically lying.
Hay recently “admitted” in the biography, Becoming Beyonce, that he cooked up the story that Jay cheated with Rihanna to get publicity for her first single,“Pon de Replay.” Hay made the media rounds last week to share a somber apology over the cheating report, yet the singer’s lawyer says: “Hay was never Rihanna’s publicist or had any personal or professional relationship with her.”
The rumors about Jay and Rih started around 2005, when he was the president of Def Jam. “Pon de Replay” came out that same year under Def Jam, which potentially means there was at least one publicity person from the label already assigned to push her project.
Hay however says he was hired by “Pon de Replay” writer Vada Nobles to do publicity for the single. “I wasn’t Rihanna’s publicist, I was [the] publicist for her first single. She didn’t have a publicist . . . It was back in the day, she was nobody.”
Unfortunately, Nobles poked holes in Hay’s story as well. “I met this guy once, maybe twice . . . I did not hire Jonathan Hay to promote Rihanna [or] ‘Pon de Replay’ . . . He had nothing to do with Rihanna. Someone I knew referred this guy [to me as a publicist], I said, ‘Let’s see what he can do’ . . . He was using my name and what I was doing to get traction for himself.”
With his credibility shot, Hay reiterated that he’s not even sure of what’s inside the Beyonce biography anyway. “I haven’t read the book and I don’t know what it says. I talked to the author for the first time this Sunday.”
He’s done dealing with the drama and is busy producing some new music projects. “All this other gossip is nonsense.”
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Photo: WENN
