Beyoncé’s husband is beaten up by her sister
rAP mogul Jay Z was punched and kicked by his wife Beyoncé’s sister Solange Knowles during a violent confrontation in a lift.
Multi-millionaire singer Beyoncé looked on during the ferocious assault, which was captured on security cameras.
In the footage, Solange, 27, lashes out on several occasions with her arms and legs and at one point appears to kick her 44-year-old brother-in-law in the groin.
For most of the altercation, Beyoncé – who has a two-year- old daughter, Blue Ivy, with Jay Z – appears curiously impassive, intervening at one point, only for her sister to launch another assault.
The trio were in a lift descending from a star- studded party at New York’s Standard Hotel following the annual fashion gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last week. Pictures show Jay Z holding his face as he leaves the lift. The seemingly unprovoked attack was captured in footage obtained by celebrity website TMZ.
According to the site, Solange was screaming at the rapper when the fight erupted. In the footage, a man who looks to be a bodyguard tries to hold Solange back but she manages to hit the rapper several times, and even strikes him with her purse.
During the frenzied altercation, Jay Z grabs her stiletto-clad foot to block a kick but never attempts to retaliate.
The bodyguard can also be seen pushing the emergency stop button in the lift at the 12th floor, no doubt to stop the fight spilling out in front of photographers.
‘Solange flipped out over something Jay had said, that she took the wrong way,’ a source told US Weekly. ‘She took it too hard or too far. Not sure what it was, but she greatly over-reacted.’
Beyoncé, 32, tried to muster a smile as the trio left the hotel but then tellingly departed with her sister in a car while her husband left separately.
No reason has emerged for the fight, but the multi-millionaire couple looked as happy as ever as they celebrated America’s Mother’s Day on Sunday at a restaurant in New York. Solange has admitted to issues with drugs in the past, and cancelled her European tour last year amid rumours of usage, according to the website radar Online.
In February 2009, she tweeted about ending up in hospital after a Nyquil overdose. ‘I don’t even smoke weed that often, but I’m finding I can’t remember things,’
‘She greatly over-reacted’
she revealed on Twitter on September 1 the same year.
Solange and the music mogul have been close for more than a decade, with Jay Z – real name Shawn Carter – taking a big brother-style role to the fledgling star after he started dating her sister in 2001. Beyoncé and Jay Z married in 2008.
Beyoncé is extremely close to her younger sibling, and made a surprise appearance at the Californian music festival Coachella this year to support her set. Solange regularly accompanies the couple to events such as the Met Gala and the Grammy Awards.
Always in Beyoncé’s shadow despite her own immense talent, Solange had a few stints in her sister’s former group, Destiny’s Child, before signing with her father’s Mathew’s Music World Entertainment label. He and the girls’ mother Tina had quit their jobs to focus on their eldest child’s career.
But it paid off for Solange initially, too, as her first studio album Solo Star – released when she was just 16 in 2003 – was a quiet success.
A year l ater, however, she married Daniel Smith, and after giving birth to a son, moved to Idaho, where she wrote music for her sister.
But Solange missed the buzz of performing and after divorcing Smith in 2007, she threw herself back into the fray.
It paid off as her second album, Sol-Angel and the Hadley St Dreams, hit No 9 on the Billboard 200 and garnered positive reviews. She set up her own label, Saint records, and recorded the album, True, in 2012.