Well the “Becoming Beyonce” unauthorized biography saga has just got messier.
Rihanna’s legal reps have woken up and are blasting reports that claim that Jonathan Hays, a publicist that leaked a 2005 rumor that Rihanna and Jay Z had an affair, was EVER her publicist.
The book dropped a bombshell this week by quoting Jonathan Hay, who claimed he leaked false, lurid details about an affair between a teen Rihanna and Jay Z to promote her first single, “Pon de Replay,” in 2005.
“I was working for Vada Nobles, who wrote and produced ‘Pon de Replay,’” Hay’s quoted in R. Randy Taraborrelli’s “Becoming Beyoncé.” “It was my job to make sure she hit . . . In an effort to generate some interest . . . I began to plant . . . stories that Jay and Rihanna were having a hot romance.” The only problem with the revelation? Rihanna’s legal reps and Nobles told Page Six on Tuesday that Rihanna’s never had any involvement with Hay as a rep.
“Hay was never Rihanna’s publicist or had any personal or professional relationship with her,” Rihanna’s lawyer Jordan Siev told us. Her team claimed the New York Daily News erroneously reported Hay was “Rihanna’s ex-publicist” before updating its story on Tuesday. Other outlets have also called him “former Rihanna publicist.”
Hay told Page Six, “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.”
But Nobles said: “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.”
Hay also added: “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 added he’s now focusing on “music projects that I’m producing and releasing . . . All this other gossip is nonsense.”
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