Gossip columnists Joanna Molloy and George Rush provided more details in their book Scandal: A Memoir: The fact that Chaka still works for Jay two decades later says something, though, no? Like many siblings, they sometimes engaged in a little roughhouse play.
They’d been through a lot together and their relationship was as much brother/sister as business partners. A diminutive, super intelligent woman who does not suffer fools lightly, she was Jay’s business manager at the time, and had been for years. To me the most disturbing aspect of the clip is that Chaka is labeled an underaged girl. He also added that the claim that the video showed an “underage” girl was “disturbing” since Chaka was Jay Z’s business manager at the time: We reached out to Fiore for more information about the clip and he reiterated that it was cut just before Jay-Z and Chaka hugged and laughed about the incident. Pilgrim, who works for Jay’s Rocawear company, confirms they’re still pals and that “we were just playing around.” “The shot in question was taken out of context by me, and was used in the film to create a sense of heightened tension at the end of the tour,” Fiore says. What’s more, Fiore admits to us, he left out footage where “they both laughed and hugged” immediately afterward. Now “Backstage” director Chris Fiore is corroborating that the hand-to-face smoosh was “playful.” Jay told us last week that the woman, Chaka Pilgrim, is “one of my best friends,” insisting, “We were playing.” The hip-hop star has come under fire because of a scene in the 2000 concert documentary “Backstage,” in which he appears to strike a woman who takes his picture after a performance. Jay-Z has found out what it’s like to be the victim of a bad rap. Pilgrim and director Chris Fiore backed up Jay-Z’s story, with Fiore adding that the moment was poorly edited and left out footage of Pilgrim and Jay-Z smiling and hugging after the altercation:
Shortly after this video went viral in 2004, Jay-Z addressed the controversy and explained that the woman in the footage was actually his good friend music executive Chaka Pilgrim, who is currently the president of Roc Nation Records, and that they were just playing. Carter walks into the room he has a rather irritated look upon his face and without hesitation lashes out at an unidentified female in the video. The assault looks unprovoked as HOVA walks into what looks like a backstage area of a concert venue.Īs Mr. Again, the footage was shared with sensational claims about what it showed, yet provided little in the way of context:Īpparently Jay-Z had a problem with a female in a shocking video that was pulled out of the archives of the Backstage DVD by HipHopDX.Īs of this time I have yet to hear from my numerous contacts at Roc-A-Fella in regards to Jay-Z’s side to this affair.īut, if pictures speak louder than words then Jigga-man has some explaining to do. This clip first appeared in a 2000 documentary called Backstage about Jay-Z’s Hard Knock Life Tour, but it didn’t start creating controversy until it was picked up by music gossip web sites in 2004. When we searched for more information about this clip, we found that the person in the video was an adult, not a child, that they were an old friend and employee, not a fan, and that all parties involved said that the altercation was friendly in nature. Of course, that’s problematic as we never actually get a good look at the “victim” in this video, and its limited runtime provides little to no context about the encounter. The provided details also change with each posting: Is the girl 12? Is she a teenager? Did she try to hug Jay-Z or take his picture? Whatever the situation, it’s difficult to verify based solely on the images in this 3-second clip.