Finding Becky
No wait, before you click away, I promise this is the last theory you ever have to read about Becky in your life. A tall order, I hear you say — perhaps, but let’s get into it.
Everyone and their mothers have probably heard of the titular ‘Becky’ by now. She is of course, most often known as “the Other Girl” — a promiscuous distraction at best, a devious snake lulling our undoubtedly heroic male, away from his modest lady love, with her feminine wiles and open-24-hour leg service (so to speak), at worst.
Nearly half a decade ago, the entire world, or at least, the entirety of Twitter found themselves in absolute disarray when Beyoncé dropped her 2016 album Lemonade, professing to the world that not only were the long circulated cheating allegations true, but that there was one ‘Becky’ in particular that really brought our Queen Bee’s marriage to its knees.
The final lyric in her song ‘Sorry’ almost proves as much: “He only want me when I’m not there,
He better call becky with the good hair”
The next question of course was: who was Becky and how good was her hair really?
The Beyhive (one group of Beyoncé’s unwavering supporters; affectionately nicknamed her worker bees) made it their sole purpose over the next few months, to look into the identity of this Becky in order to avenge their queen’s legacy. Who could this mysterious side chick be?
Nearly every possible woman with a connection to Jay Z and been named: Rachel Roy, Rachael Ray, Rita Ora, even some of his former protégées like Rihanna, or people who with whom he barely had a connection at all such as Taylor Swift, Gwyneth Paltrow, or even Kermit the Frog (he was drinking lemonade in that one meme — very sus). There were theories, completely unrelated celebrity blacklisting and after all the digging, it soon became apparent that whoever Becky was, she wasn’t the first of Jay Z’s many many infidelities in his marriage, but for our Queen’s sake we hope she was the last.
So I’m here to take you through a mostly accurate timeline of events in order to unmask the identity of the most (briefly) hated woman in America.
We begin with the record-breaking album Lemonade that dropped in 2016, topping the Billboard 200 in its first week of release, and the real trigger to the whole fiasco.
However, there were a few doubters. BET.com entertainment editor Clay Cane suspected that it was all a marketing hoax and there was no Becky nor were there any cheating allegations to begin with, but was quickly disproved.
Although Beyoncé had thus far proven to be one of the most talented musicians of her time, Lemonade was something special. One of the featured songs, “Hold up” begins with a poem titled Denial, the exposition quite uncommon for a music video, but it set up the basis for everything that came after.
The poem went “I tried to change. Closed my mouth more, tried to be softer, prettier, less awake […] ”
(The poet is Warsan Shire, a London-based Somali-British writer who connected with Beyoncé through a mutual friend of theirs.)
Raw, unforgiving, and akin to a freshly opened wound, the poem immediately set the tone for whole album. We were about to feel the rage, not just the sorrow. Lemonade wasn’t just about heartbreak or hurt feelings anymore, but the dissection of a pulsing tumour that had infected her relationship. In the preceding track Sorry, Beyonce goes on to clarify “Sorry — I ain’t sorry.” in the very first line. She makes it clear that she will not apologise for his mistakes.
A few hours after the album dropped our first suspect Rachel Roy — an American fashion designer who was previously married to Jay Z’s former business partner and friend — posted a selfie with a friend captioned “Good hair don’t care, but we will take good lighting for selfies, or self truths, always. Live in the light. #nodramaqueens.” The wording was awfully close to the lyric in question and back in 2014, at a Met Gala afterparty, Rachel was involved in the infamous elevator scandal involving Jay Z and Solange, Beyoncé’s sister. It was reportedly due to Rachel’s flirtations that the trio got heated in the first place and why Solange lashed out at Bey’s husband. This, of course, called Jay Z’s morals into question for the first time and where the rumour mill began to turn.
But was Rachel Roy, the infamous Becky? She certainly was a strong contender. However it is worth noting that Rachel has never again, under record, been involved with the couple after that single incident in 2014. Sources claim that Beyoncé and Jay Z allegedly skipped the Kardashian wedding later that month due to Rachel’s attendance, and she went on to release multiple statements claiming innocence.
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In contrast, a small typo resulted in Beyonce’s supporters targeting a celebrity chef named Rachael Ray, who had nothing to do with the scandal and simply had the unfortunate luck of having a similar name, flooding her Instagram with lemon or bee emojis and hate comments. Suffice to say tensions were high and everybody was looking for Becky.
Rita Ora, a former protégé of Jay Z’s is the second suspect on the list as she was caught in 4k (actually it was probably 240p) on the day of the album release wearing a lemon emblazoned bra and a broken ’T’ necklace that looked suspiciously like a J, via Snapchat.
Looking back to another one of Sorry’s lyrics for evidence the lines “I see them boppers in the corner / They sneaking out the back door” in succession suggest that Becky might be a close friend or in relation to the couple if she was seen leaving the “back door” of their home, something that doesn’t necessarily adhere to the description of Rachel Roy. Sure, she was an ex-wife of Jay Z’s colleague but since they split up in 2009 it’s hard pressed for me to believe that she’s been a regular visitor to the Knowles-Carter family home. It’s not implausible but it’s not likely either.
Rita Ora on the other hand doesn’t have the same excuse. A former student of Jay’s would more likely know where his house was and be welcome in a way that Rachael was not. However due to the circumstances of events that were happening in that time frame, it puts Rita in a greatly unlikely position. In 2016 Rita Ora was involved in a legal battle with Roc Nation, Jay Z’s former company, for a unsatisfied contract which was the result of multiple years of having her career passed over and not taken seriously. This, of course, doesn’t rule out an affair but leaves a very small possibility that Rita was sneaking around with her ex boss.
In May, Rita was seen with Beyoncé in a selfie taken at the 2016 Met Gala captioned ‘Family’ and the rumours were put out almost immediately. Beyoncé is quite possibly the classiest woman of our time, no doubt about it, but even we know she isn’t patient enough to smile in a picture with her husband’s mistress. So Rita was in the clear.
So who else was there? After falling down an internet rabbit hole and looking into various dead ends — it wasn’t Taylor Swift guys, she was referencing a completely obscure Tumblr meme way before Lemonade dropped — I was starting to wonder if Becky even existed.
Diana Gordon, a co-writer of the song told Entertainment Weekly that Becky was just a metaphor — “I laughed, like this is so silly. Where are we living? I was like, ‘What day in age from that lyric do you get all of this information?’ Is it really telling you all that much, accusing people?” — and I was just about this close to agreeing with her, after all, Beyoncé’s music is rarely ever about one thing in particular.
She has always been shown telling a story through her art, talking about an experience that is significantly larger than herself. Numerous analyses of any of her music videos will tell you the range her lyrics often encompass in telling the truth of the black experience and the lack of intersectionality for black women between feminism and racial equality, an article by the Lexington Review goes in-depth into this beautifully.
Still lost in my internet deep dive I discovered that Jay Z had released the album 4:44 and the titular song had a Becky referenced in it and my interest was piqued. The lines “I apologise to all the women whom I toyed with your emotions” and “You did what with who? / What good is a ménage à trois when you have a soulmate?” were cold, hard evidence of infidelity. A ménage à trois translated literally “a household of three” is the French phrase referring to a romantic, sexual, or living arrangement involving three people. This further implies that Jay Z cheated with someone close to the Carters, the references to home a little too on the nose to be purely coincidental.
In another song of his, Family Feud, Jay Z goes on to sing “Yeah, I’ll fuck up a good thing if you let me / Let me alone, Becky” — which of course could be a reference to just him moving on from his affair and renouncing his old ways, or literally a Becky he has cut off from his life. All in all, the further I dove in the more inconclusive the information became and the more I began to regret my hyper-fixation with a caricature of a woman who was created to be an umbrella term.
When I came across an article that stated how Amber Rose, an American model and the ex-wife of Kanye West, made a throwaway comment on a podcast about how Gwyneth Paltrow could be the infamous Becky, I should have taken a long hard look in the mirror and said to myself ..Alright, that’s enough Internet for today — but I didn’t. The fire inside of me had kindling again and I was ready to completely burn it out. Three diet cokes and a red bull later, I was sitting on my bed at 6:00 in the morning, eyes bloodshot, the sun peaking through the shutters when I finally figured out the answer.
Gwyneth Paltrow is an American actress, model, writer, singer and business woman, best known for her acting and the founder of the lifestyle brand goop. Paltrow and Beyoncé had an extremely close friendship in the mid-2000s (along with their husbands) with the latter being present for Beyoncé and Jay Z’s wedding in 2008. In 2014, around the same time Jay Z’s fidelity came into question, Paltrow split with her husband Chris Martin, but maintained her friendship with the Carter family.
Bey performed with Chris Martin for the 2016 Super Bowl, with Gwyneth babysitting both her and Beyoncé’s daughter (Apple and Blue Ivy), on February 7th, however when Lemonade dropped in April of the same year, things began to go south. As Amber pointed out on a podcast in 2018 “They were, like, friends, and then, like, you don’t see Gwyneth Paltrow with Beyoncé anymore.”
This part, at least, was quite true. The Carters were not present at Gwyneth’s wedding to the co-creator of the television series Glee, Brad Falchuk, on September 29th 2018 — forgivable as they were on their second OTR tour — nor to the engagement party in January of that year, a little less forgivable, in my opinion. It’s also worth noting that although Paltrow follows Beyoncé on Instagram and Twitter now, Bey doesn’t follow her back.
Of course, Paltrow’s rep issued a statement remarking how incorrect the assumption was and how the two were still close, as well as Paltrow herself shutting down the comments of her being the infamous Becky, i.e. “WHAT??? Of course not, that is ABSURD. Good lord.” but my brain was not convinced.
It was actually the name that really stuck with me. Why Becky? Considering all the women we’ve accused so far, none of them have a tie to the name Becky in any way. There is no small margin of euro-centric names to choose from: Tiffany, Allison, Hannah or any variant of Katherine (Kate, Kaitlyn, Kathryn, Catherine, Katelyn, etc.); so why Becky? It felt personal somehow, an inside joke or a secret that no one knew besides Bey, her friends, or the Becky in question. A nickname of some kind. So I consulted the only god-like source of information at my disposal, Google and opened IMDB on purpose for the first time in my life.
After scrolling through all of Gwyneth Paltrow’s old movies, I found a film so ancient, none of you would’ve seen it or remembered if you did; and sure enough on the casting section of Shout (1991), one of Gwyneth Paltrow’s earliest roles, she played a quiet, largely overlooked character called Rebecca.
I wanted to leave the ending of this article sort of ambiguous because it is and I quote, a heavily opinionated piece, and while is based on factual information, consists of a large part of speculation as well. Either way, it’s quite a coincidence. Did we find Becky? Who knows. But I guarantee you today, I’m certainly never going to look into it again.
