After months of silence and speculation, we finally have official confirmation (or about as much confirmation as we're likely to get) that Sanaa Lathan was the actress in Tiffany Haddish's wild story about a party after a Jay-Z concert in which someone bit Bey on the face. LAW & ORDER SOUND!!!
In a new profile in the Hollywood Reporter, Haddish confirms that she witnessed Lathan nibble Bey's face, despite Lathan's denial when the story first broke.
Perhaps she was just trying to get in the mood for the second On the Run tour by taking a bite out of crime. That's the explanation we'll have to live with for now, as Lathan's reps have declined to comment further on this story.
Haddish told the Hollywood Reporter, 'I'm super good friends with [Sanaa Lathan's] stepmom and her dad [Stan, a producer-director], and they were mad at me... But I didn't try to ruin her career. I never said her name! I was just trying to say how Beyoncé kept me from goin' to jail that night. I coulda just shut my whole career down.'
As Haddish told GQ at the time, an actress at the December party was 'doing the mostest.' Though she declined to name Lathan then, she did elaborate on Bey's reaction:
'So Beyoncé stormed away,' Haddish says, 'went up to Jay-Z, and was like, "Jay! Come here! This bitch—" and snatched him. They went to the back of the room. I was like, "What just happened?" And Beyoncé’s friend walked up and was like, "Can you believe this bitch just bit Beyoncé?" '
The entire internet lit up with guesses about the identity of this biter, including celeb sleuth Chrissy Teigen, who discovered the identity and then taunted the world with the knowledge:
Well, the truth has finally set us all free. Sanaa Lathan is the biter, Bey's face looks as perfect as ever in photos from the concert, and most importantly, Tiffany Haddish has moved on to other wild stories from different parties she's been to.
Haddish told The Hollywood Reporter that at a more recent party she decided to shoot her shot with none other than Leonardo DiCaprio. 'Yeah, I met him at a party two, three months ago,' she said, 'and I asked him if he'd let me hit that.' DiCaprio thought she was kidding but she reports that, like Sanaa Lathan, she was serious about taking a bite out of the erstwhile Gilbert Grape.
R. Eric Thomas is a columnist for ELLE.com, where he skewers politics, pop culture, celebrity shade, and schadenfreude. He is also the author of Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America, a memoir-in-essays.
