At 75, Brazil football legend Pelé took wedding vows for the third time, tying the knot with girlfriend Marcia Cibele Aoki, who he met in an elevator in Sao Paulo. Their romance reminds you of six other dramas that took place in a lift.
In 2014, security camera footage showed music couple Jay-Z and Beyoncé, stuck in a hotel elevator with her sister Solange. The juicy bit was that it showed Solange lunging at Jay-Z, wildly kicking and hitting him, in the Strand Hotel lift in New York. It was speculated that Solange attacked Jay-Z because of his alleged closeness to designer Rachel Roy. The video sent media and fans into a tizzy, even as Beyonce stayed mum over the whole affair. While the real reason behind t he at t ack never came out, the trio seems to have moved on. Except that rumours about Jay Z’s cheating still swirl around the couple.
Ray Rice American footballer Ray Rice’s career took a drastic hit in 2014 after a shocking video showed the 200-pound football player punching his then-fiancée Janay Palmer in a hotel elevator and her falling unconscious to the floor. He then dragged her partially out of the elevator. While the NFL suspended Rice indefinitely after this incident, Palmer went on to marry him. She told newspapers that she was angered by her husband’s violence, but it also hurt to see his career go down the drain. She attributed Ray Rice’s actions that February night to “humanness”.
Stewart Rahr American billionaire S t ewa r t Rahr all e g e d l y threatened an elevator operator with a gun at his office in New York’s Trump Tower in 2012. The operator claimed that Rahr pulled out a gun when he refused to hold the elevator on the 24th floor. Though the police took Rahr to a psychiatric ward for evaluation and confiscated his guns, he was released the same day and no criminal charges were pressed against him, causing a furore. Rahr, who sold his drugstore distribution company for $1.3 billion in 2010, shares a close friendship with Donald Trump, who is said to have ‘arm-twisted’ cops into letting him walk free.
Tarun Tejpal The editor-in-chief of an investigative news magazine was arrested in 2013 for allegedly sexually assaulting a colleague in an elevator in Goa during an event. In an email to her superiors, the woman said that an inebriated Tejpal molested her in a hotel elevator. Tejpal is now out on bail and the trial continues, but the incident remains a hot topic of debate.
Prince The game changer of modern music was found unresponsive in an elevator this April. He allegedly overdosed in his $10 million estate in Minneapolis. Spookily enough, his music executive friend L A Reid told newspapers that Prince had often said that “elevators were the Devil”. If this wasn’t enough, conspiracy theorists latched on to the idea that the music icon predicted his death in his 1984 song Let’s Go Crazy with the lyrics: Don’t let the elevator bring us down.
ET Bureau
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