What a difference a few vowels can make. Celebrity chef and syndicated talk show host Rachael Ray had a very interesting weekend, thanks to the coincidental similarity her name bears to that of fashion designer Rachel Roy, the woman currently implicated as “Becky with the good hair” in the Jay Z-Beyoncé infidelity scandal. It’s the same kind of fluke one finds at the heart of Joel and Ethan Coen’s script for The Big Lebowski, except this happened in real life.
Over the weekend, to much fanfare, Beyoncé released her sixth solo LP, a “visual album” entitled Lemonade, the lyrics of which seem to allude frequently to marital indiscretions on the part of the singer’s husband, rapper-mogul Jay Z. One track in particular, “Sorry,” contains this memorable closing couplet: “He only want me when I’m not there / He better call Becky with the good hair.” Who was this Becky person, Beyoncé fans wondered? They seemingly got their answer when Roy, not Ray, posted this cryptic message (containing the phrase “Good hair don’t care”) to her Instagram account:
Whether fashionista Roy is truly “Becky,” the other woman in Sean Carter’s life, is still unknown and merely the subject of a great deal of online speculation at this point. What can be said definitively, however, is that Ray, the amiable TV cook, has nothing to do with any of this and is merely collateral damage in an internet shit storm. Before gathering all the evidence and double-checking their sources, Beyoncé’s famously devoted fans immediately started attacking the blameless Ray through social media. When the domestic goddess posted a picture of “Texas style slow cooked pulled beef chili Joes” to her Instagram account, she almost certainly did not expect to be called a “hoe” or a “home wrecker” for doing so. But sometimes, that’s how the cookie crumbles.
For the record, “Becky” has not been positively identified as Roy, Ray, or anyone else. And it isn’t Taylor Swift, either. Be patient, internet. Becky’s day of reckoning will come.