Tamera Mowry is speaking out after her story of how she first met Jay-Z drew criticism from Beyonce fans.
The daytime talk show host, whose recollection of her first encounter with the rapper sparked backlash among Beyonce fans last week, admitted that she was “aloof” to the comments at first and that she did not think her story was “going to be a big deal.”
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“I think in the beginning, I was aloof,” Mowry told Us Weekly at the NAACP Image Awards on Saturday of the backlash. “I was like, ‘What’s going on?’”
“I try not to look at that stuff,” she continued. “If it’s negative, I don’t like to make an agreement with it, and what I mean by that is making an agreement with my spirit, with my soul, because I’m a very positive person. I’m a mom. I’m a wife. So, I’m focusing on that. Yeah, I was just [like], ‘What the hell is going on?’”
“What’s so funny is that I never thought it was going to be a big deal,” she added. “All I did was ask for gum and thought he was pretty cool. That’s it.”
The Disney Channel alum had sparked backlash following the March 20 episode of The Real when she recalled her first, albeit brief, encounter with the rapper about two decades ago.
“I’ve actually met JAY-Z in person. And, he wasn’t with Beyonce at the time, and I wasn’t dating anybody and when I met him. You do get like hit with the charm,” she said. “I found myself strangely asking for gum. It’s so weird! I swear. My sister and I were at a premiere of Nutty Professor and he walked by. And I was like ‘Oh my God that’s JAY-Z!’ I was like, ‘Can I have some gum?’ And he gave me some gum.”
“It was his charm,” she said of what stuck out to her after meeting him. “I was 23, I hadn’t even met Adam [Housley, her husband],” she added. “I actually was attracted to him in the moment.”
The story prompted the Beyonce fans to quickly go on the defensive, with many flooding the comments sections of Mowry’s Instagram posts with bee emojis, representing the “Beyhive,
and other scathing comments.
Others, however, came to Mowry’s defense.
“Who has time to go on random pages typing a bunch of bee emojis???” one person questioned. “Find something to do y’all. She’s happily married and so are Jay-Z and Beyonce.” Another added, “I’m part of the bey hive and y’all doing too much. She or Jay did nothing wrong.”
Mowry and her husband tied the knot in 2011, and JAY-Z and Beyoncé have been happily married since 2008.
