Beyonce walks backstage during the 2017 Budweiser Made in America festival. Photo / Getty
We're only a few months into 2018 and we already have the lead for wildest celebrity anecdote this year.
A GQ magazine profile of comedian Tiffany Haddish published Monday revealed a few things: she drinks turpentine, is a dream whale-watching companion and, um, witnessed an actress biting Beyonce on the face.
Beyonce fans - the Beyhive - went into high alert. Pop culture Twitter went bananas.
Someone allegedly bit Beyonce - considered a queen-like mega pop star - on the face.
On the face. Like, on the face.
What a weird thing to happen to anyone. But Beyonce? Utterly bonkers.
The singer has such a tightly controlled image and is a pro at keeping her private life very private, showing snippets only on her terms. She manages to drop surprise albums without nary a song leaked in advance.
Her 2016 visual album Lemonade, although her most revealing work to date, left fans guessing as to whether she was singing about her husband's infidelity. Cheating rumours and missteps were pretty much confirmed the following year on Jay-Z's album 4:44.
That's why the infamous elevator incident of 2014 was so shocking. The TMZ footage provided a rare, uncontrolled glimpse into the Carter-Knowles world. (Beyonce eventually alluded to the dramatic fallout in her music.)
Okay, but back to face-biting: According to Haddish, it happened during the after-party for a December Jay-Z concert.
Beyonce's representative, Yvette Noel-Schure, told GQ: "I absolutely cannot comment on any of this, as I have no knowledge."
According to Haddish, at the party, an actress - whom she wouldn't name - was "just, like, doing the mostest". This included biting Beyonce, prompting the pop star to storm away, grab Jay-Z and head to the back of the room.
"I was like, 'What just happened?'" Haddish recalled. "And Beyonce's friend walked up and was like, 'Can you believe this b**** just bit Beyonce?'
From the GQ story:
"And so then," she continues, "a lot of things happened."
According to Haddish, she and the actress continued to cross paths throughout the night, culminating in a brief standoff. The actress, at one point, told Haddish to stop dancing - good luck making that happen.
"And then Beyonce and Jay-Z walked by me, and I tapped Beyonce."
Haddish says she told Beyonce, "I'm going to beat somebody - at your party. I just want to let you know that." Beyonce asked her not to - told her to "have fun" instead. (Haddish leveraged this moment into a selfie with Beyonce.)
"Near the end of the party," says Haddish, describing her final run-in with Mrs. Carter sometime later, "Beyonce's at the bar, so I said to Beyonce, 'Did she really bite you?' She was like, 'Yeah'."
Haddish then went on to tell Beyonce she was going to beat up the actress, but Beyonce told her not to, that the woman was "on drugs. She not even drunk. She not like that all the time. Just chill."
Haddish has previously dished about the night in question, telling Vulture that she had wanted to fight someone but Bey told her to just have a good time instead, and then telling TV One's Uncensored that another actress touched Jay-Z's chest, prompting Beyonce to intercede.
"She started talking to the other actress and some other stuff happened, but I'm not gonna say nothin' yet," Haddish said at the time. "But it's gonna be in these streets."
Beyonce had alluded to Haddish's storytelling skills in a verse of the DJ Khaled single, Top Off, singing, "If they're tryna party with the queen/ They gon' have to sign a non-disclosure."
But these new details on Monday prompted an army of amateur detectives to dive into action, sleuthing for whatever clues they could dig up and tweeting #WhoBitBeyonce to identify the actress in question.
Chrissy Teigen immediately jumped in, tweeting "I can only think of one person who would do this. but I cannot say. but she. . . . is the worst." She then tried to tamp down any suggestion of Gwyneth Paltrow, and then went back on her initial guess, hinting she knows the identity of the rumoured actress.
Lots of folks also seized on The Cut's celebrity gossip column, which in February published a handful of party attendee names - Rihanna, James Franco, French Montana, Queen Latifah and actresses Sanaa Lathan and Sara Foster.
Soon, Lathan's and Foster's Instagram posts were bombarded by with angry messages and bee emojis. (The Beyhive also did the same to Haddish in her social media posts.).
"I wish I could get close enough to Beyonce to bite her," Foster wrote on her Instagram story.
This isn't the first time the Beyhive has gone after a purported Beyonce nemesis. In 2016, her song Sorry called out "Becky with the good hair."
Fans interpreted this as Jay-Z cheating on Beyonce with this "Becky", and they frantically searched for clues of her identity - only to land on Rachel Roy, a fashion designer and ex-wife of Jay Z's ex-business partner.
Roy didn't help matters by posting a coy Instagram caption: "Good hair don't care, but we will take good lighting, for selfies, or self truths, always. live in the light #nodramaqueen."
It didn't take long before Roy had to make her account private, as she was bombarded with nasty notes. (Not to mention celebrity chef Rachael Ray was the unintended target of furious fans who swore they would never make her recipe for hot chicken fajitas again.)
The guessing game continues, but we can cross off one name for sure.
"Media Takeout is saying it was Taraji," someone tweeted, referring to Taraji P. Henson.
Haddish replied: "No it wasn't."
This year of TV has had something for everyone.