Beyoncé, Jay-Z and Solange Step in an Elevator and the Rest is History

"Of course sometimes s--t go down when it's a billion dollars on an elevator."

It sounded like the set-up to a punchline: The world's biggest pop star, her sister, and her husband walk into an elevator... 

It was brief ride, taking Beyoncé, Solange and Jay-Z out of a Met Gala after party at the Standard Hotel in New York City five years ago, but when footage of the quick lift made its way online, we learned that something truly wild went on behind those closed doors. 

And suddenly what could've been a joke turned into one of the biggest mysteries in Met Gala history.

What on earth possessed Solange to, for lack of a better word, lose her s--t on her brother-in-law, screaming, clawing and kicking at the rapper with a level of vitriol so palpable in the leaked surveillance footage that you can almost hear her despite the video having no sound? 



And why did Bey, for the most part, just stand there motionless as the chaos erupted all around her?

For a while, it seemed as though answers to this mystery would remain out of reach. Immediately after the fight, the trio depart the hotel with little indication that anything remotely out of the ordinary had just gone down, save for the slightly perturbed look on Solange's face and the eyebrow-raising fact that, as TMZ reported with the break of the leaked footage, the Knowles sisters took one car while Jay hopped into another.

In the immediate aftermath, Bey and her sis took a quick trip to Costa Rica for Kelly Rowland's secret wedding, before returning to NYC to take in a Nets Game at Brooklyn's Barclays Center with her husband on Saturday night, five days after the fight, and enjoy Mother's Day with their daughter Blue Ivy the following morning.

The video leaked the next day. 

The Standard issued a statement regarding the breach in security, and E! News confirmed that they identified the guard responsible for the leak (sold, per the New York Post, for as much as $250,000) and summarily fired the individual. A few days later, the trio would break their silence.