by TONY BEST

"People know it's not true."

Twenty-year-old Rihanna, the international pop singing sensation from Barbados, was denying for the umpteenth time the rumour which still haunts her today.

It's about an alleged intimate relationship with Jay-Z, the Grammy-award winning record label guru and rapper, who first signed her to a lucrative contract when she was 16 years old and just out of Barbados.

In an interview for a cover story in the June edition of Elle magazine, the international publication that features women, glamour, glitz and lifestyle, the editors asked her about the rumour, which according to the talk "greatly displeased his then girlfriend", Beyoncè who is now his wife.

"Well, it's crazy that you ask me that," she told Elle. "People know it's not true."

Bristling and straightening up, Rihanna went on: "I think it's a kind of cliché question, and people know it's not true, so I don't even know why it's still addressed to this day. I get asked about it all the time; and I'm like, you're asking, but you know the answer. I don't like to address it anymore."

But if the story about Jay-Z stirs her up, a question about R&B singer Chris Brown, with whom she has been romantically linked, brought a different reaction, according to Elle.

"She was 'much more pleasant, but still careful'," stated the magazine in its June edition, which is now on international news stands, especially in the United States and Canada.

"We've always been friends, but we're very close now," was the way Rihanna put it.

That brings us back to Jay-Z, the former head of Def-Jam Records who literally locked the doors of his office so she wouldn't leave with Evan Rogers, the composer and music producer who spotted her talent while in Barbados and encouraged her mother, Monica Fenty, to allow her to come to Connecticut and live with Rogers and his Bajan-born wife, Jackie.

After listening to her during an audition in New York, Jay-Z had her signature on a contract 12 hours later, a fact that was promptly reported by THE NATION.

"We made a little Godfather joke," says Jay-Z of that day in 2005 when he locked the door. "We said the only way she could leave was through the window."

A "Godfather" joke can be traced to the 1970s movie of the same name: "He made an offer you couldn't refuse."

The record mogul told Elle that what made Rihanna different was the Bajan accent in her voice: "There's something about her staccato Bajan lilt that takes a verse to another place."

And Jay-Z has become something of an interpreter when the singer lapses into Bajan.

"We have this on-going joke about people not being able to understand what I say because of my accent," Rihanna told Elle.* Please also see Page 22.