Former adult industry model and author Karrine Steffans has recounted a brief sexual encounter with Jay-Z that she says took place in 2000 after a music video shoot, a story that has circulated for two decades and recently gained fresh attention through a viral social media post featuring an older interview clip.
Steffans, born Elisabeth Ovesen on August 24, 1978, in Saint Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, was 21 and a single mother when she appeared in Jay-Z’s “Hey Papi” video. The track, featuring Memphis Bleek and Amil, was directed by Hype Williams and released in 2000 as part of the soundtrack for the film *Nutty Professor II: The Klumps*. The video also included cameos by producer Timbaland and Damon “Dame” Dash, then Jay-Z’s business partner at Roc-A-Fella Records.
According to Steffans, her cousin Chuck, a longtime friend of Jay-Z dating to their teenage years, contacted the rapper ahead of the shoot and asked him to look out for her. Steffans has said Jay-Z, whose full name is Shawn Corey Carter, ensured she received prominent camera placement and pay of about $2,500 a day. “He always looked out for me,” she has stated in interviews, including a widely recirculated appearance on VladTV.
Steffans has described the professional relationship turning physical after one of the shoots. She said the pair were driven toward the Malibu coastline in a chauffeured car. There, according to her account in the 2005 memoir *Confessions of a Video Vixen* and later interviews, they engaged in a short sexual encounter lasting roughly three minutes. Both recognized it as a mistake, she has said. “We only had one encounter that was beyond a friendship,” Steffans recalled in the VladTV interview. They returned to a polite, non-sexual acquaintance and never discussed the incident again.
In the same interview, Steffans explained that the tension she felt around Jay-Z and others at the time was something she interpreted through a sexual lens because that was the language she knew. Looking back, she said she has come to understand that such tension is not always sexual and that the awkward moments ended with an agreement to simply remain cool.
Steffans later became involved with Dame Dash. She has said she continued to see Jay-Z in social and professional settings during that period, including discussions about adapting her memoir into a film. The earlier encounter was never raised. “It was as if that sexual encounter never happened,” she has stated.
Steffans’ 2005 book became a New York Times bestseller and detailed encounters with numerous figures in music and sports. It helped solidify the nickname “Superhead,” which she has linked to comments by Ja Rule and her work in adult films around the same period. In a 2005 interview, she described some of the named men, including Jay-Z, as relatively secondary compared with more powerful industry figures she chose not to identify in order to protect future opportunities.
In 2016, following the release of Beyoncé’s visual album *Lemonade* and its reference to “Becky with the good hair,” Steffans published an essay identifying herself as one of Jay-Z’s earlier partners. She emphasized that the 2000 encounter occurred before Jay-Z and Beyoncé began dating. The couple met around 1999 or 2000, maintained a friendship for about a year and a half, and became romantically involved around 2001. Jay-Z has not issued a specific public denial of Steffans’ account of the Malibu incident.
Steffans, who has also used the name Elisabeth Ovesen in more recent years, has continued to discuss her experiences in the early-2000s hip-hop video scene. In 2024 comments on broader allegations involving Jay-Z and Sean “Diddy” Combs, she described certain industry patterns as unsurprising and referenced an earlier episode in which she said an executive presented her to Combs.
The story of the “Hey Papi” shoot and its aftermath has resurfaced periodically, often through the same interview footage in which Steffans describes Jay-Z’s professional support on set, the single interaction, the decision to move past it, and the later ease of their interactions while she was involved with Dame Dash. It remains one account among many from that era of music video culture, offered by Steffans herself across books and interviews over more than 20 years.
