The rich evidently do live by a different set of rules. Celebrities Kanye West and Kim Kardashian were escorted past a security checkpoint at New York’s Kennedy International Airport on Tuesday, The Washington Post reports.
Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein says the celebrity couple had arrived at the airport on an international flight on Tuesday.
She says after clearing customs and baggage, they were escorted by an airline employee ‘through a non-public area in order to provide expedited access to their domestic flight.’
Farbstein says this violated security protocols by bypassing the TSA checkpoint. She says that prompted TSA officials to conduct the private screening.
The Post stops short of revealing the identity of the employee or stating what disciplinary action will be taken, but it does note that the “rapper and reality TV star were eventually cleared to board their flight, which departed after about a 50-minute delay.”
This is not the first time that people of means received red carpet treatment. In January of 2012, singers Beyoncé and Jay-Z sought and were granted permission to cordon off the entire fourth floor neonatal ward at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital so they could enjoy their newborn daughter without having to rub elbows with mere mortals. It could be argued that they paid for the privilege, ponying up the $1.3 million the hospital demanded, but taking over a hospital ward is not the same as renting out an entire floor of a hotel.
View slideshow: The haves and the have-nots
As another new parent complained at the time:
They just used the hospital like it was their own and nobody else mattered.
They locked us into the NICU and would say, ‘You can’t come out to the hallway for the next 20 minutes.’ When I finally was able to go back out, I went to the waiting room and they’d ushered my family downstairs!
These are parents who are going through very stressful times. To have that circus roll into town, having to deal with all this drama because someone is a superstar, isn’t fair.
The man in question, Neil Coulon, was a resident of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the same predominantly black Brooklyn neighborhood where Shawn Corey Carter grew up before changing his name to Jay-Z.
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