The celebrity gossip industry is a beast fuelled by our innermost desires to nose on the lives of the rich and famous, but sometimes that beast needs to be caged. Today, the Daily Mail revealed the name of Rihanna and ASAP Rocky’s first child: RZA Athelston Mayers. And within minutes, it was everywhere.
In fact, it’s all anyone’s Googling. According to search data, ‘How to pronounce RZA’ is a breakout search term, as well as ‘Rihanna baby name’ and ‘Wu Tang Clan’, which is a nod to legendary member of the group, Robert Diggs, whose stage name was RZA.
How do you pronounce RZA?
FYI, the pronunciation of RZA is ‘Rizza’. But how did the Daily Mail even find out Rihanna’s baby name is RZA? Not from an interview with Rihanna, nor a source from her camp leaking information, oh no. They found out because they ‘exclusively obtained a copy of the little boy's certificate of live birth’. Yeah, they hunted down the birth certificate of a one-year-old in order to reveal their name without the parent’s consent.
How is this possible, I hear you ask? Well, according to a government website for California's State Records (Rihanna's baby was born in Los Angeles), birth records are open to the public in California under the Health * Safety Code.
Nevertheless, fans of Rihanna have taken to social media to express their disgust at what they say is a gross invasion of privacy, given how secret Rihanna and ASAP have been about their son's name since his May 2022 birth.
‘Posting a birth certificate is nasty work,’ one person wrote on Twitter. ‘This is really weird and very disgusting,’ another added. ‘Why are you posting a baby's certificate?? This has nothing to do with information.’
It certainly feels uncomfortable to know that Rihanna’s baby’s records were accessed to reveal something she seemingly had no intention of letting the pubic in on anytime soon. Pregnant with her second son, Rihanna and ASAP only began posting pictures of their first child in February this year, appearing on the cover of British Vogue.
Do we all have a part to play in this? Certainly, the tabloid gossip industry is fuelled by the publics insatiable desire to know the deepest and darkest secrets of Hollywood celebrities, but whether fans were keen to know or not, plenty of them have taken a stand against tabloids revealing the name before Rihanna or ASAP.