Man Says Beyonce and Jay-Z's Bodyguards Kept Him From Newborns

Beyonce hosts the screening of 'Live at Roseland: The Elements of 4' at the Paris Theatre in New York.

Rob Kim/FilmMagic

A Brooklyn man says that preferential treatment given to Beyoncé and Jay-Z at the Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan over the weekend kept him away from his newborn twins, who were born prematurely around the same time as the superstar couple's infant daughter, Blue Ivy Carter. Neil Coulon, 38, told the New York Daily News that he was barred from entering the Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit to clear the hallways for the musicians and his family was cleared from the waiting room by their bodyguards.

"They should have been more strategic about it," Coulon said of the celebrity couple's occupation of an entire floor of the hospital. "These are children with problems in intensive care and you're just going to take over the hospital like you own it? All I want is an apology."

"I know they spent $1.3 million and I'm just a contractor from Bed-Stuy, but the treatment we received was not okay," Coulon added. "My wife is just terribly upset. She had a C-section. She gave birth to twins. She is sore. Nobody needs this."

Lenox Hill staffers, speaking anonymously, told the Daily News that Beyoncé and Jay-Z paid $1.3 million to seal off and redecorate a wing of the hospital in order to protect their privacy. A spokesperson for the hospital told the News that she had not heard of the complaints, but that they "take patient satisfaction very seriously."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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