When you’re a celebrity it becomes part of the deal that news stories get written about you. Anything you do might become worthy of ink, including things that might be embarrassing or look bad in the public eye. When those things happen, there’s not a lot you can do but accept that people are going to read about it. Although Zendaya is clapping back at a story that says she was booted from a restaurant in Rome because she had her friends say the event never happened.
The initial story came from the Daily Mail, which claimed that Zendaya and some friends were set to dine at a restaurant in Rome before the group was asked to leave because her outfit (a black tube top and cargo pants) did not meet the location’s "smart casual" dress code. But Zendaya dropped an image to her Instagram story which calls the story made up.
A friend of Zendaya’s who was there, Darnell Appling, posted a more direct attack on the story, explaining what actually happened. While the group apparently did enter and then leave the restaurant fairly quickly, it’s because they thought they were going to a place they had not eaten at before, but when they walked in they realized they had. Appling’s post reads…
Well this is a bald head lie. We never got denied anywhere. We walked into the building realized we ate there before when we seen the stairs. … The same stairs Zendaya slipped on last year and posted about.
It's happened before when a story like this gets some details (even significant ones) wrong. We've seen that occur with celebrity gossip stories historically. Not that long ago Brittney Spears' trip to a restaurant ended up in the tabloids. Later we received an explanation for the events from her husband Sam Asghari that indicated the story wasn't entirely accurate.
That seems to be what tends to happen with gossip stories where it’s impossible to get all the facts unless you speak directly with all the people involved. In this case, the subjects of this story are claiming that everything is entirely made up and there weren’t even some basic facts that were accurate. The group says they never got kicked out because they never actually entered the restaurant properly because they never went upstairs. Appling continued…
We all wanted to try a new restaurant and went somewhere else to do so. We actually never went upstairs and interacted with anyone. We talked amongst ourselves in the downstairs lobby. This whole story is a lie.
It certainly seems like an odd story to completely make up but it also seems like a strange story for Zendaya’s side to claim was false if it’s not. It’s not exactly that big a deal to not be able to eat in a certain restaurant because of the dress code. There are far worse reasons to be kicked out of a restaurant. In most cases, we might believe the truth lies somewhere in between, but there really isn’t much in between when the claim is that either a story is completely true or 100% false.
