Rihanna: Bloody knee in London and comparisons to Princess Diana

By Nardine Saad

Feb. 18, 2013 12 AM PT

Rihanna got a bloody knee during a tussle at a London club when a reveler allegedly threw a bottle in her direction.

The “Stay” singer was in town to debut her River Island collection during London Fashion Week. Her show, which featured RiRi-inspired designs from her costume designer, reportedly started 50 minutes late on Saturday, according to the Telegraph.

After the show, Rihanna hit the Box club in London to celebrate. As she was leaving with friends Cara Delevingne and Melissa Forde, a partygoer threw a bottle of a British energy drink at her, yelling something about RiRi getting back together with her controversial beau Chris Brown. The bottle missed, but she scratched her knee on a metal shop grate while dodging it, the Daily Mail reports.

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Ah, the price of fame.

Her bodyguard reportedly went after the bottle-hurler and was more severely injured, according to London’s Daily News.

The singer didn’t acknowledge the incident on Twitter but had plenty to say about her feature in London’s Sunday Times over the weekend. An essay by feminist writer Camille Paglia in the newspaper’s weekly mag compared the 24-year-old singer to the beloved Princess Diana and explored their tricky relationships with photography and fame, specifically their “ravishingly seductive flirtation” with the press.

“Diana and Rihanna began as sensitive, wounded, but appealingly bubbly and good-natured provincial girls who slowly discovered their own photogenic virtuosity and began to conceptualise themselves as living sculpture for the lens,” Paglia wrote. “Both developed a false intimacy with photographers and the public and began to cannibalise themselves in their futile search for security in love. Diana, rebuffed, eventually accepted her exile. But Rihanna, in the classic syndrome of the battered woman, still pities and hopes to change and save her abuser. (“I was more concerned about him,” she told Oprah about her recovery from Brown’s assault.) By her gallery of splendid stills, Rihanna thinks she can stop the tormenting flux of emotion, but her brilliant eye is helpless against the tyranny of the heart.”

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Paglia added:

“The problem is that in this era of social media, Rihanna in her fury of tainted love has tools ready to hand that Diana never dreamt of. Instagram, for example, a photo-sharing app, allows Rihanna to send personal pictures to friend and foe in the blink of an eye, without the mediation of professional photographers. It is autobiography written by a volatile mix of impulse and mood. The borderline between private and public has been largely erased by Rihanna’s generation, who prankishly ‘sext’ each other with little fear of the maelstrom of the web churning nearby, sucking everything in and permanently littering the sea floor with the embarrassing wreckage of past selves.”

Rihanna, ever the exhibitionist, was excited about the magazine’s comparison, even if it wasn’t the most flattering.

“When your face is pic-stitched to Princess Diana’s on the cover of The Sunday Times.... I mean... #extraordinaRIHbehavior,” she captioned an Instagram photo of the magazine’s cover.

“Just so happens I came home drunk to this in a pile of papers outside my hotel room! My lil Bajan behind, never thought these many people would even know my name, now it’s next to Princess Diana’s on the front of a newspaper! Life can be such a beautiful thing when you let it be #yourejealous :),” she added.

If you say so, RiRi ...

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Follow Nardine on Twitter @NardineSaad and Google +. Follow Ministry of Gossip @LATcelebs.