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Madonna reportedly shouts ‘enslaver’ in theater-texting outburst

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<i>This post has been corrected. See note below for details.</i>

Madonna appears to be a slave to her celluar phone, and business apparently, as her fervent texting has led to her ban from a movie theater chain.

The Material Girl seems to believe she’s above movie theater etiquette — namely not texting during a movie — and reportedly texted continuously during a New York Film Festival premiere screening of Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave,” according to several reports.

Charles Taylor, a film writer for Salon, partly catalyzed the media maelstrom when he shared an eyewitness account of the incident, which was originally posted on Facebook by one of his former NYU students who chronicled the dispute.

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“Tonight at the New York Film Festival premiere of ’12 Years A Slave’ (a masterpiece, by the way), I sat behind the unholy trifecta of Jason Ritter, J. Alexander from ‘America’s Next Top Model,’ and Michael K. Williams from ‘The Wire.’ Plus, a mysterious blonde in black lace gloves who wouldn’t stop texting on her Blackberry throughout the first half of the movie,” the student wrote (via IndieWire).

“Eventually, a woman next to me tapped her on the shoulder and told her to put her phone away, and the blonde hissed back, ‘It’s for business... ENSLAVER!’ I turned to the shoulder tapper and loudly said, ‘THANKS!’ and gave her a thumbs up. The rest of the movie, I kept thinking about how I wanted to tell the blonde what a disgrace she was. During the standing ovation, the blonde ducked out and Jason Ritter turned around to make commiserating eye contact, as J. Alexander asked, ‘Who WAS that?!’ Jason then looked down at the floor. His eyes got wide, and he picked up an envelope and showed it to us and J. And it said: ‘2 screening tix MADONNA.’ And sure enough, we looked to the side of the theater and standing against the wall in black lace gloves was Madonna. The worst person in America.”

Ouch.

The incident got the 55-year-old barred from the Texas-based Alamo Drafthouse chain of upscale cinemas until she cops to her bad behavior, according to a tweet from theater founder Tim League.

“Until she apologizes to movie fans, Madonna is banned from watching movies @drafthouse,” he wrote.

The theater’s website states that it has “a zero-tolerance policy towards talking and texting during the movie. If you talk or text, you will receive one warning. If it happens again, you will be kicked out without a refund.”

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When Entertainment Weekly reached out to League about his public shaming of the singer, he said it started off as an “offhand joke, a spur of the moment 140 characters.”

But he then said, “Yeah, I’m serious, but I don’t think it really affects her life that much,” adding, it was “more of a means to get the issue out there, that it is rude to text during movies.”

Madge reportedly enjoyed the film and was also photographed with the director, but her lack of theater etiquette is alarming since she’s a filmmaker too. Forbes’ top-earning celebrity just wrapped her second directorial effort, the short film “secretprojectrevolution.” However, the 17-minute film about freedom of expression (surprise, surprise) was released via BitTorrent Bundle, so it won’t need to have its run in a movie house anytime soon.

She has yet to respond to the incident.

[For the record, 10:30 p.m. Oct. 14: A previous version of this post said Charles Taylor was an eyewitness to the incident. He was not. The eyewitness was one of his students who posted about the account on Facebook, and Taylor shared the post. It also said Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League’s last name was Alamo.]

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