Home International White House gatecrashers 7th on Time’s ‘Top 10 Fleeting Celebrities’

White House gatecrashers 7th on Time’s ‘Top 10 Fleeting Celebrities’

By IANS,

Washington: The White House gatecrashers who strolled uninvited into President Barack Obama’s state dinner for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have earned only the 7th spot on Time’s ‘Top 10 Fleeting Celebrities’ list for their caper.

“A little more than a month after the ‘balloon boy’ debacle, America witnessed the equally shameless fame-seeking stunt of Tareq and Michaele Salahi, a pair of Virginia socialites now known as the Gate Crashers,” recalled the US magazine.

At the Nov 24 event, the Salahis rubbed “elbows with the likes of President Obama, Vice President Biden and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and later triumphantly posted photos of their coup on Facebook,” Time said.

The Salahis, it noted briefly basked in the widespread media coverage of the White House security breach.

“They started out calmly insisting that they had been invited, before revealing their ulterior motive: reality TV! That’s right – they were just gunning for a role on Bravo’s forthcoming reality series The Real Housewives of D.C.”

Such outlandish social capers appear to be a pastime for the Salahis, who reportedly crashed an awards dinner for the Congressional Black Caucus in September by entering through a door used by servers and busboys, the Time said. They were later escorted off the premises.

The magazine gave the top spot on the Fleeting Celebrities list to “Octomom” Nadya Suleman, a California woman who gave birth to octuplets in January.