Elisabeth Hasselbeck responds to expletive use in leaked audio from 'The View': 'God has changed my ways'
Elisabeth Hasselbeck officially left her job hosting The View in 2013, but she almost hung up her microphone much sooner: Aug. 2, 2006.
That’s the day the women on the ABC talk show discussed the FDA’s proposal to allow the morning-after pill to be sold over-the-counter and Hasselbeck, who opposed the move, angrily left the “Hot Topics” table during a commercial break. While the audience could tell that Hasselbeck was upset about the issue — and the fact that her co-host Barbara Walters had said she wasn’t being “rational” with her comments — new audio published in Variety as part of the book Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of ‘The View’ shows that Hasselbeck had to be coaxed back onto the set. She was fuming and said she was unwilling to return to the show that day... or ever.
Hasselbeck responded to the story Friday soon after it was published with a long note explaining that she’s “quite humanly reactive.” She said that she’d been pregnant with her second child during the argument and was thinking of her own experience with pregnancy. She credited her faith with having changing the way she handles differences of opinion today.
“God has changed my ways,” she wrote on Instagram. “He has given me a new thing — it is my heart.”
Hasselbeck referred in her post to having used an expletive during the incident. At the time of the incident, Hasselbeck was speaking to another co-host, Joy Behar, during a commercial break about what had happened.
“What the f***! I don’t even swear. She has me swearing. This woman is driving me nuts,” Hasselbeck said. “I’m not going back out. I can’t do the show like this. She just reprimanded me, and she knew exactly what she was doing. Goodbye! I’m off. Read about that in the New York f ***ing Post!”
Hasselbeck eventually walked back onstage and hugged Walters on-camera, getting cheers from the crowd.
Last month, Hasselbeck responded to former co-host Rosie O’Donnell’s admission that she had romantic feelings towards Hasselbeck. O’Donnell told author Ramin Setoodeh that she’d had a “little bit of a crush” on Hasselbeck and that she felt there had been “underlying lesbian tones on both parts” when they worked together.
“I think what she said was reckless, untrue and not only insulting, disturbing, when it comes to how she felt about somebody in the workplace,” Hasselbeck said during a guest appearance on The View. “If you replace what Rosie said and you take her name out and you put in Ruben or Robert, then we would be in a situation where you would see the objectification of a woman in the workplace. And that’s disturbing because where we may be really against that when it comes from a man to a woman, you don’t get a pass because you’re a lesbian objectifying a woman in the workplace. You just don’t.”
Hasselbeck confirmed in her new book, Point of View: A Fresh Look at Work, Faith and Freedom, that she was fired from the show and that she later declined an offer to return as a co-host. She wrote that Walters helped her to get her next job at Fox News, where she worked until 2015.
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