UPDATED: Before Elisabeth Hasselbeck was fired from “The View” in 2013, she tried to quit the daytime talk show in the middle of a commercial break.
In the new book “Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of ‘The View,'” Variety‘s Ramin Setoodeh details a day in a Hot Topics debate that got too heated for the show’s former conservative co-host.
As Setoodeh writes in the book, on August 2, 2006, Hasselbeck was having an argument with Barbara Walters and Joy Behar on TV about a proposal from the FDA to allow the morning-after pill for over-the-counter consumption.
Hasselbeck, who argued taking the pill is “the same thing as birthing a baby and leaving it out in the street,” wouldn’t let the other co-hosts provide their opposing points of view.
Finally, Walters had to interrupt her. “Could you stop now?” Walters said. “We have to go on and we have to learn how to discuss these things in some sort of rational way.”
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As the show cut to a commercial, Hasselbeck was so furious, she tore up her notecards and bolted from the table.
“F— that!” Hassselbeck screamed in a narrow corridor behind the stage, according to an audio tape of the exchange. “I’m not going to sit there and get reprimanded on the air. It’s not ok to sit there and get reprimanded on the air.”
“Come into my office here,” Behar said, trying to calm her down.
“What the f—!” Hasselbeck yelled back. “I don’t even swear. She has me swearing. This woman is driving me nuts. I’m not going back. I can’t do the show like this. She just reprimanded me, and she knew exactly what she was doing. Good-bye! I’m off. Write about that in the New York F—ING Post!”
After that, Hasselbeck raced down a stairwell and hid in her dressing room.
“Well, that’s ridiculous,” Walters said when she heard Hasselbeck had quit.
With only minutes left before the live program returned, the show’s executive producer Bill Geddie had to convince her to come back.
“You have to go on because you’re a pro, so come with me,” Geddie pleaded, as they raced back to the set.
Listen to the entire drama unfold in the exclusive clip below.
Hasselbeck responded to the release of the clip on Friday, saying she “used bad words when frustrated” with the conversation. “I was pregnant with Taylor and a big conversation about the value and the lives of the unborn took place at the View,” she wrote on Instagram. “It was a battle -but not of the flesh. I used fighting words because I believe that God decides the value of the lives of babies.”
See her full statement below.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bv4SleLlj0_/
