Oprah Winfrey teared up as she talked about the state of her good friend, Gayle King, during a recent appearance on “Today,” after the CBS anchor King became embroiled in a Kobe Bryant controversy.
What’s going on?
- Winfrey teared up Friday morning when talking with hosts Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager about the backlash to King about a recent interview, according to CNN.
- King fell under fire after she asked former WNBA star Lisa Leslie about the rape allegations against Kobe Bryant, who died at the end of January in a helicopter crash.
- Winfrey: “She is not doing well. She is not doing well because she now has death threats and has to now travel with security. She is feeling very much attacked.”
- Winfrey: “She’s not doing well and feels that she was put in a really terrible position. Because that interview had already ran and in the context of the interview, everyone seemed fine, including Lisa Leslie.”
What is the controversy with Gayle King and Lisa Leslie?
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King reportedly asked Leslie about the allegations, wondering if Leslie feels different about Bryant because of those allegations, according to the Deseret News.
- King: “Is it complicated for you, as a woman, as a WNBA player?”
- Leslie: “It’s not complicated for me at all.”
- Leslie said Bryant was not the “kind of person that would do something to violate a woman or be aggressive in that way. That’s just not the person that I know.”
- Leslie: “I think the media should be more respectful at this time. If you had questions about it, you had many years to ask him that. I don’t think it’s something that we should keep hanging over his legacy.”
What was Gayle King’s response?
- King later criticized CBS for showing an “out of context” clip of the interview, which I wrote about for the Deseret News.
- King: “I know that if I had only seen the clip that you saw, I would be extremely angry with me too. I am mortified. I’m embarrassed and I am very angry. Unbeknownst to me my network put up a clip from a very wide-ranging interview, totally taken out of context and when you see it that way it’s very jarring.”
- “It was wide-ranging. ... Yes, we talked about that court case because that court case has also come up. And I wanted to get Lisa’s take on it as a friend who knew him well.”