Mo’Nique is revisiting her feud with Oprah Winfrey. The comedian went on Shannon Sharpe’s podcast, Club Shay Shay, this week and held nothing back when it came to discussing her yearslong beef with Oprah.
If you need your memory jogged, the bad blood originally started with the press tour and Oscar campaign for Precious back in 2009. Mo’Nique claims that Oprah, who served as a producer on the film, along with director Lee Daniels and fellow producer Tyler Perry, advised her to go to the Cannes Film Festival in support of the movie. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Mo’Nique said that she wanted to spend any bit of downtime she had with her family, but that pushing back earned her the label of “hard to work with.”
But that isn’t even Mo’Nique’s main criticism of Oprah. In 2010, a month after Mo’Nique won the Oscar for Precious, Oprah had Mo’Nique’s brother on her talk show. Mo’Nique had been vocal about how her brother, Gerald Imes, had molested her when she was a child. In her interview with Sharpe, Mo’Nique said that Oprah did call her to ask if it was okay to have him on the show.
“Your brother wants to come on the show and he wants to apologize to you for molesting you, and he wants to tell other people how to look out for predators,” Mo’Nique recounted Oprah saying. According to Mo’Nique, she told Oprah she wanted nothing to do with him but that she should still do the show, in case her brother had become a different person. At the time, she was grateful that Oprah had reached out.
“I start seeing commercials with my mother and my father and my other brother, who used to be my manager — who knew the fear that I had of the brother that was up onstage,” Mo’Nique recalled to Sharpe. Mo’Nique claimed that Oprah did not tell her that her other family members would be on the show.
“You betrayed me, sister,” Mo’Nique said. “Had Oprah Winfrey said, ‘I’m [going to] have your mama [on the show]’ I would’ve said shut that shit down.” Mo’Nique also claimed that her family went to Barbara Walters first for the interview, but that she turned them down. “Mo’Nique, I told your family I can’t do that to you, I wouldn’t do that to you. You just won that award, why would I do that to you,” Walters said in Mo’Nique’s account.
Over the course of a three-hour conversation, Mo’Nique also had her fair share of things to say about Perry, Tiffany Haddish, and Kevin Hart. Between this and the Katt Williams interview, it seems that Shannon Sharpe is becoming the go-to guy if you want to say how you really feel. No one is ever going to be this candid in Oprah’s garden.