Gayle King is back at work. After the controversial clip of her talking to Lisa Leslie about Kobe Bryant‘s sexual assault accusations was released last week, King made her return as co-anchor on CBS This Morning on Monday according to Fox News. She was absent from the show on Friday after blaming CBS for the release of the clip. CBS This Morning recapped the Academy Awards but nothing was mentioned about the Leslie interview. King even interviewed for Los Angeles Lakers star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, but there was no mention of what happened last week.
“I’ve been up reading the comments about the interview I did with Lisa Leslie about Kobe Bryant,” King said in a video she posted on Instagram video on Thursday. “I know that if I had only seen the clip that you saw, I’d be extremely angry with me too. I am mortified, I am embarrassed and I am very angry.”
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Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash along with his 13-year daughter Gianna and seven other people on Jan. 26, was accused of rape in 2003 by a 19-year old hotel employee in Colorado. The woman refused the testify but she did file a civil lawsuit that was settled out of court. Bryant did admit to the sexual encounter but said it was consensual.
“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,” King continued in her video. “It’s jarring to me. I didn’t even know anything about it. I started getting calls, “What the hell are you doing? Why did you say this? What is happening?’ I did not know what people were talking about.”
“I really want people to understand what happened here and how I’m feeling about it,” she said. “I believe that Lisa was OK with the interview and I felt really good about the interview.”
Oprah Winfrey, a close friend to King, spoke about the controversy on Today With Hoda & Jenna and she said King was receiving “death threats.”
“She’s not doing well,” Winfrey stated as she was getting emotional. “May I say, she is not doing well because she has now death threats and has to now travel with security, and she’s feeling very much attacked.”
