Steve Harvey Draws Backlash for Tense Mo’Nique Interview

Unlike announcing the wrong name at the Miss Universe pageant, Steve Harvey is announcing where he stands on integrity and fans are heated about it.

The Steve Harvey Show host recently interviewed Mo’Nique where they had a chance to hash out their differences from an incident that happened back in 2010, and it didn’t pan out well for him.

The two discussed Mo’Nique’s decision to not go on a press tour for the movie Precious—the film that earned her an Academy Award—because she allegedly only received $50,000 for it so she demanded more. As a response, she turned some pretty powerful people down like Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry and Lee Daniels and as a result, her husband and manager, Sidney Hicks, were labeled as difficult. Since then, she has claimed to be blackballed from the Hollywood industry and scene. Not just that, but the comedian claims Winfrey, Perry, Daniels and Harvey were all on her side in private, but showed a different side in the public.

“We got labeled as ‘difficult’ because I said one word — and that was ‘no,’” Mo’Nique said. “Now I said no to some very powerful people … the difficulty came in when people that looked like me, like Oprah, Tyler, Lee Daniels and I got to put my brother Steve on the list. Y’all knew that I was not wrong. Each one of you said to me, ‘Mo’Nique, you’re not wrong.’ And when I heard you go on the air and said, ‘My sister burned too many bridges, and it’s nothing I can do for her now,’ Steve, do you know how hurt I was?”

While the two seemed to see eye-to-eye, things took a turn for the worse when the actress brought up integrity and how that played a higher role to her than money. Harvey didn’t seem to agree with that for his family’s sake.

“When you tell the truth, you have to deal with the repercussions of the truth,” Harvey said to her on his show. “We black out here. We can’t come out here and do it any way we want to. Your husband can’t be the Sidney [Hicks] that he really is out here […] This is the money game. This ain’t a black man’s game, this ain’t a white man’s game. This is the money game!”

Mo’Nique immediately fired back with, “Before the money game, it’s called the integrity game and we’ve lost the integrity worried about the money.”

Harvey replied with, “If I crumble, my children crumble, my grandchildren crumble. I can not for the sake of my integrity, stand up here, and let everybody that’s counting on me, crumble so that I can make a statement. There are ways to win the war in a different way.”

That’s when the Twitter war began.

One user wrote, “Collin Kaepernick just showed us it DOES pay to have integrity. Don’t listen to Steve Harvey.”

Sports journalist, Jemele Hill wrote,” To me, the most disappointing thing Steve Harvey said in that entire exchange was, ‘the best thing you can do for poor people is not be one of them.’ Truly one of those statements you make when you have lost touch.”

Someone else tweeted a clip saying, “Steve Harvey must have forgot.”

Another user pointed out the fact that this conversation was happening during Black History Month.

It wasn’t a pretty sight on social media following his remarks. Almost a week after their showdown, Harvey has finally opened up about the whole debacle admitting he needs to slow down and guard his words more carefully.

“I’ve got to slow down when I’m talking,” the 62-year-old told PEOPLE. “I can’t get into heated discussions, and I’ve got to just guard my words more carefully.”

“I take full responsibility for it, it came out my mouth, so I can’t say that I didn’t say it,” he continued. “But to people that really know me, I have lived my whole life as a man of integrity. So when I was referring to ‘integrity’ in that interview, I was talking about the method in which things were being done, and that is all it was.”

“I never questioned anybody’s principles or anybody’s causes. I was merely questioning, for the 50-minute interview, the method that she chose going about doing it—and I regret that looking back at it now, because that was a bad choice of words,” he concluded.

He went on to say he wanted his young fans to “charge that one to my head and not my heart.”

This isn’t the first and only time Harvey has been under fire after remarks. Fans weren’t happy when he called the Golden State Warriors “Gorillas.” They also weren’t happy when his wife, Marjorie Harvey, used the word “retarted” in an Instagram video.