The View has been the scene of countless behind-the-scenes feuds, including one between Star Jones and Joy Behar that exploded over a rumored dead mouse in Jones’ dressing room.
Behar and Jones were both original members of The View table, and it appeared before the cameras that they got along. However, according to Ramin Setoodeh’s book Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of The View, Behar made sure everyone knew about a mouse a janitor allegedly found dead in Jones’ dressing room in 2004, two years before Jones left the show.
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According to an excerpt from the book, published by Us Weekly, Jones’ dressing room “looked as if it were out of a Hoarders episode.”
Setoodeh wrote, “It was stacked with clothes and shoes. That made it the perfect hideout for vermin. One night, the janitor complained to Joy that he’d just swept up the carcass of a crushed mouse from the floor of Star’s dressing room and that Star must have stepped on it and killed it without knowing.”
Behar began to “detest” Jones so much that she “gleefully” shared the story with her friends on the show.
“‘Can you believe it?’ Joy would ask, thrilled. (‘Who told you this?’ Joy said, when asked about it, with a guilty expression on her face),” Setoodeh wrote.
When Setoodeh appeared on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen on March 27, he said Jones blamed Behar and Barbara Walters for leaking the details of her gastric bypass surgery to tabloids.
“Star Jones said as she was being fired in 2006, both Barbara Walters and Joy Behar were leaking stories of her gastric bypass to the New York Post to ruin her reputation,” Setoodeh said.
This is hardly the first revelation to come from Setoodeh’s book, which will be released on Tuesday.
According to one excerpt, former co-host Rosie O’Donnell described Whoopi Goldberg as “mean” and called working with the Oscar-winner the “worst experience I’ve ever had on life television.”
O’Donnell said her feelings on Goldberg “soured” after an argument in 2009, when Goldberg suggested director Roman Polanski – who pleaded guilty to the statutory rape of then-13-year-old Samantha Geimer – did not commit “rape rape.” O’Donnell claimed she received a more reserved letter of apology from Goldberg, but the feud continued when O’Donnell returned to The View in 2014. O’Donnell claimed Goldberg would “shut down” her ideas.
O’Donnell made some of the most explosive remarks in Setoodeh’s book, including claims she had a “crush” on Elisabeth Hasselbeck and detailed her “blowup” with Walters over Her mockery of Trump.
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