‘The View’: Why Joy Behar Was ‘Glad’ She Was Fired

Joy Behar’s history with The View hasn’t exactly been linear. While she’s currently on the panel, she was fired from the program in 2013. Reflecting on the situation today, she’s “glad” that it worked out the way that it did, as she told TIME. 

Behar may be a fixture on The View today, but she was let go back in 2013. However, the firing didn’t phase her, as she told TIME, “I was glad to be fired. I basically was sick of the show at that point for some reason, I don’t even remember why.” Ramin Setoodeh, co–editor in chief of Variety and author of a book about The View, Ladies Who Punch, chronicled that Elisabeth Hasselback was fired at the same time that Behar was. But, unlike Hasselback, who reportedly cried about being fired, Behar was nonchalant about the issue and offered to leave the same day. 

Even though Behar was fired from the show in 2013, she continued to make guest appearances on the program in 2014 and 2015, per The Blast. In August 2015, The View announced that she would be returning as a regular co-host starting with Season 19. Behar has remained on the panel ever since. Throughout her time on The View, Behar has stoked the flames of controversy with some of her comments. Most recently, she and the other co-hosts of The View came under fire after linking Turning Point USA, a conservative organization, to neo-Nazi demonstrators. 

On a recent episode of the show, Behar said about the demonstration that took place outside of a Turning Point USA summit in Florida, “Neo-Nazis were out there in the front of the conference with anti-semitic slurs and … the Nazi swastika and a picture of a so-called Jewish person with exaggerated features, just like Goebbels did during the Third Reich. It’s the same thing, right out of the same playbook.” In the same episode, The View aired a disclaimer that stated that Turning Point USA condemned the protestors. The show later issued an apology on Wednesday’s episode. 

“So on Monday we talked about the fact that were openly Neo-Nazi demonstrators outside the Florida student action summit of the Turning Point USA group. We want to make clear that these demonstrators were gathered outside the event and that they were not invited or endorsed by Turning Point USA,” co-host Sara Haines stated. “A Turning Point USA spokesman said the group, quote, ‘100 percent condemns those ideologies,’ and said Turning Point USA security tried to remove the Neo-Nazis from the area but could not because they were on public property. Also, Turning Point USA wanted us to clarify that this was a Turning Point USA summit and not a Republican Party event. So we apologize for anything we said that may have been unclear on these points.”