On Monday, The New York Post’s Page Six reported that ABC’s Good Morning America co-host Robin Roberts complained to The Cut magazine that her homosexuality created a “no win situation” [sic] for her ridiculous softball interview with Empire actor and accused hoaxer Jussie Smollett.
Claiming she was being “completely honest,” Roberts said she wasn’t sure about doing the interview, to begin with. Roberts also admitted that a major concern for her was how her own “LGBT community” viewed her after the interview:
“I’m a black gay woman, he’s a black gay man,” she said. “He’s saying that there’s a hate crime, so if I’m too hard, then my LGBT community is going to say, ‘You don’t believe a brother,’ if I’m too light on him, it’s like, ‘Oh, because you are in the community, you’re giving him a pass.'”
Roberts whined that “[p]eople are looking at the interview through the eyes of ‘How did you not know?'” “I did the interview 48 hours before then. Had I had that information or [knew] what the brothers were alleging, heck yeah, I would have asked him about that,” she added.
But that contradicted Roberts’s own statements from a week ago on GMA when she tried to rewrite history and claim she saw “there were a lot of red flags that a lot of people saw and you all had questions” from the start.
In fact, that contradicted what she apparently told The Cut. According to Page Six, “Roberts said she was promised she could challenge him on the ‘red flags’ over the alleged racist and homophobic attack and that she’d get new information out of him.”
Clearly, “challenging” Smollett wasn’t on Robert’s itinerary at the time because, as NewsBusters’s Kristine Marsh reported, she never even used the word “alleged” to describe his claims.
To The Cut, Roberts seemed to suggest that her pitiful questions to Smollett were adequate. “Following up [about how] he couldn’t believe people didn’t believe him, well I go, ‘You’re out 2 o’clock in the morning, you’re getting a sandwich, [and] you won’t give up your phone,’” she argued.
Page Six’s reporting also showed how Roberts was seemingly concerned about saving whatever credibility she had left:
“I pride myself in being fair, I know how much work went into being balanced about what had happened and to challenge him on certain things,” she said.
She concluded by saying that since Smollett was considered a victim at the time of their interview, she carefully selected her questions.
“There’s so many people who do not come forward because others are not believed. I don’t know how this is all going to end,” she said. “We still talk to the [Chicago] police superintendent [Eddie T. Johnson].”
Roberts even claimed, “It was one of the most challenging interviews I’ve ever had to do.” Ironically, Roberts had actually interviewed Smollett’s character on the show and was tougher when playing pretend.
