Whoopi touches Salahi’s back at 1:55
White House party crasher Michaele Salahi is one of the castmembers on the upcoming Real Housewives of DC, which premieres tonight on Bravo. She was on The View Wednesday with her co-stars and was in a lame typical argument with another housewife named Lynda from the show. Their argument was over an incident at a promotional party in which Salahi’s husband threw a glass of red wine on Lynda after she taunted Michaele by calling her an anorexic. Lynda then threw a scotch back at the husband, Tareq. These two fools were arguing back and forth about it on the View’s couches and were taking up time. Whoopi Goldberg came in from backstage and gently touched Michaele’s back to get her attention and said something about the White House. (The video is above, but you can see Whoopi touching Salahi better on Radar’s video around the :55 mark.) They then changed the topic to the Salahis showing up uninvited to that State Dinner last year, something they continue to deny despite being called to testify as part of a Congressional investigation. (They never said anything about it and took the fifth the whole time.)
Then backstage something went down with Whoopi. Michaele claims that Whoopi burst into the room and asked “did you say I f’ing hit you?!” after which Whoopi let loose with a bunch of expletives. According to Michaele, she voiced her concerns to a producer that Whoopi “grabbed” her, and that she didn’t think it was appropriate to ask her to change the subject that way. Whoopi got wind of it and went after her verbally. After Whoopi calmed down, she tried to apologize and explain to Michaele that she regularly swears and that it wasn’t a big deal. Michaele wasn’t having it, though, and of course issued a statement through her lawyer about it. She also told the story on The Today Show the next day. (Video below.) Here’s more, including the detail that Michelle conveniently left out of her interview on The Today show that her husband demanded an apology and then tried to shove his Blackberry in Whoopi’s face to tape her response.
When Michaele Salahi and her Real Housewives of D.C. castmates — Mary Schmidt Amons, Lynda Erkiletian, Catherine Ommanney and Stacie Scott Turner — appeared on the ABC talk show, the newly-minted realty star was rattled after she said Whoopi Goldberg, who was offstage for the segment, walked on the set, touched her arm and tried to refocus her on the topic at hand: her alleged crashing of the White House state dinner last November.
Though the encounter occupied no more than several seconds of airtime, offstage, an ugly scene reportedly happened when Salahi and her husband Tareq complained to producers about what she tells PEOPLE was a “humiliating and torturous” experience at the hands of Goldberg — and her View co-hosts.
“The first encounter I had with this woman is her grabbing my arm and telling me to change the subject,” Salahi tells PEOPLE in a phone interview Thursday. “It was very inappropriate … They want to torture me. I didn’t know [being interviewed on the View] would be this horrific.”
During that interview segment, Salahi also exchanged heated words with her Housewives costar Erkiletian, who alleged that Tareq threw a glass of red wine on her at a recent press event in Los Angeles. (Salahi fired back that Erkiletian lobbed a glass of Scotch back in her husband’s face.) The interview was testy, and afterward Salahi said, “When I got off stage I was fine, but then I began to cry. Whoopi came in and said ‘Did you [expletive] say that I hit you?’ ”
According to a statement on ABC’s Web site, Salahi told producers that Goldberg “hit” her. Salahi tells PEOPLE she used the word “grab.”
Goldberg doesn’t deny the backstage confrontation happened but denies she hit Salahi. “You know how I [denied it],” she said, “choice words. And I make no apology for my choice words.”
But the situation escalated after Salahi’s husband Tareq intervened.
“Tareq, my husband, said you need to apologize to my wife,” Salahi tells PEOPLE. “Whoopi doesn’t like to be told what to do. He said, ‘We’re just guests and this is an inappropriate way to treat guests.’ “
But Goldberg says Tareq “got in [her] face, had his BlackBerry out and started taking pictures of me. And needless to say, I really went off on him. And there was even more choice words. It was so choice, you could have cut it with a knife and eaten them.”
At this point, Salahi says, “I was really sobbing. I just wanted to get out of there.”
While Goldberg had no more to say about the matter Thursday, and co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck read a statement on air from Salahi’s attorney reiterating that no charges were levied after the alleged White House crashing incident, Salahi says she doesn’t understand where all the purported hostility came from on the set of The View.
“Whoopi, I don’t know you. I never saw Sister Act,” she says. “I don’t know much about her. The fact that I have had no encounters with her except this hostility, I don’t know where it’s coming from. It’s just another really painful learning lesson.”
[From People]
The Salahis are represented by Michael Lohan’s lawyer, Lisa Bloom, who talked to the Daily Beast about the whole controversy. She said, in part “I think they treated her horribly. I think they defamed her [by asking about the party crashing on air]. I was really shocked by the way she was treated. It’s one thing to ask tough questions, it’s another to use defamatory language when you’ve been warned not to.” So Michaele was mad at Whoopi for yelling at her for allegedly making false claims, and she was mad that she got called out about the party crashing on The View.
The Salahis posted a notice on Facebook that they were going to talk about the incident and release the audio and video of Whoopi going ogg. They wrote in a now-deleted post “Salahis will address on Thursday Morning LIVE on National TV the outrageous abuse and exchange that took place on the ABC Show the View and a [sic] audio & video file from Whoopi Goldberg verbal attack to Michaele. Standby for details…”
Michaele did talk about the alleged “abuse” on the Today show, (video below) but she was supposed to be promoting her new show and her other castmembers were pissed that the focus was on her. A woman named Cat said very clearly that she’s over Michaele and the scotch-throwing chick Lynda Erkiletian claimed to have been friends with the Salahis for 15 years before their falling out. Lynda said “they live a very fake Bonnie & Clyde life” and added that they’re misusing funds that are supposed to go to charity, as reported by the Washington Post. Michaele countered “you’re so crazy and jealous.” Then the one woman who didn’t diss Michaele yet moved on to talk about the show. Stacie Scott Turnersaid that their new show was “more sophisticated than some of the other series have been. You will not see the hair pulling… weave pulling.” Hoda said “I heard about the drink throwing though.”
Oh and ABC has issued an official response to this ridiculousness:
“At one point during Michaele Salahi’s appearance on The View on Wednesday, Whoopi lightly touched Ms. Salahi to get her attention and said to her, “Excuse me, can you get back to the White House, please?,’ meaning could Ms. Salahi return to the original subject of the conversation. After the show, Ms. Salahi and her husband accused Whoopi of hitting Ms. Salahi. As the broadcast clearly shows, the accusation was completely unfounded and erroneous. After the show and after being told she was being accused of hitting Ms. Salahi, Whoopi proceeded to defend herself verbally from this baseless claim in a heated exchange with the Salahis.”
[via The Daily Beast]
You know the Salahis are loving this. Michaele gets to be the focus of the new show despite the fact that all her costars can’t stand her, and they have more publicity to shill their book. They’re con artists who live for controversy like this. It’s ripe that they don’t want to talk about the party crashing when we would have never heard of them if they didn’t sneak into a state dinner uninvited. I’m not team Whoopi though by any means. Maybe now we have a little insight about her reasons for defending Mel Gibson.
Salahi tells her side of the story at 1:20.
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The other housewives can’t stand Michaele
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