Former ESPN anchor Sage Steele says Barbara Walters physically attacked her backstage at The View
Steele, who departed ESPN after a year-long lawsuit against the company this week, says Walters "tried to tackle" her after she made comments about Barack Obama
Former SportsCenter anchor Sage Steele announced this week that she was leaving ESPN—said news arriving, not coincidentally, right alongside news that she’d settled her year-long lawsuit with, wait for it, ESPN. And while we really do not want to spend more of our Friday night sorting through the personal narrative of Sage Steele for any longer than we absolutely have to at this point—for reasons that will hopefully become clear in a moment—her post-departure press tour has produced a story too weird to ignore.
Specifically, Steele went on The Megyn Kelly Show this weekend in order to talk with the former Fox News host about the various ways in which life has aggrieved her—which mostly seems to have come in the form of people telling her they don’t like it when she loudly criticizes vaccine mandates, or makes regular suggestions that Barack Obama shouldn’t identify as Black because he’s biracial, or issues repeated calls to keep trans women out of womens’ sports, etc. Amidst this two-and-a-half-hour conversation—which, we can assure you, you will feel if, say, you find yourself in the unlucky position of scanning through it for work, in a desperate bid to hear the one interesting bit buried at the 2:02:50 mark—Steele revealed that, at one point, Barbara Walters tried to beat her up.
Okay, so: This was apparently back in 2014, when Steele was occasionally guest-hosting on The View—and where she trotted out her Obama material, seven years before she’d refresh it on the Uncut With Jay Cutler podcast, kicking off the conflicts that would ultimately lead to her departure from ESPN. In 2014, the response was much more quiet, but also completely bizarre: Steele says she was in the show’s green room with Walters and Whoopi Goldberg after the segment, when, well, here’s her account:
I was probably about four feet from the wall and the trash can, and Barbara was standing over here in front of me. She just started to back up toward me and looked at me and got close and elbowed me, and it pushed me back into the wall and the trash can. I was like, “What did [she] just do to me? This 140-year-old woman just tried to like tackle me.”
Steele says the incident—which would have happened when Walters was 84, during her final run on the chat show—occurred in front of Whoopi Goldberg, who then allegedly took Steele aside to issue words of support like “Don’t you let her do it.” Steele, who earlier in the Kelly interview said Walters “went nuts” on her (and who said Walters glared at her before delivering the elbow) described the situation as incredibly surreal, which is, to our minds, the single most relatable moment of this entire viewing ordeal. Then Megyn Kelly went on a little diatribe denouncing Barbara Walters as a mother, because that is the tone of the conversation, which you are now blessedly free from watching, because we’ve relayed to you the only interesting part. You’re welcome, dear reader: Please carry the bizarre mental image of 84-year-old Barbara Walters slowly shuffling backwards to elbow a woman half her age, and six inches taller than her, as part of some sort of violent octogenarian retaliation, forward with you into the rest of your weekend.