Tamron Hall is speaking out against claims that Stassi Schroeder was ambushed during her sit-down interview.
The former Vanderpump Rules star appeared on “The Tamron Hall Show” for her first televised interview since her firing over her racially insensitive remarks, but a report claimed Schroeder wasn’t too thrilled with the one-on-one exchange.
“The other day I was told that there was a report that Stassi felt ‘unprepared’ and that it was ‘awkward.’ Even that I had gone rogue — whatever that means,” Hall said on Tuesday’s episode, referring to an Us Weekly article citing a source, according to Page Six. “Let me just be open because I’m expecting everybody who’s participating in this show today, I want them to be open, so I have to do the same. It’s why I wanted this show to be honest with you.”
“So I’m going to take you behind the scenes of TV,” she continued. “Now, I don’t tell people the specific questions I’m going to ask them. How they answer, that’s up to them. But the topic and everything that we discussed, Stassi knew. She knew the subject matter. She knew what I was going to ask her. Not the questions.”
Hall went on to say that “the night before the interview,” Schroeder’s team asked Hall not to discuss the comments Schroeder made on the #MeToo movement. In 2017, she released an episode of her now-defunct “Straight Up With Stassi” podcast titled, “Are we on a male witch hunt?” In the episode, she criticized women who came forward during the #MeToo movement, according to a report by Page Six.
“It hit me to my gut that I didn’t ask her,” Hall said of obliging the request to not discuss the matter. “But again, I want to be honest with you. Given that she was five months pregnant, the issue of race was hard enough for her and for me and it was a lot to unpack, including that Nazi comment, so I said we were not going to go down that road but we would have this difficult conversation that we all should have to provide a better platform for our children.”
On Friday, September 18, Us Weekly reported that Schroeder “felt totally unprepared” after her Hall interview and that she “felt like she was put on the spot.”
“Stassi felt totally unprepared for the interview,” a source told the publication. “She wasn’t in a good mood afterward and felt like she was put on the spot. She has built her brand on being candid and funny, and she feels afraid to make any wrong comments or jokes and having them come across negatively, which, in turn, made the interview awkward.”
The insider added, “She doesn’t want to make a wrong move or say anything that can be taken out of context because she really has been taking time to work on herself. She felt somewhat caught off guard in how the interview went down because she really has been doing her best to learn, educate herself and be the best version of herself that she can be.”
A second source explained, “Producers laid the segments out for Stassi and her team, and everything was all set. And then, to everyone’s surprise, Tamron [Hall] went rogue and took the interview in a completely different direction.”
Photo Credit: YouTube; The Tamron Hall Show