Sharon Osbourne is back on the air, hosting a show on the U.K.’s new TalkTV network, starring in, believe it on not, a show called The Talk. But Wednesday, she appeared as a guest on another program to again discuss her departure from the stateside show of the same name.
The show was Fox Nation’s Piers Morgan Uncensored, and the host was her friend Piers Morgan, whom she had defended just before she was fired from CBS’s The Talk in March 2021.
“It’s very important to me. It’s something that I love,” Osbourne said of returning to television. “And I, just, again, you know, didn’t want it to end my career in such an ugly way.”
The saga began in March 2021, when Morgan criticized Meghan Markle in her interview with Oprah, in which she and Prince Harry accused the royal family of racism and ignoring her mental health. Morgan then went on his show, Good Morning Britain, and accused Markle of lying, to the point where his co-host confronted him on the air, and Morgan stormed off set. He parted ways with the show altogether within hours.
. @piersmorgan I am with you. I stand by you. People forget that you’re paid for your opinion and that you’re just speaking your truth.
— Sharon Osbourne (@MrsSOsbourne) March 9, 2021
Osbourne, a friend of Morgan’s, then defended him on an episode of The Talk, to the point that she argued with co-host Sheryl Underwood over whether Morgan had been racist. Osbourne also said she had been accused of being a racist herself for standing by him. The conversation got so ugly that Osbourne issued an apology two days later, and CBS launched an internal review of the incident, even briefly shutting down production. Meanwhile, former The Talk co-hosts Holly Robinson Peete and Leah Remini, as well as others, alleged that Osbourne herself had made racially-charged comments over her 11 years on the talk show; Osbourne refuted their stories.
Still, she left the show for good on March 26.
She’s since said she’s both “angry” and “hurt” by what happened. In a September interview with DailyMailTV, Osbourne said that she had received death threats in the wake of the controversy. She’d hired security. “I definitely went through a difficult patch at the beginning,” she said. “I found it embarrassing. The humiliation that people would think that I might be a racist.”
Osbourne explained to Morgan that her phone completely stopped ringing following the scandal.
“You are untouchable. You are an untouchable. And what makes me so mad is I’m in a blessed situation that, no matter whatever happens to my career, my husband will always take care of me,” she said of rocker Ozzy Osbourne. “But what happens to a person that, you know, say I didn’t have a husband and I had kids to bring up, right? What happens to people like that, that are canceled or fired because they’ve… used the wrong term or something’s taken out of context? And they’re fired? To the average person, what happens to that person?”
Osbourne said, as she has before, that her former co-host Sara Gilbert had advised her to get help, which she did eventually, with three months of therapy and ketamine treatment for depression. But the first few months were filled with tears.
“It was tough on me, and it did affect me mentally. It honestly did, because after everything that I felt, all my dreams I had achieved, everything that I’d wanted to do, I had achieved,” Osbourne said. “And did I want my legacy for my family to be? ‘Oh, well, your Nana was on television, but everybody said she was racist, so she never went on television again.'”
Morgan asked whether she had ever been suicidal.
“Not suicidal,” Osbourne said, “because I didn’t want to give CBS the satisfaction.”
