Anderson Cooper Slams Star Jones for Ratings Comments

On July 2, 2012 Anderson Cooper wrote an email to a friend and essentially came out of the closet in a move that journalists had been waiting for in vain. In the email to Andrew Sullivan, Anderson wrote, “The fact is, I’m gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn’t be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud.”

Adding, “I have always been very open and honest about this part of my life with my friends, my family, and my colleagues. In a perfect world, I don’t think it’s anyone else’s business, but I do think there is value in standing up and being counted. I’m not an activist, but I am a human being and I don’t give that up by being a journalist.”

Fast forward to Star Jones’ appearance on The Today Show where she cited ratings as the reason for the self-outing. See the clip here.

Sitting next to Andy Cohen for a segment of Anderson Live, Anderson reflected on that time, “I haven’t thought about Star Jones in I don’t know how long. I was unaware she was even on TV…” He then shared, “If I was wanting to boost ratings, I would have waited to announce it on ‘A Very Special Episode’ that would have been promo’d for weeks and weeks and there would have been commercials… ‘Anderson’s Huge Announcement.’”

He didn’t stop there. “As memory serves, in terms of boosting ratings, I seem to recall [Star] hocking her wedding every single day to get free products when she was on The View and I seem to recall her lying about her gastric bypass surgery and making everybody else lie about it as well. So for her to suddenly emerge out of the shadows and suddenly attack me for this, I couldn’t believe it.”

Anderson invited Star onto his show to chat about the issue, but she declined his offer to appear.

“I would think she would want as much publicity as possible given her penchant for wanting publicity,” he said.