Sherri Shepherd staged a View reunion by having Joy Behar on Sherri on October 11, and the former co-hosts shared a shocking story about the late Barbara Walters and Richard Pryor during their interview. According to Shepherd, the late comedian Paul Mooney told her years ago that he walked in on Walters and Pryor hooking up.
The story came up when Shepherd was ribbing Behar about their time together on The View (Shepherd was a co-host from 2007-2014, Behar started in 1997 and has been co-hosting consistently since 2015). As Shepherd teased, “You liked it that I was scared of Barbara Walters. You used to laugh.”
“What was scary about her?” Behar said, as Shepherd replied, “I don’t know. She was just so formidable … I would tell you stuff and then you would go and tell it.” Then came the… intimate details about their former colleague, who died in December 2022 (Pryor died in 2005).
“I never told this before, but I’m going to tell it,” Shepherd told the audience. “I told Joy that I had run into Paul Mooney and Paul Mooney had said that he caught Barbara Walters with Richard Pryor.”
“What do you mean? She slept with Richard Pryor?” Behar asked, as Shepherd replied, “Yes, that’s what Paul Mooney said. And I came back and I was like, Joy, guess what?!? When you talk like that you know, don’t tell nobody.”
Shepherd wanted to keep that juicy story between her and Behar, because as she said before, she was intimidated by Walters. Dishing the dirty details was no skin off Behar’s back, however. “He walked in … that’s what he said,” Shepherd explained. “He looked through the door. Don’t act like you don’t remember. It was just me and Joy … don’t tell nobody. And the next day Barbara walks in and you go, so …”
Behar, recalling the exchange, chimed in to say, “I didn’t say you told me.” As Shepherd went on, “But you say to Barbara, so you’re schlepping Richard Pryor, huh?!”
According to the host, Walters reacted by whipping her head around and asking, “Who told you that?!” “I’m sitting there and I just got this job,” Shepherd jokes. “And Joy, you do that because you’re not scared of Barbara.”
Behar then spoke more on Walters’ sexual history, saying, “You know, Barbara, between me and you … Barbara liked a brother,” noting that the journalist once dated a Black senator and that similar information is in one of Walters’ memoir, Audition. Shepherd added that Walters loved when Colin Powell would be a guest on The View. “It’s in her book,” Shepherd said. “You always said Barbara loved a chocolate man.”
At one point, Behar cheekily acknowledged the NSFW content of this conversation with the Sherri audience, saying, “Is this going to be on television?”
See the full exchange in the video above.
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