Gayle King Addresses Lisa Leslie Interview Controversy: ‘I Am Mortified. I Am Embarrassed.’
Gayle King has received some backlash for a clip that was shared online by CBS that the news correspondent says was published out of context.
In the short clip, King was interviewing WNBA legend Lisa Leslie regarding the death of NBA legend Kobe Bryant. During King’s interview with Leslie, she asked the WNBA star if her relationship with Bryant was complicated due to Bryant’s 2003-2004 sexual assault charge that was dismissed.
“It’s not complicated for me at all,” Leslie responded. “There are a few times where we’ve been out at a club at the same time. Kobe’s not the kind of guy. Never been, ‘Lisa, go get that girl. Or tell her or send her this..’ I have other NBA friends who are like that. Kobe, he was never like that. I have never seen him being the kind of person that would be-do something to violate a woman or be aggressive in that way. That’s just not the person that I know.”
“But, Lisa, as his friend you wouldn’t see it,” King told Leslie. “And that’s possible. I just don’t believe that. I’m not saying things didn’t happen. I just don’t believe that things did happen with force,” Leslie replied.
Gayle King is trash for this. https://t.co/lk5ax7bna4
— KEITHAN (@iamKeithan) February 6, 2020
“I’ve been up reading the comments about the interview I did with Lisa Leslie about Kobe Bryant, and I know that if I had only seen the clip that you saw, I’d be extremely angry with me too. I am mortified. I am embarrassed. and I am very angry,” King said in a video that was uploaded to Youtube on Thursday (Feb. 6).
“Unbeknownst to be my network put up a clip from a very wide-ranging interview. Totally taken out of context, and when you see it that way it’s very jarring. It’s jarring to me. I didn’t even know about it. I started getting calls.”
King said that she had been advised to let it go and say nothing. “But that’s not good enough to me because I really want people to understand what happened and how I feel about it,” King said. King asserted that she reached out to Leslie because she wanted to get her perspective on whether or not the media should ignore Bryant’s previous sexual assault case. She noted that there will be an “intense discussion” with the network about why that particular clip was used to promote the interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkmalPeP6dk&feature=youtu.be