Meghan McCain’s protracted exit from The View played out for the whole world to see. In the months following the split, McCain’s been strangely quiet about her motivation to go. Many suspected that she just didn’t get along with Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg, but that wasn’t confirmed. Until now. With a book coming out, McCain is finally opening up about why she quit The View. Here’s what she has to say.
‘Bad Republican’
McCain’s returned to writing. Upon leaving The View, she started a column for the Daily Mail. like Rosie O’Donnell before her, she’s also been hard at work on a tell-all about her experience on the infamous talk show. Bad Republican comes out on October 21, and she’s doing interviews to promote its release.
In an interview with Variety, McCain revealed that her castmates were blindsided by her exit. “Up until the week before, they were trying to convince me to stay and finish out the two years left on my contract. I told them it was too late — I had to get out.” She lost sleep over the decision because of “how much respect I had for my co-hosts,” but her treatment after returning from maternity leave made it impossible to stay.
Misogyny Reigns
McCain makes a point of calling out misogynistic tabloids for how they cover the program. Gossip Cop has encountered loads of these very stories, with articles about McCain sparring with Behar and Goldberg arriving on a weekly basis. She says this coverage became a “self-fulfilling prophecy because the atmosphere of The View breeds drama.” She called out the culture at ABC and criticized its lack of oversight.
McCain thinks she became an avatar for Donald Trump, so her co-workers took their frustration out on her. She says her relationship with Behar especially deteriorated, culminating in Behar saying she didn’t miss McCain while she was gone on maternity leave. “She had humiliated me live on air,” McCain says, “ I never talked to Joy one on one again after that day.”
There’s a lot in this interview alone about McCain’s experience with anxiety and postpartum depression. She explains how Goldberg went from friend to foe, and how shocked she was to feel such little support on the air. There are diatribes about Trump and the pressure of being a conservative voice during the Trump administration.
‘Toxic Environment’
In her conclusion, McCain aims squarely at Behar. She says “After giving birth, I didn’t feel like myself. I felt extremely vulnerable. Joy seemed to smell that vulnerability like a shark smells blood in the water, and she took after it.” She also calls The View “toxic.” Needless to say, she’s probably not going to visit her old stomping ground to promote her book.