The View's panel has gone through many lineups over the years, and only a select few can say that they helped launched the talk show. Recently, four of the original View hosts got together to mark the show's 25th anniversary. Star Jones, Joy Behar, Meredith Vieira, and Debbie Matenopoulos met up in the same hotel where they auditioned for The View back in 1997, and they reminisced about their time together. (Series creator and fellow original host Barbara Walters was not in attendance, but they did talk about her influence.) During the reunion, the conversation turned toward any regrets they had, and Jones mentioned that she regretted not sharing the truth about her health during her tenure on the show. In response, her co-hosts explained why being asked to lie for her made them "angry" and "uncomfortable."
Read on to see what the co-hosts had to cover up and to see how they feels about Jones' situation today.
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Jones said she regretted not opening up about her health.
During the reunion, Behar was the one to ask Jones if she would have done anything differently. She responded, "If I'm 100% honest, I regret not being strong enough to admit that I was in a depression and really ill about my health. I really regret that I just wasn't there."
As reported by People, Jones underwent gastric bypass surgery during her time on The View but at the time, said that she had undergone "a medical intervention." On the show, she touted the benefits of diet and exercise.
She went public about the procedure years ago.
In a 2007 essay for Glamour, Jones opened up about her gastric bypass surgery, sharing why she decided to go through with it and why she wasn't honest about the procedure at the time.
"I admit that when asked about my obvious weight loss over the past four years, I was intentionally evasive," she wrote. "Lying was never an option for me, so I called it a 'medical intervention,' which was true, but it was really a pathetic attempt to tell only the truth I could handle at the time." She added that she "was scared of what people might think of me … afraid to be vulnerable, and ashamed at not being able to get myself under control without this procedure."
Jones also explained that she began to feel regret about hiding her experience because she knew she had been honest about her life in other ways that impacted other women. "[K]eeping his decision private started to feel hypocritical and cumbersome," she wrote.
Her co-hosts weren't happy about being implicated in the lie.
During their reunion, Vieira told Jones, "We were worried and we were also kind of, to be honest, a little bit angry about the dialogue, because we felt, this isn't honest. And we purported to be the honest women on this show, and we stopped being totally honest with each other, which was not good." She added, "And it didn't come from a bad place."
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Behar said she wasn't "paid to be an actress."
After the reunion segment aired on the show, Behar told her current co-hosts, "Star never, ever talked about her weight issue like that. She was in tremendous denial and we had to pretend it was something other than it was. So, we didn't like that. We were told, 'Well you have to be an actress,' and it's like, 'Well, we don't get paid to be an actress.' We were uncomfortable with that. And now she realizes it. I have to give her credit because she has comes miles, miles from where she was."
Jones calls her journey her "greatest achievement."
Behar told Jones during the reunion, "You have grown tremendously since then." She explained, "I remember [you said] you thought that it would have been great if one of us had said, 'Star, you need to lose weight, you're unhealthy,' And I said, 'If I said that to you, you would have bitten my head off' and you said, 'Yes, I would have.'"
Jones may wish she handled things another way, but she's still looking at the positives, too. "That is a regret in my head," she said, "but it is my greatest achievement that I am healthier now than I've ever been in my whole life."
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Lia Beck Lia Beck is a writer living in Richmond, Virginia. In addition to Best Life, she has written for Refinery29, Bustle, Hello Giggles, InStyle, and more.Read moreFiled UnderEntertainment • NewsRead This NextThis "View" Co-Host Was "Appalled" by Whoopi
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