Articles by Rachel DeSantis

Technology

Ozzy Osbourne Says Sharon Osbourne Was 'Set Up' Ahead of “The Talk ”Ousting: 'She Was Devastated for a Long While'

Ozzy Osbourne had some choice words for The Talk after his wife Sharon left the show amid scandal in 2021. Ozzy, who died on July 22 at age 76, wrote at length of Sharon’s negative experience on the CBS talk show in his posthumous memoir Last Rites, saying that while the “last thing” he wanted to do was “stir all that s--- up again,” he felt as though his wife had been the victim of a “complete carve-up.” Sharon, 72, was an original cohost on the series from its debut in 2010 but left more than a decade later following backlash for her on-air defense of friend Piers Morgan. At the time, Morgan had recently left Good Morning Britain after making racially insensitive comments about Meghan Markle and the validity of her mental health discussion with Oprah Winfrey. Sharon got into a heated exchange with cohost Sheryl Underwood on air, arguing that while she didn’t like or agree with everything Morgan said, she supported him “for his freedom of speech.” After the episode aired, the show went on hiatus as the network conducted an internal review, and Sharon ultimately left the show, with CBS saying in a statement that her behavior “did not align with our values for a respectful workplace.” In Last Rites, which was finished just days before his death, Ozzy said his wife was “f---ed the second the subject [of Morgan] even came up” and is convinced that someone who “knew what they were doing” “set her up.” “It was really terrible to see her go through that. She was devastated for a long while,” he wrote. “You think you’ve got friends in TV. They ain’t your friends. It was hard, man. Really hard.” The “Crazy Train” rocker said that at the time, Sharon was already dealing with a number of things in her personal life, including Ozzy’s declining health and canceled tour on top of the pandemic. Though he described his wife as a “rock,” and said she’d never complain, he wrote that she’d “poured her heart and soul” into The Talk, and loved being a part of the show. Ozzy doubled down on the fact that Sharon “is not a racist” and said such thinking is “against everything she’s ever stood for.” “To be stuck with that label, it was just f---ing wrong,” he wrote. “Because you can never get a gig anywhere on TV once that’s what people think of you. It’s game over. They knew that when they took her down.” Though Sharon was “gutted” for the first few weeks, she ultimately let it go and moved on, and Ozzy said she remained friendly with women who used to work on the show. The Talk was eventually canceled in 2024, a move that Ozzy called “poetic justice.” Sharon issued an apology after defending Morgan, saying she “panicked, felt blindsided, got defensive” after “being accused of being racist.” Despite Ozzy writing that Sharon believed the exchange to be a set-up, CBS’ statement at the time said they’d found no evidence “that CBS executives orchestrated the discussion or blindsided any of the hosts. At the same time, we acknowledge the Network and Studio teams, as well as the showrunners, are accountable for what happened during that broadcast as it was clear the co-hosts were not properly prepared by the staff for a complex and sensitive discussion involving race.” Two years later, cohost Julie Chen Moonves, who left the show in 2018, called Sharon’s ousting a “horrible mess.” “I think the whole thing was handled really horribly,” she said. “It was very sad to see… It was watching a train wreck.” Last Rites covers the last seven or so years of Ozzy’s life, including his health struggles and his fight to get back on stage one last time for the Back to the Beginning farewell concert with Black Sabbath in his native Birmingham.