In a three-hour chat with Shannon Sharpe on the Club Shay Shay podcast, comedian Mo'Nique gave the former NFL star his most explosive interview since Katt Williams.
Throughout the lengthy sitdown, Mo'Nique made it clear that she had countless problems with many people in Hollywood who have worked against her or wronged her in some form. She called out Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, Kevin Hart, and Tiffany Haddish, among others.
Curiously, many of the targets of Mo'Nique's criticism were also brought up during Katt Williams' interview with Sharpe, suggesting that they might not be the only ones to have issues with the likes of Haddish, Hart, and Perry.
Check out what she had to say about everyone in the interview above.
Oprah Winfrey
Mo'Nique still isn't happy about Oprah Winfrey inviting her estranged family on her eponymous talk show in 2010. In a particularly audacious move, members of Mo'Nique's family who aren't on talking terms with the actor and comedian, including her brother who admitted to molesting her, sat down for a talk about their family drama.
"You betrayed me, sister," said the Oscar winner of Winfrey. "Family is sacred, and we don't cross the line with family."
She also accused Winfrey of making an example of her and doing the same thing to Taraji P. Henson during the promotion of The Color Purple. "We know you were mistreated," she said of Henson. "We know it wasn't right. We know it was unfair. And then you turned around and say, 'Oh, but Lady O handled it.' I have a problem with that. That allows Lady O to keep doing what she's doing and we're in a position of, 'I don't want to say nothing because we saw how Mo'Nique got whooped.
Tyler Perry
The comedian suggested that Tyler Perry spread rumors about her being "difficult" to work with, in an attempt to blackball her in the film and TV industry. She said if it wasn't for a phone call in which he admitted to this, which she also recorded, it would be her word and against his.
"We sent you the audio of Tyler Perry, I don't want you to take me at my word," Mo'Nique said, getting Sharpe to confirm that Perry did, in fact, admit to spreading rumors about her work ethic. "That's cost my family tens of millions of dollars," she said. "Over a lie, a rumor." Sharpe asked if Perry would be willing to compensate Mo'Nique for the lost income after the rumor negatively impacted her career. He personally invited him on the show to talk about the situation.
Later in the interview, she suggested the rumor was so damaging that she faced blacklisting from the industry that she wouldn't face if she was a white woman. "If I was a white woman, my name would be Melissa McCarthy," she told Sharpe. "Same track record. Five-year sitcom in syndication. Same track record. The opportunities are not the same."
She claimed the rumor lost her a role in Empire among others.
Tiffany Haddish
In 2018, Tiffany Haddish made an off-hand remark about Mo'Nique's husband Sidney Hicks, her manager who she married in 2006. Speaking with GQ, Haddish was asked about Mo'Nique asking for a boycott of Netflix for the streaming platform's "gender bias and color bias" when it comes to stand-up specials. "My business run different than her business," Haddish said. " Don't live her life. I don't have that husband of hers. I'm looking at how [Netflix has] opened up so many opportunities for black females and comedy. When my people are dying, that's when you gonna catch me protesting."
At the 1:39:30 point of the Club Shay Shay interview, Mo'Nique offered a response to her comments.
"I remember our beautiful sister Tiffany Haddish did an interview with GQ magazine, and this is my humble opinion, we keep throwing each other under the bus," she said. "When I saw that, it's like, Tiffany, if you had a husband like mine, you may not have two DUIs. If you had a husband like mine, you may not be caught up in what looks like you could have been grooming a child. And I say all of that with no judgment, but when you speak about having a husband like mine you open the door and I'm saying to you, if you had one like mine you may not sit in these positions."
She's referring here to two DUI charges Haddish has been hit with over the past few years, and a child sex abuse lawsuit pertaining to a Funny or Die sketch in 2013.
Kevin Hart
Following the fallout about being "blackballed," as she put it, after giving an Oscar-winning performance in Precious, she said Kevin Hart reached out to her to help mend the situation. While he said he wasn't really a friend of Oprah's, he did know Tyler Perry and wanted to reach out to him on Mo'Nique's behalf.
"Kevin Hart, I do his podcast, and I want y'all to re-listen to the podcast so you can hear it for yourself," she said. "When he first comes on he says, 'You're like my mother, you're like my aunt, you're like my sister.' Okay, then we do the podcast, we speak about the Tyler Perry situation. Oprah Winfrey, he said, 'I don't really know Oprah but I'mma reach out to Tyler.' I appreciate that Kevin kept his word, he reached out to Tyler Perry. Kevin Hart called me back about maybe a week or so later, he said, 'Mo, I talked to Tyler, he said he don't want to revisit it.' He said, 'But I tell you what, let's move past that, Mo, let's just move pass that and let's just do great things together.'"
While she wasn't happy with the way the situation played out, she did give Hart some praise for his support. "When my family was up against the wall, Kevin hart wrote us a check, and said, 'here you go,'" she shared. "We're forever grateful for that. When we were able to give it back, we said, 'Brother, we appreciate you, with some interest on top 'cause I don't never want nobody to think.... I just want to make sure I put that out there."
He offered to work with her on any project, whether it be in an executive producer role or something else, but weeks later they were told by his manager that Kevin didn't want "anything to do with" her. When she confronted him about it, he said it was all a "miscommunication" and he would follow up with her soon. "That was two years," she said. "I've never talked back to Kevin Hart again."
D.L. Hughley
Mo'Nique opened up about an experience she had after appearing on D.L. Hughley's radio show, where his team, but not him, made her play a game of Would You Rather? that turned ugly. "Would you rather your husband sleep with Lee Daniels with a condom or Karrine Steffans without one?" they asked her. "I said to the team, 'How does that uplift our community?'"
She called Hughley after the incident and was greeted with a rude, "Yeah?" He told her that it was "how they do it" on the radio show. "It got so ugly that my attorney had to send a cease and desist so it never aired," she added. "That's how that whole thing got started."
Mo'Nique said that he faced criticism from Hughley throughout the years, calling her "bitter" and that her husband didn't know what he was doing as her manager. They later performed at a comedy show together, where she was the headliner but he showed up late in an apparent effort to strong-arm his way into the headlining slot. She called him out during his set, labeling him a "coward."
Hughley has since responded and called her a "liar."
Skip Bayless
Mo'Nique wasn't a fan of how Skip Bayless spoke to Shannon Sharpe during an on-air confrontation in December 2022.
“The day I watched Skip Bayless lose himself with you—and that’s what he did, he lost himself—and when I watched Skip Bayless say to you, ‘Put them goddamn glasses back on, boy,'" she said of Sharpe's former Undisputed co-host. “Now I know he didn’t say ‘goddamn’ and ‘boy,’ but that’s what everybody heard. And I was waiting for you to snatch his ass across that table, baby, and give it to him. I was like, ‘Shannon, this is the perfect time.’ I don’t condone violence…but that day. I was in my feelings for two days.”
Following that confrontation, Sharpe later confirmed it was the point where he realized it was time to move on from Undisputed. "I felt in that moment he had lost all respect for me," he told Stephen A. Smith last year.
