Sharon Osbourne and Piers Morgan bond in the 'naughty corner' six months after her her controversial departure from 'The Talk'
Sharon Osbourne continues to stand by longtime friend Piers Morgan.
On Wednesday, more than six months after she left CBS's The Talk following her on-air defense of him, she shared a photo of them meeting at a restaurant. "The naughty corner…lovely time out with my dear friend @piersmorgan," she captioned it, adding a winking emoji.
He posted the same image with a slightly different caption: "In the naughty corner… so great to catch up with my fabulous friend @sharonosbourne who was on irrepressible form."
Osbourne's departure from The Talk in March was sparked after Morgan made comments about Meghan Markle, on the heels of the royal's high-profile interview with Oprah Winfrey. During the March 9 episode of his own show, Good Morning Britain, Morgan's co-host, Alex Beresford, called him out for repeatedly slamming Markle, who has a Black mother and a white father and told Oprah, among other things, that the British media was racist toward her. Beresford alleged that Morgan had a personal vendetta against Markle because she had ended their friendship. Morgan stormed off the set and left the show for good. (A subsequent investigation by British media regulator Ofcom eventually determined that Morgan had taken part in a "finely balanced discussion" and cleared him of wrongdoing.)
Fellow Brit Osbourne then defended Morgan, both on Twitter and on the March 10 episode of her talker, leading to a tense exchange with one of her co-hosts, Sheryl Underwood, about the implications of race. Things became so heated that Osbourne publicly apologized the next day to "anyone of color that I offended and/or to anyone that feels confused or let down by what I said."
— Sharon Osbourne (@MrsSOsbourne) March 12, 2021
CBS put the show on hiatus and launched an internal review of what happened as a result. At the same time, one of Osbourne's former co-host at The Talk, Holly Robinson Peete, said that, when she was on the show, Osbourne had called her too "ghetto" to be on it, and that she had been fired shortly afterward, at Osbourne's request. Another former co-host, Leah Remini, who was also fired, had previously said that Osbourne had labelled both too "ghetto" before they were booted. (Osbourne said she "never once uttered those words" and didn't have the power to get people fired.)
Other derogatory comments Osborne allegedly made against former co-hosts Julie Chen and Sara Gilbert emerged as well. She dismissed the accusations as "lies."
Mrs. O's departure from the show was announced March 26. She has since said that she participated in "months of therapy" to deal with the trauma of what happened.