Sharon Osbourne betrayed by her co-hosts following secret pact and underwent ketamine therapy – Daily Mail

Sharon Osbourne sat down exclusively with DailyMailTV for her first in-depth interview since her shock exit from The Talk this year amid controversy over purported racist comments. 

The 68-year-old British television personality went on the offensive, accusing CBS and show producers of hanging her out to dry live on the air during a tense conversation with co-host Sheryl Underwood.

As a result, Osbourne lost her job and was effectively ‘canceled’ by social media, leading to a series of death threats against her and her family. Sharon reveals that she was forced to hire 24 hour security and underwent months of ketamine therapy to deal with the trauma.

The former host also made bombshell accusations against her co-hosts for betraying her after she says they’d previously held a clandestine meeting and agreed not to hoodwink each other.   

Back in March, Sharon and Sheryl had gotten into a heated discussion over comments her friend Piers Morgan had made about Meghan Markle when Morgan was being accused of being racist in his public critique of the Duchess.  

‘It was a freedom of speech matter. It was pure freedom of speech,’ Sharon told DailyMailTV. ‘A journalist friend of mine who wrote something that people didn’t like and then a few crazies out there, some thugs go – “you must be racist, that’s why you’re saying it” – about my friend Piers. It’s like, come on.’  

Sharon claims that the seemingly impromptu moment was actually carefully orchestrated by a show executive who wanted to create controversy and without her knowing by telling her co-hosts to ask her if people now thought she was a racist.

‘They all knew the question and they all knew what was going down. I felt totally betrayed,’ Sharon said. Adding that, what made matters worse, was when Sheryl started crying Sharon told her to stop. 

The optics of a white host telling her black colleague not to cry over issues of racism, on live television, didn’t sit well with the public, the audience or the network. Osbourne asserts, however, that perception was not reality.  

‘We had a disagreement and I told her she shouldn’t be crying, it should be me that should be crying and that didn’t go down well,’ she said. ‘Then in the commercial break, she wouldn’t talk to me. I was begging her to talk to me and she wouldn’t, and basically I said, go f**k yourself.

‘I would say that to any one of my friends,’ she explained. ‘When you say it to a friend, it’s different than saying it to somebody, a stranger. If you can’t get real with somebody who you’ve worked alongside for 10 years, then then you don’t have a friendship, and that’s the way I look at it.’

The showdown not only lost Sharon her hosting gig on The Talk – a position she’d held for 11 seasons – but cost her her relationship with Underwood whom she hasn’t spoken to since the ordeal. Osbourne added that she’s unlikely to ever speak to her former co-star ever again.

After getting some distance from the now infamous episode and the subsequent fall out, Sharon is frankly, p***ed. At the public’s reaction, at the network, at the producers and at her co-hosts.

‘To leave me for 20 minutes on live TV … on live TV … unprepared, not produced, not knowing what’s going on,’ she recalled with a shake of her head. ‘Wait, where’s their apology to me? They could have cut at any time and gone to a commercial break, and why didn’t they cut?’

‘They didn’t cut because they liked the controversy and they liked that everybody would be talking about this because they needed something for the show that was going into the toilet,’ she said. ‘So they thought, well, she’s got the biggest following. Let’s go for her.’

‘I felt totally betrayed, not protected by CBS. I felt used. I felt like an old shoe,’ Sharon added. ‘They didn’t care. It was a set up and it was set up by one of the executives.’

DailyMailTV reached out to CBS regarding Sharon’s accusations that she was set up by executives. The network responded by reiterating the same statement that they issued back in March when the incident went down.

‘Sharon Osbourne has decided to leave THE TALK,’ the statement read. ‘The events of the March 10 broadcast were upsetting to everyone involved, including the audience watching at home. As part of our review, we concluded that Sharon’s behavior toward her co-hosts during the March 10 episode did not align with our values for a respectful workplace. We also did not find any evidence that CBS executives orchestrated the discussion or blindsided any of the hosts.’ 

Sharon says the betrayal was especially hard to swallow, because a similar ambush  had occurred not long before with co-host Carrie Ann Inaba. In that instance, the hosts were answering fan questions and Inaba was tossed a racially charged question live that she hadn’t been privy to.

Osbourne recalled the unexpected question: ‘Why is it that it’s not okay for white people to use the n-word?’ 

‘And I’m like, did I just hear that? And Carrie Ann then started to cry. It was a very bad situation,’ she said. 

Not wanting to be caught unawares by producers again, Sharon said the ladies decided to band together and met in secret at Carrie Ann’s house to broker a pact to protect one another.

‘We went to lunch and we all agreed that no, we wouldn’t hijack each other. We all agreed, we all drank on it. We all agreed and. It never happened, did it? Because the next month they were all wised up but me.’

A month after Sharon’s departure, in April, Inaba also left The Talk. Carrie Ann revealed she was taking the extended break to focus on her health after recovering from COVID-19 in December. She announced that the leave would be permanent in August. 

The public reaction to Sharon’s comments on the episode were loud, swift and unforgiving.  

‘It was as if I had gone in there with a machine gun and threatened to kill somebody,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t like I was coming in with T-shirts, with horrible slogans. I didn’t come in with a white hood, I don’t tell jokes about religion or color.’

The diminutive Brit revealed that several stars from other CBS shows joined the cancel-culture chorus, sending her messages online saying ‘shame on you’, which she did not take lightly.   

‘It’s like, f**k you missus, you don’t know me and you don’t know the full story,’ she quipped.

‘Where is the forgiveness? Where is a second chance? So you say something wrong. You’re not threatening somebody, but you say something wrong. You’re out, you are out,’ she added. 

The fallout was so severe that Sharon hunkered down at home, fearful of how people might treat her in public. Additionally, she and husband Ozzy Osbourne started getting constant death threats. 

‘I definitely went through a difficult patch at the beginning. I found it embarrassing. The humiliation that people would think that I might be a racist,’ she admitted, adding that the vitriol from the public was difficult to swallow. 

‘They were going to kill the family. They were going to come at night with knives, cut all our throats and the animals. So I had all of that, all the threats, and we had to have 24 hour guards.’

‘It’s like, listen, it’s about me, not about [Ozzy], not about my kids. Anything you got to say about me, I can take it. Do not start on my family. I mean, that’s … you can’t get any lower.’

The emotional stress was crippling for a time. Sharon recalled going shopping at The Grove in Los Angeles with her eldest daughter Amy and needed to leave because she was too anxious being around people. 

Her good friend and former co-host of The Talk, Sara Gilbert, suggested she try a unique form of therapy and recommended a doctor who did ketamine treatments. 

‘I went through three months of therapy,’ she said. ‘I had ketamine treatment and I got it all out. All the tears and everything that I felt, you know. All of that, it’s gone.’ 

Ketamine, a medication used in anesthesia, can be implemented in small doses to treat forms of depression, according to Harvard.  

She said that time, therapy and her family helped her shake off her traumatic exit from The Talk and she’s ready to move forward. ‘You know how this industry works  – nothing’s forever and everyone’s replaceable,’ Sharon said. ‘Everyone.’  

Sharon is in full support of her replacement on the show, Jerry O’Connell, who sent her a sweet message when he joined the show. O’Connell, she thinks, will breathe some needed life into the daytime series. 

As for fully putting this controversy behind her, Sharon vehemently denies any lingering allegations that she is racist. However, she isn’t about to start embracing ‘woke culture’. 

‘I’m not “in” with the jargon and I don’t want to be,’ she said. ‘Listen at my age, I need to be hip with my vocabulary? Give me a break. Really, I’m respectful and that’s what I expect back from people.’

That being said, in hindsight she does wish she could change how everything went down: ‘I wish I hadn’t been in that position so that I could have held myself together more. I would have definitely held myself together [if] I knew what they were going to ask me. So I would have been mentally and emotionally prepared.’ 

Not one to waste a moment of downtime, Sharon is still managing her rocker husband’s career and is plotting a new podcast as well as a book.

She and Ozzy are also in the early stages of planning a biopic about their relationship – the good, the back and the, at times, very ugly. 

‘It’s a movie about Ozzy’s and my life, how we came together in the early days and our volatile relationship. All the fights, all the make-ups, all the fights, all the arrests, all the everything. And it’s a love story.’ 

She does want to return to television but behind the scenes. Her days as a daytime talk show host are, at lease for now, in the rear view mirror. 

‘You got to evolve,’ she explained. ‘What am I going to do? Am I going to be a judge again? No. I’m not going to go on another TV show that’s talk because I know right now it’s not a safe place to be. The slightest thing and you’ve p***ed off half the nation and I don’t want to put myself up for that grief. I really don’t.’  

Another thing the star definitely won’t be doing is watching season 12 of The Talk, which just premiered. ‘Why would I watch it?’ she asked.

DailyMailTV’s exclusive interview with Sharon Osbourne continues Tuesday where the star talks plastic surgery and her family’s many serious health challenges. Check local listings.