Months after their on-air clash, Mo’Nique is letting her true feelings about Steve Harvey be known.
The comedienne actress once again spoke about Harvey failing to phone and talk to her personally about the supposed bridges she burned over her call-out of Hollywood heavyweights like Tyler Perry, Lee Daniels and Oprah Winfrey.
“When I went on ‘The Steve Harvey Show,’ I knew the conversation I was gonna have with my brother,” Mo’Nique told Comedy Hype of their talk show discussion in February. “I didn’t know the conversation he was gonna have back with me.”
Part of that discussion saw Harvey tell Mo, “We Black out here. We can’t come out here and do it any way we want to. … This is the money game. This ain’t a Black man’s game, this ain’t a white man’s game. This is the money game!”
Meanwhile, Mo stood firm on maintaining her integrity.
Continuing to chat with Comedy Hype, Mo’Nique questioned Harvey’s statements on “The D.L. Hughley Show” where he claimed to have edited their heated discussion to protect her. She also wondered why Harvey didn’t air the remarks about Harvey allegedly being “pissed” that “them white boys was supposed to call me” about the fate of his talk show.
“I’ve never met so many cowards and our black men in show business,” she says. “I’ve never met so many black men that have no goddamn backbone, and that bothers me.”
Mo’Nique’s husband and manager, Sidney Hicks, then chimed in to discuss Harvey losing his talk show to “The Kelly Clarkson Show” this fall on NBC.
“I think it was a dual aspect of it,” Hicks says. “What you can’t call Steve is lazy; he’s a hard worker. … What you can’t call him is not a smart business person because he formed a partnership with IMG in order to have ownership over his show.”
But Hicks said that it ultimately didn’t matter to execs “how much you’re winning and we can’t get a piece of it, we’re going to remove you from the scene.”
Further, he compared how Harvey played the game of the NBC higher-ups, while Mo’Nique, in her refusal to promote her 2008 film “Precious” and more recently her call for a boycott of Netflix over what she said was unequal pay, stood her ground. The manager surmised that both ended up getting burned, but Mo’Nique left with her dignity intact.
“In him doing it what he thought was proverbial the right way, look at the outcome and here’s an individual who said, ‘I know how to do it too and that’s to stand up for equality but the outcome was the same thing,'” Hicks says. “They both cast you to the side. You tried to do it their way, and you didn’t do it their way — you just did it from an integral standpoint — then you have to ask yourself, can you live with yourself for doing it the right way versus playing by their rules and doing it the right way and you still have the same results?”
After the host said it appeared as if Harvey regretted how things played out between him and Mo, the actress said, “Eventually, who you are will always shine through.”
“It may take a day, it may take years … and I’m not saying people don’t make mistakes, let me be clear,” she adds. “What I find in a lot of us is, I got a hard time saying I’m sorry, I can’t say I’m wrong ’cause I’m almighty powerful … I’m mother earth, I’m the Christian of all Christians. So, you watch these people and then you watch our community say, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s about the bag. Don’t worry about your integrity.’ And that’s the part when I say, ‘Y’all, but don’t you see we’re falling like that? … We’re crumbling worrying about the bag, not the integrity.”
As for how Mo’Nique responded to “Steve” getting canceled, she reflected on karma.
“The reaction is: are we not paying attention?” Mo says. “See, Steve, you said to the community ‘to hell with integrity, get the bag.’ So now you’re saying, ‘I have no integrity and I don’t have the bag? And now I gotta face my family?’ What you put out is what you get back.”
However, Mo’Nique said she and Hicks were not cheering once Harvey’s show got the ax. They questioned how a show they said was No. 4 in the ratings managed to get yanked from TV.
