Things are definitely not as they appear on The View. While Joy Behar and Star Jones appeared to get along while they both cohosted the show, they actually did not like each other behind the scenes, Ramin Setoodeh reports in his new book, Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of The View.
In fact, Behar, who has been on the show since it began in 1997, reportedly didn’t like that Jones was getting attention as the most popular cohost. In 2004, two years before Jones exited, Behar spread a rumor about her, the book claims.
Read Us Weekly’s exclusive excerpt below:
For all Star’s old-fashioned ways, she wasn’t exactly neat. Her dressing room looked as if it were out of a Hoarders episode. It was stacked with clothes and shoes. That made it the perfect hideout for vermin. One night, the janitor complained to Joy that he’d just swept up the carcass of a crushed mouse from the floor of Star’s dressing room and that Star must have stepped on it and killed it without knowing.
Joy had grown to detest Star so much, she gleefully spread the story to some of her friends on the show. “Can you believe it?” Joy would ask, thrilled. (“Who told you this?” Joy said, when asked about it, with a guilty expression on her face.)
During the Wednesday, March 27, episode of Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen, Setoodeh also revealed that Jones told him Behar was part of the reason the world found out she had gastric bypass surgery.
“Star Jones said as she was being fired in 2006, both Barbara Walters and Joy Behar were leaking stories of her gastric bypass to the New York Post to ruin her reputation,” the author revealed.
Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of The View hits bookstores Tuesday, April 2.
