Black Sabbath legend Ozzy Osbourne had some strong comments for The Talk after his wife Sharon departed from the show amid a scandal in 2021.
Ozzy, who passed away on July 22nd at age 76, wrote at length of Sharon’s negative experience on the CBS talk show in his posthumous memoir Last Rites and said that while the “last thing” he wanted to do was “stir all that s— up again,” he felt as though his wife had been the victim of a “complete carve-up.”
Sharon was an original co-host of the show since its debut in 2010. However, she left more than a decade later after backlash over her on-air defense of her friend Piers Morgan. At that time, Morgan had recently departed from Good Morning Britain after making racially insensitive comments about Meghan Markle and questioning the validity of her mental health discussion with Oprah Winfrey.
During a heated exchange with co-host Sheryl Underwood, Sharon argued that although she didn’t agree with everything Morgan stated, she supported him for his “freedom of speech.”
As the episode aired, the show went on hiatus as the network conducted an internal review. Ultimately, Sharon left the show, with CBS stating in a press release that her behavior “did not align with our values for a respectful workplace.”
Ozzy Osbourne opens up on Sharon Osbourne
In Last Rites, which was finished just days before his death, Ozzy said his wife was “f—ed the second the subject [of Morgan] even came up,” and is convinced that someone who “knew what they were doing” “set her up.”
“It was really terrible to see her go through that. She was devastated for a long while,” he wrote. “You think you’ve got friends in TV. They ain’t your friends. It was hard, man. Really hard.”
The rocker stated that at the time, Sharon was already dealing with several things in her personal life, including Ozzy’s declining health and canceled tour on top of the pandemic. Though he described his wife as a “rock,” and said she’d never complain, he wrote that she’d “poured her heart and soul” into The Talk, and loved being a part of the show.
Ozzy doubled down on the fact that Sharon “is not a racist,” and said such thinking is “against everything she’s ever stood for.”
“To be stuck with that label, it was just f—ing wrong,” he wrote. “Because you can never get a gig anywhere on TV once that’s what people think of you. It’s game over. They knew that when they took her down.”
Although Sharon felt devastated for the first few weeks, she ultimately moved on and let it go. Ozzy mentioned that she maintained friendly relationships with the women who had previously worked on the show. In 2024, “The Talk” was canceled, which Ozzy described as “poetic justice.”
Sharon later issued an apology after defending Morgan, stating that she “panicked, felt blindsided, and became defensive” when accused of being racist.
