Gayle King would like to set the record straight about her interview with WNBA star Lisa Leslie about Kobe Bryant. During a lengthy interview with Leslie on Tuesday’s CBS This Morning, King asked about the rape allegations against the late basketball star. Backlash quickly erupted against King from viewers who thought the questions were in poor taste, and on Thursday King responded with an IGTV video—in which she said that although CBS had advised her to stay silent, “That’s not good enough for me.”
“If I had only seen the clip that you saw, I’d be extremely angry with me, too,” King said. “I am mortified, I’m embarrassed, and I am very angry.”
“Unbeknownst to me,” King continued, “my network put up a clip from a very wide-ranging interview totally taken out of context, and when you see it that way it’s very jarring. It’s jarring to me; I didn’t even know anything about it. I started getting calls: ‘What the hell are you doing? Why did you say this? What is happening?’ I did not know what people were talking about.”
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King noted that CBS had advised her to let it go, let people troll her for a couple days and wait for it to blow over. She chose to speak out, she said, “because I really want people to understand what happened here and how I’m feeling about it.”
In reaching out to Leslie, King said, she’d hoped to discuss Bryant’s legacy as well as the pair’s friendship. “We had a really wide-ranging interview, talked about many things—his career, his passion, his sense of humor, the way he was mentoring other people, how he was starting his next chapter,” King said, adding, “And yes, we talked about that court case. Because that court case has also come up. And I wanted to get Lisa’s take on it as a friend who knew him well—what she thought, where that should stand.”
During the interview on Tuesday, King asked Leslie whether Bryant’s legacy was “complicated” for her, as a woman and member of the WNBA, due to the rape allegations. (The rape charge was eventually dismissed, and Bryant settled the civil case out of court.) Leslie told King, “Kobe’s not the kind of guy... I just never see, have ever seen, him being the kind of person that would be, do something to violate a woman or be aggressive in that way.”
“But, Lisa, you wouldn’t see it, though,” King replied. “As his friend, you wouldn’t see it.”
“And that's possible,” Leslie said. “I just don’t believe that.” Eventually, as the two discussed how the media should treat the issue at this point, Leslie said that reporters have had years to ask their questions about the matter, adding, “I don’t think it’s something that we should keep hanging over his legacy.”
That response, King said during her post on Thursday, “was very powerful. When she looked me in the eye as a member of the media to say it’s time for the media to leave it alone and back off.”
King said that she asked Leslie follow-up questions to make sure her position came across clearly. “And at the end when she said it’s time to leave it alone...I insisted that that part be in the interview because I thought that it put a nice button on that part of the conversation,” she said. When she spoke to Leslie after the interview aired, King added, the WNBA player seemed happy with the finished product—and King was, as well. “So for the interview—to take the most salacious part when taken out of context and put it up online for people who didn’t see the whole interview is very upsetting to me, and that’s something I’m going to have to deal with with [CBS].”
CBS addressed the incident in a statement: “Gayle conducted a thoughtful, wide-ranging interview with Lisa Leslie about the legacy of Kobe Bryant. An excerpt was posted that did not reflect the nature and tone of the full interview. We are addressing the internal process that led to this and changes have already been made.”
