Cranky media personality Keith Olbermann has added something to the long list of things that make him angry: the vasectomy that CBS Mornings anchor Tony Dokoupil recently got.
Olbermann is the ex-partner of Dokoupil’s wife, MSNBC anchor Katy Tur—and he used Tuesday’s episode of his podcast to unleash a bizarre tirade against the couple.
The 63-year-old bachelor spent the better part of 20 minutes unpacking a laundry list of grievances with Tur, saying he’d been “pushed… over the edge” by news that Dokoupil, who has been married to Tur since 2017, got snipped.
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Calling the pair “insufferable publicity addicts,” Olbermann accused Tur of “turning a vasectomy into a photo op,” adding that he’d finally “[run] out of the energy required to cover for her.”
Olbermann seemed tweaked by the fact that the vasectomy announcement—posted by Dokoupil to his Instagram page on Sunday night—did not mention him. Despite acknowledging the fact that it “doesn’t even have anything to do with me,” Olbermann said he “went looking for my name” in the coverage of Dokoupil’s decision.
“I’m reading stories about her husband getting a vasectomy, and I’m sitting there waiting to see how she managed to make this one my fault,” he said.
Tur’s failure to include Olbermann seemed to pick at an old wound, since he also took a moment to slam her for barely mentioning him in her book, 2017’s Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History. “
“When Katie’s first book came out, she reduced our entire history to a throwaway anecdote defending Kellyanne Conway,” he fumed. “The story described me as somebody she had dated briefly in her twenties.” Tur also, unforgivably, did not name him in the acknowledgements.
As Tur told The Daily Beast podcast The New Abnormal this summer, her career has been “haunted” by her three-year relationship with Olbermann, which began in 2006, when she was in her early twenties.
“That relationship followed me for a long time in my career. To this day, when somebody tries to bring me down, they’ll bring up Keith Olbermann. I get it on Twitter every single day, a person telling me that I screwed my way to the top,” she said then.
“Now I don’t really care right now. I roll my eyes. But there was a time in my life where it really haunted me and it made me feel small and worthless.”
Unsurprisingly, in his rant, Olbermann essentially took credit for Tur’s professional success, claiming that he wrote all her scripts when they were together and alleging that she asked him to write her memoir.
Tur did not immediately respond to Olbermann’s vitriol, and The Daily Beast could not reach her for comment. One person who did weigh in, however, is conservative pundit Megyn Kelly, who blasted Olbermann for his “weird” remarks and called him a “terrible person” on her podcast.
“I don’t know what’s happened there, but it’s very trainwreck-y to watch an ex—both of these people are public figures—to go public with this list of grievances and try to take down a woman who’s clearly moved on,” Kelly said.
“She’s married to somebody else, her career’s fine... His career seems—I don’t know,” she continued. “His podcast is very entertaining, I’m sure it’s doing… I don’t know how it’s going. But bitter, bitter, bitter.”
