Women
Jenny McCarthy Says 'Shame on Me' for Hillary Clinton Lesbian Joke
Jenny McCarthy Says 'Shame on Me' for Hillary Clinton Lesbian Joke

The co-host of The View is on her way out at the show and already regretting some things she's said.
July 28 2014 1:54 PM EST
December 09 2022 9:12 AM EST
The View's Jenny McCarthy says "shame on me" for parroting a lesbian rumor often spread by the ring-wing to discredit Hillary Clinton.Â
Â
McCarthy was talking about a new Bill and Hillary Clinton biography and said, "Well, maybe he has his girlfriends and she has her girlfriends, you never know…. Maybe they have an arrangement."
Â
She was just trying to get a laugh, McCarthy said Friday in a guest post for the Chicago Sun-Times.Â
Â
"Over the last year, my goal has been to always be funny with a side of inspiration," wrote the host, who is finishing her contract with the show, "yet I have found myself being molded to be something I’m not. I don’t feel good about gossiping. I’m not even good at it, but when I started at The View, I knew I had a job that required some of it."
Â
McCarthy explained that jokes felt safer to her than wild speculation.
Â
"Truthfully, my stomach would turn worrying that the information I was presenting might not be accurate," she wrote. "There have been so many inaccurate stories about me and it made me nauseous to think that I could be igniting a shitstorm that was not true in someone else’s life. So, I turned to jokes most of the time. To me, jokes seemed far less harmful."
Â
After the Clinton joke, McCarthy said she felt like she'd gone too far.
Â
"That night, as I lay in bed and reflected on my day, I realized I was a hypocrite," she wrote. "How could I make a joke like that and then five minutes later preach about female empowerment? It makes me sad when I see women ripping on other women, and there I was making a joke about our possible first female president!"
Â
McCarthy had inadvertently joined the ranks of conservative commentator Glenn Beck and Bryan Fischer, of the American Family Association, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled a "hate group." Beck laughed it up back in April, kidding that Hillary Clinton had come out and "will be having sex with a woman on the White House desk if it becomes popular." He was supposedly just joking, too. Before that, Fischer derided her as possibly the "first lesbian president."