Disgraced TV chef Paula Deen said she “lost it all” after admitting in 2013 she’d used the N-word decades earlier, RadarOnline.com can reveal.
In a new documentary, Canceled: The Paula Deen Story, the former Food Network star recounts the firestorm that erupted 12 years ago after she acknowledged she’d used the racist slur in the past.
In a tense interview on her press tour, the biscuits-and-gravy poster gal confessed the aftermath of the revelation, and the implication that she was racist, “ate at my gut every day.”
Paula Looking Back On The Scandal
Paula Deen admitted she last used the racist slur in an anecdote about a 1980s bank robbery.
The admission she had used the slur came during a deposition in a lawsuit brought by Lisa Jackson, an employee at a restaurant owned by Deen and her brother Earl Hiers, aka Bubba, for racial and sexual discrimination.
Deen, now 78, recalls that during a deposition for the case, she was asked if she’d ever used the N-word.
“I [was] 65 years old [at the time] and raised in the South, I said, ‘Yes, of course,'” she explained in a recent interview.
But she insisted she hadn’t used the slur since she was a teenager – except for once when she recounted an anecdote to her then-husband about how a Black man had allegedly robbed a bank where she worked in the 1980s.
Paula Being Cancelled Over The Scandal
Walmart and Target quickly cancelled business deals with Deen within 24 hours of the charges becoming public.
She said the admission was taken completely out of context. “I would have been fine had the whole story been told – had the real story been told,” Deen claimed, before accusing Jackson, who is white, of being “a known liar.”
“They took her word and ran with it, and no one ever investigated any further,” she added.
The repercussions came fast and furiously – within 24 hours of the charges becoming public, she said Walmart and Target canceled deals they had with her. The Food Network immediately announced it was not renewing her contract, and all three of her shows were pulled off the air.
She became a punch line for comedians on The Tonight Show, Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show.
Reaching A Settlement
A judge dismissed racial discrimination claims against Deen.
A judge ultimately dismissed Jackson’s claims of racial discrimination, after which she and Deen reached a confidential settlement.
But the stigma of being accused of racism stuck to the Southern cooking legend, which pains her to this day.
She said she was not okay in her heart “until both sides get out, the whole entire dirty truth,” which she claimed is why she participated in the documentary.
“I was not going to be happy until the world saw the truth,” she explained.
