Joy Behar said Monday that it was “manipulative” for CNN to have anchor Alisyn Camerota read back the contents of Jeffrey Toobin’s NSFW Zoom call.
Behar went on to defend Toobin, saying that he did not know the camera was on and should be forgiven for that. “I’m not judging the guy. It shows how boring these Zoom meetings are,” she said on “The View.” (RELATED: ‘He Took A Guess’: Joy Behar Says Trump Scapegoated China, It’s Just A ‘Lucky Break’ That He Was Right)
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Whoopi Goldberg brought the topic to the table, asking Behar whether she thought the response would have been the same if a woman has been caught in the same situation.
“Joy, do you think if this had been a woman that the response —” Goldberg began, but Behar interrupted.
“No. With all the men on CNN’s payroll they had to give it to poor Alisyn Camerota. She didn’t deserve that. It was embarrassing and uncomfortable and manipulative I thought, very manipulative,” Behar said, going on to note that Toobin has since said that he used his time off to work on making himself a better person.
“I don’t see the correlation between needing to engage Mr. Happy and being a bad person. Maybe it causes blindness, but I don’t see how it causes you to be a bad person. Everybody in the world would be a bad person for doing what he was doing at home alone in their house,” Behar continued. “He didn’t know the thing was running of course, so we forgive him that. I’m not judging the guy. It shows how boring these Zoom meetings are.”
Behar then pivoted to address the broader topic, asking whether CNN’s decision to forgive Toobin and put him back on the air might speak to other situations as well.
“Does this mean that Louis C.K. should be back on television?” she asked. “Who is allowed to do it? Who isn’t allowed to do it? Does this mean that Al Franken — get him back into the Senate, let’s get him back. I don’t know what he did that is worse than any of this. I don’t understand the rules and regulations of this. What is accountable and what’s not accountable frankly?”
Cohost Sunny Hostin agreed that the math had become a little bit fuzzy with regard to cancel culture, saying, “Where do you draw the line? The line seems to be constantly shifting depending on the person involved … I don’t even know where the line is anymore.”