Catt Sadler has a strong inner circle. Since leaving E! over a pay disparity with her male cohost Jason Kennedy, the 43-year-old has stayed in touch with many of her former coworkers.
“I have very good friends there who reach out and I still see and talk to and I adore and love,” Sadler said in an interview with Cosmopolitan published on Tuesday, February 13. “But they’re literally like, ‘Uh, maybe we shouldn’t meet at Sunset Tower, maybe you should come over,’ because they don’t want to get in trouble. It’s that heightened of a situation.”
After all, the entertainment news broadcaster told the magazine that she “couldn’t imagine walking back into that building … knowing that they completely rejected my value.” And her decision to leave the network wasn’t made overnight. “It was months of me starting to see the picture very clearly,” she said, adding that she isn’t “on some kind of E! takedown tour.”
Sadler left E! in December after working there for nearly 12 years. She later claimed in a blog post that Kennedy, 36, was “making close to double” her salary. In response, the network told Us Weekly that it “compensates employees fairly and appropriately based on their roles, regardless of gender.”
The former Daily Pop anchor has not yet decided whether she’ll sue E! over the pay gap. “There’s a part of me that wants to fight that frickin’ fight for all those women because I can,” she told Cosmopolitan. “But there’s another part of me that wants to work and doesn’t want to get labeled as somebody out filing a big lawsuit and now it becomes this really ugly thing and half of Hollywood doesn’t want to work with me because I’m that chick that sued E!”
As for Sadler’s response to Debra Messing and other actresses calling out the network during its Golden Globes red carpet coverage in January? “I was on my bed watching with the rest of the world. My jaw just dropped,” she recalled. “I went, ‘Oh, my god, this is actually happening.”
