Cut to confessional. Celebrity Apprentice alum Maria Kanellis, who was fired on season 3 of the NBC series for her “locker-room” talk, spoke out about getting the pink slip in a new interview now that Donald Trump has come under fire for his own lewd conversation.
“He fired me for what I said, and what he said was much worse, so my hope is that he gets fired as the Republican nominee,” the 34-year-old wrestling star told Entertainment Tonight.
In 2010, Kanellis told celebrity chef Curtis Stone, one of her fellow contestants, that “the reason why I said you were so arrogant was because you came in our dressing room and you took a crap and left the stench in the room.”
At the time, Trump, now 70, called Kanellis out for her comments, which he said were “sort of gross” and “a little below the belt.”
“This is my boardroom, it’s not a locker room,” he told a stunned Kanellis. “Maria, you’re fired.”
The Daily Show aired the clip on Monday, October 10, and used it to point out the Republican presidential candidate’s hypocrisy after he dismissed his vulgar 2005 comments about women as “locker room talk.”
“When I first saw [the Celebrity Apprentice footage] I was astounded that anybody remembered it,” Kanellis told ET. “But then again, we are talking about a presidential nominee. When he is a hypocrite about things that he says, I guess then it starts to become a news story.”
“I don’t think that is locker-room talk,” she continued. “I have been in locker rooms for the past 12 years in wrestling companies. I have been backstage, I have been in greenrooms, and I have never heard anyone talk like that.”
As previously reported, the real estate mogul came under fire on Friday, October 7, after footage of him on an Access Hollywood bus joking with Billy Bush about grabbing women “by the p–sy” surfaced, leading many supporters, including top Republican officials, to rescind their endorsements.
Trump, however, remains staunch in his stance that there was nothing wrong with his words. He first defended his conversation as locker room talk in a video statement on Saturday, October 8, and then reiterated his perspective during Sunday’s debate.
“First of all, [it’s] locker-room talk, and most people have heard it before,” he told conservative Fox News host Bill O’Reilly on Tuesday, October 11. “I’ve had a lot of women come up to me before and say, ‘I’ve heard that, and I’ve heard a lot worse than that over my life.’ If that’s what it’s going to take to lose an election, that would be pretty sad. Then I’d have to go back to my other life.”
