Whoopi Goldberg passionately criticized a respected sports reporter after he wrote a controversial story about the LSU women’s basketball team.
Ahead of LSU’s Sweet 16 showdown with UCLA on Saturday, March 30, Los Angeles Times reporter Ben Bolch compared Angel Reese and LSU to “dirty debutantes” and “villains,” while calling the UCLA squad “milk and cookies.”
“This really pissed me off,” Goldberg, 68, said on the Wednesday, April 3, episode of The View. “How dare you? How dare you?”
Goldberg then made a thinly veiled reference to radio personality Don Imus, who was fired in 2007 after referring to members of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hoes.”
“You didn’t learn from the last time somebody did something like that?” Goldberg asked. “You didn’t learn that that’s not how you talk about these women or these athletes? How dare you call them ‘dirty’ anything?”
Looking directly into the camera, Goldberg saved her most personal criticisms for her final crescendo.
“You can’t do what they do,” Goldberg said. “You better make sure that when you have kids, if you have kids, that you apologize to your daughter. Because that’s who you’re calling a ‘dirty debutante.’ Every little girl that you pass, that’s who you’re talking about.”
Goldberg concluded that she was “really, really disappointed” in Bolch, further noting, “And I was a fan. Not so much now.”
After an overwhelming amount of other criticism, Bolch issued an apology for the column on Monday, April 1.
“It has taken me two days to write this apology because I wanted to be as thoughtful as possible in response to the situation I have created,” Bolch shared via X. “These are words I have not been asked to write by anyone at my paper, but they need to be expressed so I can own up to my mistake.”
Bolch went on to say he “failed miserably” in his choice of words while trying “to be clever in my phrasing about one team’s attitude, using alliteration while not understanding the deeply offensive connotation or associations.”
“I sincerely apologize to the LSU and UCLA basketball teams and to our readers,” Bolch concluded. “UCLA, a school I have covered for nearly a decade, champions diversity and is known as a leader in inclusivity. However, I have not upheld that standard in what I wrote and I will do much better. I am deeply sorry.”
