Silke Jasso
After a memo Steve Harvey sent to his staff — which includes a list a some pretty diva-like demands — went viral, the comedian is speaking out, and he isn’t sorry.
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“I could not find a way to walk from the stage to my dressing room, to sit in my makeup chair, to walk from my dressing room to the stage or to just sit and have lunch without somebody just walking in,” he explained to Entertainment Tonight. “I’ve always had a policy where, you know, you can come and talk to me — so many people are great around here, but some of them just started taking advantage of it.”
The memo excessively instructs the staff of his daytime talk show, “The Steve Harvey Show,” to make appointments with him essentially any time they want to talk to him. He requests over and over that they abstain from stopping by his dressing room, waiting in the hallway to speak to him and approaching him while he’s in his makeup chair.
“Look man, I’m in my makeup chair, they walk in the room. I’m having lunch, they walk in, they don’t knock,” Harvey continued. “I’m in the hallway, I’m getting ambushed by people with friends that come to the show and having me sign this and do this. I just said, ‘Wait a minute.’ And in hindsight, I probably should’ve handled it a little bit differently.”
He further defended his decision to send out the memo “asking everyone to simply honor and respect” his privacy.
“If you come out your house, you don’t want anybody on your porch waiting on you. You walk to your car, you don’t want people bothering you on your way to your car. Everybody wants the freedom to be able to move around,” he said. “I just didn’t want to be in this prison anymore where I had to be in this little room, scared to go out and take a breath of fresh air without somebody approaching me, so I wrote the letter. I don’t apologize about the letter, but it’s kind of crazy what people who took this thing and ran, man. I appreciate you asking me.”
