How Barbara Walters Reacted to Alleged Richard Pryor Affair Reveal

Originally appeared on E! Online

Sherri Shepard is revisiting a hot topic that came up outside of the roundtable.

As The View alum—who sat alongside cohosts Joy Behar and Barbara Walters for seven years until 2014—recently revealed, she once let Joy in on a little secret about the famed TV anchor's alleged fling with comedian Richard Pryor.

It was a revelation that Joy ended up playfully bringing back up to Barbara herself, much to Sherri's dismay at the time.

"The thing about it is I would tell you stuff and then you would go and tell it," the Sherri host joked to Joy during the show's Oct. 11 episode. "I never told this before, but I'm going to tell it. I told Joy that I had run into Paul Mooney and Paul Mooney had said that he caught Barbara Walters with Richard Pryor."

And though she relayed the claim to Joy with a disclaimer, the View cohost then dropped the bombshell the very next day. Though Joy did admit to leaving out who told her the secret in the first place, recalling to Sherri, "I didn't say you told me!"

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"No you didn't," Sherri responded. "But she said something like, 'So, you're schlepping Richard Pryor, huh?'"

As for The View creator's reaction?

"She turned around," Sherri recalled, "You know Barbara's head would swivel like that. She goes, 'Who told you that?' And I'm sitting there, like, I had just got this job. And Joy, you do that because you're not scared of Barbara."

The tale involving the trailblazing comedian comes nearly two decades after his death at the age of 65 in 2005. Last December, Barbara—who never addressed the alleged affair—passed away at the age of 93.

Shortly after the legendary journalist's passing, Sherri detailed on the impact her cohost had on her.

"For me, I connected with Barbara's sense of humor," she told E! News in January. "I think that not enough people really got to see what a bawdy sense of humor Barbara had."

As Sherri noted, "We would talk, it was like literally, she was my mom."

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