Meghan McCain pens scathing tell-all column about The View : 'May the bridges I burn light the way'

It's no secret Meghan McCain doesn't fondly look back at her time as a cohost on The View.

"There is nothing on God's green earth that could convince me to ever walk on to that set again," McCain writes in a new Daily Mail column, responding to her fellow former View cohost Rosie O'Donnell's negative comments about working on the daytime talk show.

In her column, McCain compares her relationship with the show to a "very nasty breakup with an infamous ex-boyfriend." She claims she's "always hesitant to rehash it," but goes on to detail various complaints, alleging she was "pushed off topics that I thought were newsworthy by show producers" and "treated horribly" by cohost Joy Behar. "May the bridges I burn light the way," she writes.

Where O'Donnell spoke on the Now What? With Brooke Shields podcast of cohost Whoopi Goldberg squashing discussion of the Bill Cosby rape allegations, McCain says she was denied the chance to discuss the 2019 scandal surrounding Democratic Virginia Governor Ralph Northam after a photo from his 1980s medical school yearbook surfaced of him in blackface.

"We weren't allowed to talk about it because of Whoopi and Joy Behar," McCain writes, noting that the former was linked to her ex Ted Danson's infamous blackface appearance at a 1993 Friars Club roast and the latter had openly discussed darkening her skin to dress up as a "beautiful African woman" for Halloween in the 1970s. (EW can confirm that all possible Hot Topic discussion points are reviewed by all the cohosts daily, and they decide as a group — including producers — which to include based on what will make for the best conversation.)

Lou Rocco/ABC via Getty Images (2) Whoopi Goldberg; Meghan McCain

McCain also writes of returning from maternity leave in early 2021 "still reeling from a severe case of postpartum anxiety for which I had to be medicated" on top of coming out of the COVID-19 lockdowns and the death of her father, Arizona Senator John McCain.

"On my second day back, Behar told me on camera and in front of the entire world, 'that she didn't miss me one bit,'" she says. "I went to my office after the show, threw up in a garbage can, called my brother hysterically crying and decided to quit the show that day."

On her final episode as a cohost in August 2021, McCain called her experience "the best of times in all ways, on and off the show." But she quickly changed her tune two months later in a Variety interview ahead of the release of her memoir Bad Republican, calling the program "unhinged and disorganized and rowdy" and claiming she made official complaints to human resources. (At the time, sources told various outlets that ABC addressed all HR complaints made by McCain, as well as ones made about McCain.)

"The only way to survive on that show is to be vanilla pudding," McCain says. "I've never actually heard an ex-host have anything positive to say."

EW has reached out to reps for The View and Goldberg for comment.

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