On Wednesday the tarnished cooking-show queen tearfully told Matt Lauer on NBC’s “Today” that she was provoked into using a racist epithet only once, when an African-American robber held a gun to her head, as she put it, “a world ago.” (Actually, it was 1986.)
And now she says unnamed enemies are using her word — the one she alluded to using more than once in a legal deposition in May — against her. “Someone evil out there saw what I worked for and they wanted it,” she said.
Ms. Deen, who rose to fame on her buttery, folksy way with words as well as ribs, went full Southern gothic to turn the table on her critics. Hers was a display somewhere on the scale between the defiant Bill Clinton (“I did not have sex with that woman”) and the weepy televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker.
“And I tell you what, if there’s anyone out there that has never said something that they wish they could take back, if you’re out there, please pick up that stone and throw it so hard at my head that it kills me. Please,” Ms. Deen said. “I want to meet you. I want to meet you. I is what I is and I’m not changing.”
There is nothing new about sorrowful admissions of innocence on the “Today” program — that is still the premier reputation-repair destination for politicians and celebrities in trouble, including Don Imus and Charlie Sheen. This one should have been a more convincing spectacle — nobody really got hurt, except Ms. Deen and her Southern-cooking empire. This was her chance to lean into the schadenfreude, turn on the charm and save her skin.
Instead, the contrite denial had a desperate underlay that didn’t really help either Ms. Deen or her interrogator. Both participants had a lot on the line. Ms. Deen’s brand is in immediate jeopardy: the Food Network and Smithfield Foods have already cut her off, and after the interview Walmart said it was ending its deal for Deen-branded products.
Less acutely, but just as visibly, Mr. Lauer’s star power is under attack as “Today” keeps losing ground against its rival “Good Morning America” on ABC. Mr. Lauer’s interview with the self-forgiving queen of butter and fat was a fresh opportunity to show his worth and boost the ratings.
As performers, they both proved to be their own worst enemies.
Ms. Deen had been scheduled to appear on Friday, just as the scandal was cresting, but she canceled, saying she was exhausted. She did find the strength to post online two florid apology videos that failed to quell the brouhaha.
She honored her commitment to “Today” because, quite obviously, nothing else has worked since the story broke.
Her credibility took a serious tumble last year, and then it wasn’t about what she said but what she held back. Ms. Deen, who has made fatness, not fitness, her culinary motto, concealed from viewers that she had had Type 2 diabetes for three years, and only revealed it in 2012 after she became a paid spokeswoman for a diabetes drug. So it was hard not to squirm when she so indignantly told Mr. Lauer things like “there’s a couple of kinds of people that I don’t like that I am prejudiced against, Matt, and that’s thieves and liars.”
Ms. Deen, 66 and a Georgia native, described herself as a loving, giving and forgiving woman, but still found ways to cast, not just the first stone, but an avalanche of blame, including at young black workers in her restaurants who, in her view, use racist epithets too freely among themselves.
“It’s very distressing for me because I think that for this problem to be worked on, that these young people are going to have to take control and start showing respect for each other and not throwing that word at each other,” she said. “That — it is — it makes my skin crawl.”
At one point she seemed to disagree with the content of her own deposition, which is available online.
Mr. Lauer didn’t try very hard to clear up the confusion.
He can be a tough interviewer, but lately he has been more often depicted as a bully who helped oust his former co-host, Ann Curry. So he had a tricky task with Ms. Deen, trying to confront her inconsistencies without looking like a mugger stealing a grandma’s handbag. He asked questions that commanded preordained replies.
“So, I’ll ask it to you bluntly: Are you a racist?” Mr. Lauer said. Not surprisingly, Ms. Deen answered no.
When Ms. Deen complained that “something evil” was out seeking to destroy her business, it was one of those odd, open-ended assertions, like Hillary Rodham Clinton’s statement, made on the “Today” program in 1998, about a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against her husband. Back then, even though Mrs. Clinton was first lady and an intimidating presence in her own right, Mr. Lauer kept on probing.
He was less persistent with Ms. Deen, and instead of following up her assertion, wrapped up the interview.
The ado over Ms. Deen’s language is far less important than a presidential sex scandal, of course. But the fate of “Today” is so rocky that it was hard to tell if Mr. Lauer was exercising news judgment or, like his guest, looking too keenly after his own self-interest.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/arts/television/cooking-up-redemption-with-a-dollop-of-denial.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
