The woman who seemed to have single handedly caused Kelly Osbourne to abruptly quit “Fashion Police, ” Giuliana Rancic, is now giving her side of the story.
Osbourne, whose maternal grandfather was Jewish, abruptly quit the E! Network program in February less than a week after the show’s pre-Oscar broadcast aired. The daughter of Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne was outraged by what she felt were racist comments made by Rancic in reference to the singer Zendaya’s hair at the Oscars. Rancic said that she smelled like a hippie pot smoker.
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Appearing on the Today Show yesterday, Rancic told Savannah Guthrie that her comments about Zendaya were porrly edited by the Fashion Police’s producers. “”It’s something I want to be really clear about … because I’ve never really spoken about it, ” she said.
“You know, I made a reference to the hippie culture, ” she said. “I talked about patchouli oil, which is a hippie perfume. And in the editing process, some of the gestures I made, some of the things I said were taken out for time. I made peace signs, I said ‘bohemian’ twice — those were taken out for time. So when the joke aired, some people were offended by it.”
“There were about 40 people in the studio audience, but in addition, there were about 40 people — executives, cast members, hair and makeup — [there]. Not one person said anything, ” she recalled. “It wasn’t a live show; it was taped. We had several hours to fix it. The editors, the producers, no one saw anything wrong because when they heard the joke, it was truly a joke about the hippie culture.”
Rancic went on to condemn racism and say that she finds it to be offensive. She also said that she could understand why people misinterpreted her comments that night as racist.
“I thought that the joke was not edited in the proper way, and that’s just something I have to live with. But those darn headlines were so crazy for so long that I thought, ‘Let everything calm down, and then I can come out and tell the real story.'”
Since Osbourne’s exit she was followed by the show’s most famous co-host Kathy Griffin.
Things are so bad for Fashion Police that E! has announced that it will shut down production until the Emmys in September. Many observers expect it to be canceled.
