Watch Mo’Nique Defend Integrity Over Money During Tense Blackball Discussion With Steve Harvey
The two passionately discuss Mo'Nique being blackballed in Hollywood, and how the two's friendship was affected by it all.
Mo'Nique recently sat down with Steve Harvey on his show Steve to talk about why she believed she was blackballed in Hollywood and how the drama affected her friendship with Harvey.
READ: Mo'Nique Releases Private Phone Conversation With Tyler Perry
"You started getting labeled as 'difficult,'" Harvey says to Mo'Nique. "Why do you believe that happened, do you see that changing and why?"
"I got labeled as difficult...because I said one word and that was 'no,'" the actress begins. "Now I said no to some very powerful people. I said no to Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, Lee Daniels and Lionsgate. And the difficulty came in when people that look like me, like Oprah, Tyler, Lee Daniels and I gotta put my brother Steve on the list, y'all knew I wasn't wrong."
"And when I heard you go on the air and you said 'My sister done burnt too many bridges, and there's nothing I can do for her now.' Steve, do you know how hurt I was?" she added.
From there, Harvey said that he was in favor of Mo'Nique vocalizing her grievances but she did a disservice to herself because how she went about doing it, speaking to her call to boycott Netflix.
"We never gave people a point of action. If we gonna boycott are we gonna not get subscriptions, turn it off, or are we gonna go down there and get signs?" Harvey told Mo'Nique, while also calling her problem with Netflix "rich people problems."
Elsehwere, Harvey referenced a specific time when the comedian told Oprah, Perry, and Daniels to "suck her dick" onstage.
"I do not regret one moment of that night from that stage," Mo'Nique said.
"When you made that statement the narrative got flipped...there's two wars: it's what your issue is and what the perception of your issue is," Harvey responded.
Mo'Nique then says that her issue with all of it was that even though Harvey and others supported her privately they didn't do the same publicly.
The conversation the shifts to a discussion on integrity over money, with the Queens of Comedy performer in favor of the former over the latter.
"We are in the money game but before the money game it's the integrity game and we've lost the integrity worrying about the money," she said.
"If I crumble, my children crumble, my grandchildren crumble. I cannot for the sake of my integrity stand up here and let everybody that's counting on me crumble so I can make a statement," Harvey replied.