Sharon Osbourne sat down exclusively with DailyMailTV for her first in-depth interview since her shock exit from The Talk this year amid controversy over purported racist comments.
The 68-year-old British television personality went on the offensive, accusing CBS and show producers of hanging her out to dry live on the air during a tense conversation with co-host Sheryl Underwood.
As a result, Osbourne lost her job and was effectively 'canceled' by social media, leading to a series of death threats against her and her family. Sharon reveals that she was forced to hire 24 hour security and underwent months of ketamine therapy to deal with the trauma.
Telling her side: Sharon Osbourne sat down exclusively with DailyMailTV for her first in-depth interview since her shock exit from The Talk this year amid controversy over purported racist comments
The former host also made bombshell accusations against her co-hosts for betraying her after she says they'd previously held a clandestine meeting and agreed not to hoodwink each other.
Back in March, Sharon and Sheryl had gotten into a heated discussion over comments her friend Piers Morgan had made about Meghan Markle when Morgan was being accused of being racist in his public critique of the Duchess.
'It was a freedom of speech matter. It was pure freedom of speech,' Sharon told DailyMailTV. 'A journalist friend of mine who wrote something that people didn't like and then a few crazies out there, some thugs go - "you must be racist, that's why you're saying it" - about my friend Piers. It's like, come on.'
Sharon claims that the seemingly impromptu moment was actually carefully orchestrated by a show executive who wanted to create controversy and without her knowing by telling her co-hosts to ask her if people now thought she was a racist.
'We had a disagreement and I told her she shouldn't be crying, it should be me that should be crying and that didn't go down well,' she said of her showdown with Sheryl Underwood. 'Then in the commercial break, she wouldn't talk to me. I was begging her to talk to me and she wouldn't, and basically I said, go f**k yourself.
'They all knew the question and they all knew what was going down. I felt totally betrayed,' Sharon said. Adding that, what made matters worse, was when Sheryl started crying Sharon told her to stop.
The optics of a white host telling her black colleague not to cry over issues of racism, on live television, didn't sit well with the public, the audience or the network. Osbourne asserts, however, that perception was not reality.
'We had a disagreement and I told her she shouldn't be crying, it should be me that should be crying and that didn't go down well,' she said. 'Then in the commercial break, she wouldn't talk to me. I was begging her to talk to me and she wouldn't, and basically I said, go f**k yourself.
'To leave me for 20 minutes on live TV ... on live TV ... unprepared, not produced, not knowing what's going on,' she recalled with a shake of her head. 'Wait, where's their apology to me? They could have cut at any time and gone to a commercial break, and why didn't they cut?'
'I would say that to any one of my friends,' she explained. 'When you say it to a friend, it's different than saying it to somebody, a stranger. If you can't get real with somebody who you've worked alongside for 10 years, then then you don't have a friendship, and that's the way I look at it.'
The showdown not only lost Sharon her hosting gig on The Talk - a position she'd held for 11 seasons - but cost her her relationship with Underwood whom she hasn't spoken to since the ordeal. Osbourne added that she's unlikely to ever speak to her former co-star ever again.
After getting some distance from the now infamous episode and the subsequent fall out, Sharon is frankly, p***ed. At the public's reaction, at the network, at the producers and at her co-hosts.
'To leave me for 20 minutes on live TV ... on live TV ... unprepared, not produced, not knowing what's going on,' she recalled with a shake of her head. 'Wait, where's their apology to me? They could have cut at any time and gone to a commercial break, and why didn't they cut?'
'They didn't cut because they liked the controversy and they liked that everybody would be talking about this because they needed something for the show that was going into the toilet,' she said. 'So they thought, well, she's got the biggest following. Let's go for her.'
'I felt totally betrayed, not protected by CBS. I felt used. I felt like an old shoe,' Sharon added. 'They didn't care. It was a set up and it was set up by one of the executives.'
DailyMailTV reached out to CBS regarding Sharon's accusations that she was set up by executives. The network responded by reiterating the same statement that they issued back in March when the incident went down.
'Sharon Osbourne has decided to leave THE TALK,' the statement read. 'The events of the March 10 broadcast were upsetting to everyone involved, including the audience watching at home. As part of our review, we concluded that Sharon’s behavior toward her co-hosts during the March 10 episode did not align with our values for a respectful workplace. We also did not find any evidence that CBS executives orchestrated the discussion or blindsided any of the hosts.'
Sharon says the betrayal was especially hard to swallow, because a similar ambush had occurred not long before with co-host Carrie Ann Inaba. In that instance, the hosts were answering fan questions and Inaba was tossed a racially charged question live that she hadn't been privy to.
Osbourne recalled the unexpected question: 'Why is it that it's not okay for
