A great deal of the controversy regarding Bruce Jenner’s interview with Diane Sawyer has centered on whether or not ABC reached out to Kris Jenner for comment on Bruce’s transition. Jenner says she was never contacted. ABC says that’s an outright lie.
On Friday night, after ABC informed viewers that Kris Jenner had no comment on her ex’s transition—his previous two wives had sent supportive messages—Kris got into a Twitter fight with Perez Hilton, who tweeted that she had been silent on the issue. With a “fuck you,” Kris claimed that no one had asked her to say anything.
Kris went on to call Bruce Jenner her hero, and said she was proud to have also called him her husband for 25 years. But Bruce painted a different picture during the interview, saying that, while Kris is a good person whom he loves, they might have still been together if she’d been really understanding of his transition. In any case, Kris’ reaction to her husband’s revelation is understandable—but with a bombshell like that, it’s hard to imagine that ABC hadn’t reached out to her to get any kind of comment pre or post interview. Considering that they’d gotten statements from his previous wives, it’s almost inconceivable that they wouldn’t have also tried to get a statement from the ex that is most often on television and in the news.
While Kris maintains that she’d never heard a peep from ABC (and at this point she can hardly back down), the network released a statement saying that they stand by Diane Sawyer’s assertion that Kris refused to speak about her former husband.
From People:
“ABC News sent an email to her publicity team more than once,” reads a network statement released to PEOPLE. “They called and said no comment.”
It is, of course, possible that Jenner’s people were contacted and just didn’t send the message along, but a request this huge seems unlikely to have been tossed away like a press release about new shoes or an invite to a charity gala. And one could speculate that someone as shrewd about publicity as Kris is would assume that she’d be contacted by the national television network that was running an interview with her ex.
Kris has continued being silent on the issue since her two tweets at Perez (although she tweeted several times about the newest episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians), but People reports that she’s going to have her say soon in E!’s docu-series about Bruce Jenner’s transition. Is it too much to assume that she may be drumming up publicity for that series with this miniature controversy?
Image via Getty
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