Former The View host Sherri Shepherd has revealed the salaries she and her co-workers made during her first days on the show.
“They didn’t want to give me no money,” Shepherd, who joined the ABC talk show in 2007, told Vulture. “They had offered me $400,000.”
Shepherd says Rosie O’Donnell revealed how much each of the panelists were making so she could advocate for herself.
O’Donnell told her that she made $2 million at the time, Shepherd told the site. She added that O’Donnell then told her, “Joy makes $500,000, Elisabeth Hasselbeck makes $500,000, so you need to ask for $2 million.”
“I eventually made a million, too,” she explained. “I always will credit Rosie O’Donnell for being free with that.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to a representative for The View for comment.
Shepherd now hosts her own daytime show Sherri in Wendy Williams’ former time slot. Her show was renewed for a fourth season in March.
On The View, she was known the comedic relief she brought to the panel in contrast to the political backgrounds of some of the other hosts.
“I can’t debate you on politics, but I learned to make myself concise and funny,” she said.
In 2018, opting not to share the exact numbers at the time, Shepherd told People that “If Rosie O’Donnell had not told me what her salary was, I would’ve gotten something so low.”
“I would have made more in a sitcom, and I got a boy with special needs,” she told Vulture. “Then all kinds of articles were coming out that I was being difficult, and I had to deal with the tabloids.”
“It was the best and the worst of the learning curve,” she said.
“That was my training ground. Whoopi was tough on me, and I really thought she didn’t like me. I see now it was just love; she just didn’t want me to go through what she went through,” Shepherd said. “Barbara (Walters) was hard on me, and I cried for those three years; she was always saying something to get under my skin, and I now think she was pushing me. If you don’t learn to speak up with Barbara, she’s going to eat you alive; that’s all she respects. On my last day, Barbara said she loved me and said, ‘You learned the most.’”
Shepherd says she passed on O’Donnell’s salary favor to current View co-host Sunny Hostin.
“She got me paid,” Hostin said during a 2023 appearance on Shepherd’s show. “You basically went over your salary for the entire time you were there, and you also gave me Jenny McCarthy’s salary.”
Shepherd replied at the time, “You gotta pay it forward.”
