Back in 2014 NeNe Leakes famously dragged Wendy Williams after Wendy featured NeNe in an unflattering Hot Topics segment about NeNe defacing her Birkin bag [click here if you missed that].
Turns out NeNe's mouth costs her a talk show gig with Tom Arnold...
From Page Six
The former “Roseanne” star, 63, tells Page Six he “connected” with Williams’ producers after a few appearances on her titular program and was presented with the concept.
“The reason they approached me is because they’d seen me go on ‘Wendy,’ and I had a great time,” he tells us. “The goal was to have [our show] go on right after ‘The Wendy Willams Show.’ And I said, ‘Oh, that sounds great! Let’s get together.’ And then we did.”
According to Arnold, the producers were “jazzed” about the project, telling him they “felt it would be a home run” as the “Wendy” show was “killing it” at the time.
“I thought, ‘With somebody like NeNe Leakes, how do you go wrong there?’ And then I figured out how you go wrong – make fun of somebody’s purse,” he said.
After the handbag caught Williams’ attention, she asked both her viewers and Twitter followers, “Hot Question: What do think about @NeNeLeakes defacing her Birkin bag?”
The former radio host, 57, soon deleted the tweet, but not before Leakes got wind of the shady “Hot Topics” segment. She responded with a scathing blog post, which Arnold claims cost them their show.
Arnold told us that it wasn’t long before he got a call from one of the producers, with whom he’d had “great meetings.”
“She called me and said, ‘I got some bad news. We can’t do the show.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘Because NeNe made fun of Wendy Williams’ purse.’ And I go, ‘Who would care about somebody making fun of their purse?’ And the producer said, ‘Black women care.’ She explained to me it was a very personal thing,” he recalled.
“It was a big deal. She said, ‘Wendy has the No. 1 show. What if Roseanne [Barr was put in the same position]?’ I go, ‘Yeah, I guess she probably would get upset about somebody saying something about her purse.’”
