Giada De Laurentiis is calling out her former Food Network co-star Mario Batali.
If you don’t know, the 64-year-old disgraced celebrity chef has fallen out of the spotlight. He was first publicly accused of sexual misconduct in 2017. Years later, he was eventually charged with indecent assault and battery after he was accused of aggressively kissing and groping a woman while they took a selfie. He ended up being found not guilty in that case. A former employee accused him of sexual assault in 2022.
In a new interview, Giada is speaking out about a negative experience she had with him.
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“This is a person we’re not supposed to talk about but I’m going to,” Giada said on Samah Dada‘s On the Menu Show.
“He’s really the main guy I had worked with. He’s a legend in the Italian space. I felt like his stamp of approval would’ve been huge for me.”
She recalled a time back in 2005 when she asked him to write a forward for her first book, “Everyday Italian.”
She continued, “When I read [what he wrote], I cried. Because I realized, ‘Ah, he’s basically saying that I’ve gotten to where I’ve gotten, and I’ve had this little bit of success that I had, because I have big boobs, and that if he had boobs, he would even be much further.’”
“Because I’m, like, a joke, right? To him, it was like a little bit of a joke. I called my editor, and I was in tears. I’m like, clearly I can’t use this. So now what do I do?” she continued.
She shared that they rewrote the text for him and got his approval to use their version.
“So we rewrote it, but I will never forget that. That’s basically what a lot of people figured: cute girl with big boobs, and so that’s why they’re watching her,” she added.
Currently, the forward in the book shares that she’s not a celeb chef “because she’s merely attractive; she’s a real Italian girl who can cook.”
Find out the real reason why Giada exited the Food Network after 21 years.
