Sharon Osbourne has said that she, her family and even her dogs received death threats in the wake of her decision to defend Piers Morgan’s comments over Meghan Markle.
The 69-year-old TV personality was part of a heated on-air debate about race which resulted in her suspension and subsequent dismissal from US show The Talk.
Sharon had served as a panellist on the CBS show, but said she was blacklisted in the United States after defending Piers.
Sharon, 69, claims she was subjected to death threats in the wake of her suspension in a teaser clip for a new sit-down interview with Piers on his programme Uncensored on TalkTV.
Recalling her dismissal from CBS, she tells Piers: “I never thought in my wildest dreams that my career after fifty years would have ended that way.
“I must have cried for three months. Never stopped crying.”
She continued: “Some of the comments that were coming through on my social media were so horrific about cutting my throat, my husband's, even the dog's.
“They wanted to kill my dogs. Then they started on Ozzy and I thought, this is just insanity.”
In the clip, Sharon concluded: “Did I want my legacy for my family to be, ‘Well your Nana was on television, but everybody said she was racist, so she never went on television again’. That kind of ate me up.”
Sharon became a household name after the success of the MTV reality show The Osbournes, a fly-on-the-wall look at life inside the family’s sprawling Beverly Hills mansion, which she shared with husband Ozzy, their three children and pets.
An eleven season run on The Talk soon followed, but she admits every door was slammed in her face after she publicly endorsed Morgan's right to free speech in the wake of Meghan and Prince Harry's bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey.
Sharon exited CBS’s The Talk two weeks after her clash with co-host Sheryl Underwood, during which her co-host said she was giving “validation” to “racist views” in her support of Morgan.
Sharon was accused of “gaslighting” Sheryl and later issued an apology over the episode, saying she had “felt blindsided” and had let her “fear and horror of being accused of being racist take over”.
Discussing the reaction to her own comments on The Talk, Sharon recently told the Sunday Times: “I said, ‘I ain’t going out, I ain’t doing anything.’”
“I just couldn’t stop crying because all I was thinking about was all the things that I’ve gone through in my life, and now they’re calling me a racist, this is insanity.”
