When Catt Sadler left E! last December over a wage gap issue, her future was suddenly unknown. But, make no mistake about it, she knows she did the right thing.
"What has happened since I took that leap, though, is nothing less of remarkable," she told Coveteur in a new interview, via Page Six.
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Over the past few months, Catt has been a bit of a rallying cry for the Time's Up movement, and she's been spoken about on red carpets by women like Debra Messing and Eva Longoria. "I stand with Catt" was a common theme at the Golden Globes. The former E! host said her cause has served as an "awakening."
"I was completely stunned, humbled, and frankly moved to tears more than once that day," Catt said. "The injustice that I was experiencing and naively thought was merely my own, became a collective awakening in many ways."
When she initially realized that she was getting far less than E! News' Jason Kennedy, who started at the network around the same time as her, she approached the "decision makers" about the pay discrepancy. She remembers them telling her, "We're obviously just looking through a different lens than you."
She knew it was over at that moment.
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Catt knows she's become an advocate for gender equality, but she never set out for that to happen.
"You see I didn't start out on a crusade to be a voice for gender equality in the workplace; I didn't have grandiose plans to organize powerful people and roar about equal pay," she said. "For me, at that time, it started out as simply the 'right thing to do.'"
She continued, "It was important to explain how I had been wronged and how I knew in my core that to stay would mean collaborating with an evil system. Swallowing my values was not an option. What happened to me was unfair."
Catt added a call for women to hold "each other up as sisters" and refuse "to accept less than what we deserve."
