Rachel Uchitel is claiming that Wendy Williams went rogue in an interview last month, which led to an "uncomfortable" and "inappropriate" chat about Tiger Woods.
Rachel says the interview was supposed to center on her partnership with Seeking.com, but Wendy wouldn't stop badgering her about the notorious affair she had with Tiger a decade ago. In fact, the interview even prompted Wendy's staff to apologize to Rachel, she revealed.
"That was a little bit of a rough interview," Rachel said during an appearance on "Behind the Velvet Rope with David Yontef." "Her staff was really nice about asking me to be on and said that she was going to be nice and had said all nice things to me."
The interview, though, started off rather awkwardly, as Wendy asked Rachel if the exposure from the affair was "good for her." Wendy also asked if Rachel believed Tiger would leave his then-wife, Elin Nordegren, for her. The daytime talk show host ended the chat by saying, "We'll never like home-wreckers here, but we like you for what you're trying to build."
During most of the 13-minute interview, Wendy asked about Tiger.
"This was a story that happened 10 years ago and it's something I want to be disassociated with," Rachel told Wendy in March. "I want no more association with that. I wish people would stop shaming me for something that happened 10 years ago."
On the "Behind the Velvet Rope" podcast, Rachel implied that Wendy was simply unprepared and "didn't really know" how to interview her.
"I think she was confused as to how to interview me because I felt like that first five minutes or so was very, almost like she felt pressured into asking me these questions that she thought she needed to ask for some reason," she said, "because I felt like it was almost awkward in the way that these were questions that were so inappropriate almost to a level that didn't make sense."
Prior to going on the show (virtually), Rachel — who's often referred to as "Tiger Woods' mistress" — was apparently told that Wendy would ask one or two questions about Tiger, with most of the questioning related to the HBO documentary "Tiger" that Rachel recently participated in.
"Her staff ended up calling me after the fact and said, 'We're so sorry, because we didn't know she was gonna continue on that level of questioning.' And that's actually not even why they booked me," Rachel said. "It got very uncomfortable because it was sort of like, she kept harping on something and didn't want to let go of it. And you know, after 10 years of living with a stigma attached to you and like, everyone's sort of, you know, needing to like introduce you as that, like it's really enough already. I thought that was really a place of, now we're getting inappropriate here."
Several viewers reached out to Rachel and said they were "uncomfortable" with the interview, the former New York and Las Vegas nightlife host said.
She also doubts that Wendy would have treated a man as "harshly."
"I definitely think that something needs to be said about the stigma that women have," she said. "I think that she, something needs to be said on her show about how hard she came at me and that women shouldn't be given the stigma for being the other woman."