Bette Midler joined the #MeToo campaign on Thursday when the singer tweeted a video interview with Barbara Walters, in which she accused talk show host Geraldo Rivera of groping her in 1970s. In the tweet, Midler says Rivera “has yet to apologize.”
In the 1991 interview, Midler recounts what she calls Rivera’s “unseemly behavior,” accusing him and his producer of pushing her into a bathroom. There, they allegedly broke two vials of amyl nitrate, pushed them under her nose, and groped her. “I did not offer myself up on the alter of Geraldo Rivera,” she tells Walters. “l’ll tell you the truth if I had known he was going so, twenty years later he was going to wind up a slimy talk show host, I never would have even let him in the room.”
Midler posted the video amid recent sexual harassment allegations against the TODAY show host, Matt Lauer, who Rivera defended. Lauer was fired on Wednesday by NBC on Wednesday. Rivera tweeted that the news was “sad,” calling Lauer a “great guy” and claiming that “news is a flirty business.”
Rivera went on to tweet his opinions about the massive wave of sexual harassment claims surfacing in the last few months, People reports.
Rivera received enormous backlash for the string of tweets, which later apologized for.
#MeToo is a popular hashtag used online for victims of sexual harassment to speak openly about about their experiences.
[People]
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