On Monday, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) said she would not be going on ABC again because of her argument with host George Stephanopoulos on Sunday.
“I’m not going back to ABC any time soon.” As she walked away, she told him, “Good effing luck getting me back on.” She told Leland Vittert of NewsNation on “On Balance.”
“I cursed on my way out,” she said. I was mad, but I didn’t do it on air.
An argument between Mace and Stephanopoulos broke out on Sunday’s “This Week” when he asked her how she could support Trump after he was found guilty of sexual battery in a defamation case with E. Jean Carroll last year.
At the beginning of the interview, he played a clip from 2019 of her testifying that she had been stabbed. As Mace was talking on ABC, Stephanopoulos was criticized for “shaming” her by asking her why she backed Trump.
And Stephanopoulos said that his question wasn’t meant to “shame” her. At one point, he called her “courageous” for coming forward while he kept asking her the question.
She told Vittert that she thought she was going to talk about the 2024 elections instead of the fact that she had been raped.
I was ready to talk about Donald Trump vs. Joe Biden and the general election race in 2024. You know, the President had just made his “State of the Union” address. I think that all of that would have been brought up in a conversation about 2024. The guy did lead to me being raped, though. “You can see the pain in my face,” she said, adding that watching the evidence was “painful.”
At first, the conversation and then the response should have hurt every woman in this country, she said. On Monday, she told Fox News’ “The Faulkner Focus” that Stephanopoulos “tried to bully” her during the interview.
The way Mace and Stephanopoulos broke up after the interview was also called “very awkward,” and Mace said that the ABC host was “angry.”
“But you know, just staring at me and being mean.” Everything about him was rude. That’s what these people do, though. She said, “That’s what the far left does.”
We asked ABC News for a statement on Stephanopoulos’s interview, and they said they stood by it.
A spokesperson for the show said, “George did his job by asking important questions that matter to our viewers.”
