Giuliana Rancic continued to defend herself following the controversy over her joke about Zendaya‘s red-carpet look at the 2015 Oscars.
In an interview on Monday’s Today show to promote her new memoir, Going Off Script, Rancic insisted she wasn’t racist but claims that the “editing” of her comments turned what she said into an offensive sound bite.
“It’s something I want to be really clear about what happened because I’ve never really spoken out about it,” Rancic said. “I made a reference to the hippie culture. I talked about patchouli oil, which is a hippie perfume, and in the editing process, some of the gestures I made, some of the things I said were taken out for time. I made peace signs. I said ‘bohemian’ twice. Those were taken out for time. So when the joke aired, some people were offended by it.”
She added: “I find racism reprehensible. I don’t tolerate it at all nor have I ever. And I think that’s really important for me to get that out there, because that’s been the hardest part of all of this is that someone could believe that I have racial undertones in the things that I do. Absolutely not.”
Still Rancic felt that it was important to “tell the real story,” including the explanation about the editing process.
“I see why people took offense. I thought the joke was not edited in the proper way. And that’s just something I have to live with,” she said.
She was quick to say that Fashion Police would be back in September, but as for whether she would be on the show when it returns, she hesitated and said simply, “We’ll see.”
Rancic also talked about her weight loss, which she recently explained is due to the cancer medication she’s taking. She insisted she doesn’t have an eating disorder, adding to Twitter critics who want her to “eat a burger,” “I eat burgers. It’s still not working.”
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She said she decided to speak out about her weight loss because the topic had become a distraction.
“It was something I didn’t feel I ever needed to talk about because I think weight is very personal. Whether you’re underweight, overweight, whatever, it’s your business. But it became distracting,” she said. “I would do a two-hour red-carpet show and I would be so proud of these interviews, so many fun moments and I would go on the Internet afterward just to see 99 percent of the comments about my weight and not about the interviews. So I basically found it very distracting and I thought, ‘You know what? It’s time to just tell the truth and tell people what’s going on.'”
Watch Rancic’s full interview below.
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