Tamar Braxton was devastated and heartbroken by her untimely exit from The Real but refuses to call it a career setback. And she has something new to look forward to—her own show.
Fans of the daytime talk show were shocked late last month when show reps and the 39-year-old herself announced she would exit to concentrate on her solo singing career, before the start of the third season after serving as one of its five original co-hosts since the series' debut in 2013. Tamar is the first The Real cast member to leave the series.
In what marked her first on-air comments since the news broke, Tamar talked about her shocking exit on Steve Harvey's radio show The Steve Harvey Morning Show Thursday, confirming what many thought—that it was not her decision.
"At the end of the day, I'm just like everybody else, when you hear something that's devastating and something that's very close to you," she said. "I'm a regular person, a regular woman and I have feelings and at the end of the day, I got my heart broken. It just wasn't by a man."
Tamar filmed footage for her reality show Braxton Family Values soon after learning about the news of her The Real exit. A clip for Thursday's episode was posted online this week, showing her breaking down crying while being consoled by sister Toni Braxton.
"I'm sitting on my bed, beet-faced, hair snatched," Tamar told Harvey. "I do believe that it was God's divine intervention that this is something that needs to be seen—not to see Tamar crying and upset but just to understand that I'm human as well."
Tamar told Harvey her The Real exit "came out of the blue" and that she was not told why she was not coming back. She had posted a cryptic message on her Instagram page a day before the news broke, saying, "I love u all but I have been stabbed in the back by someone I stupidly trusted (not my man or my sisters)."
"You know when you love your job...you're not complaining about much, you're not fighting with anybody, me and the girls got along, so I thought," she said.
Tamar added she "loves" her former co-hosts, Loni Love, Tamera Mowry-Housley, Jeannie Mai and Adrienne Bailon.
They had paid tribute to Tamar on social media following her departure.
"My concern is for Tamar," Love had said. "It's just devastating for all of us. I still don't know what happened. I don't want to believe it."
Tamar said her husband and manager Vincent Herbert was the first to break the news to her. She said on Saturday afternoon, a day before the news was made public, he made an unrelated phone call to a show official, who then told him his wife would not be coming back to the series.
"He was just like, 'I think you got fired, I think,'" Tamar said. "I'm like, 'Whatchu talking about? Fired for what?' My heart sunk into my shoes, really. I pretty much fell over."
On his radio show, Harvey announced that his production company has signed a deal to produce a new show for Tamar.
"We saw the opportunity of what people may recognize as the end, but it's not," he said. "It's such a beginning. She has such a bright future. She is such a star. She has so much to offer. She is a plethora of talent. We think she would make a great game show host, we think she would make a great talk show host, we think she's in line to produce a number of series...we are proud to announce today that Tamar Braxton is already on her feet."
Tamar said she refuses to "stay down" following her The Real departure and that she is now a stronger person and that her future is "brighter than ever."
"I just feel like I'm just not going to allow anybody to dim my star," she said. "This is not a setback, this is a setup. I feel like if you don't look at things like this as a blessing, it won't be a blessing. I definitely feel like it is and I feel like from here, it's onward and upward."