When Joy Behar left The View in August, it was on her own terms. But as the TV personality revealed during a Sept. 18 appearance on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, she had actually been briefly fired from ABC's morning talk show seven years earlier.
At the time, Barbara Walters had planned to announce that Rosie O'Donnell was joining the program during the Primetime Emmys. Behar let it slip during an interview with Entertainment Tonight, ruining Walters' big surprise. "You ever feel like you're going to have a heart attack?" Behar asked Leno. According to Behar, Walters called her and said, "Hello, Joy? It's Barbara. And I just want you to know I'm not renewing your contract."
Behar repeatedly apologized and said "it was a mistake," to which Walters reportedly replied, "It was a big mistake! I'm not renewing your contract!" Before Behar could explain how she got back into the moderator's good graces, host Jay Leno moved on to another topic.
During her 16 years on the program, Behar said she made quite a few enemies—though none were as formidable as Donald Trump. "I might have said something like that he wears a wig one time, and he got really pissed," she recalled. "I don't like to get in trouble with Donald."
Behar then read a letter sheallegedly received from Trump's team. "'Trump is livid about the comment Joy made on air yesterday. He does not wear a wig. She can come over to the office and pull it and see or herself that it won't come off," she read. "'People over there need to check their facts before running their mouths.'"
Trump isn't the only person who didn't take kindly to the comedienne's quips. "I got in trouble a lot," Behar admitted. "I mean, people don't know how much trouble I got into."