Former ESPN anchor Sage Steele says interviewing President Joe Biden in 2021 was “the saddest thing,” as the politician was confused and “couldn’t finish his sentences.”
Steele, who exited ESPN this summer after alleged repeated discrimination for her conservative views, told podcast host Bill Maher that she felt bad for Biden on a “human” level, though she thinks he’s a “terrible president.”
The 2021 interview was via satellite, and due to technical issues, Steele had to “chit chat” with Biden before it could begin, she recalled.
Biden’s team kept the president’s camera off until the last moment, Steele said, but the pair could still hear one another. “So I can hear him and he goes, ‘What is this for? Wait — what’s her name?’” she said.
“I was going, ‘Oh my God!’ And then [an aide] said, ‘SportsCenter, ESPN.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, okay,'” Steele explained.
Biden then apparently went on about his high school and college football career. “And so he started to tell football stories of his greatness,” Steele said. “He goes, ‘I have the best hands.’”
“What do you say to that?” Steele said.
“And here’s the saddest thing — his voice just trailed off,” the anchor recalled. “He said, ‘I was good,’ and then he went silent, and he goes … ‘Uh, never mind.’”
“The human aspect of what we’re witnessing right now, to me, is heartbreaking,” Steele added.
The interview between Steele and Biden, which aired in April 2021, focused on the COVID pandemic before the upcoming baseball season. Biden notably chided people who “think they’re being tough guys” for “not wearing masks” and pushed the vaccine on all MLB players.
“I’d say, look, I’m President of the United States and I got the vaccine,” Biden told Steele when the anchor asked what he’d say to athletes who are “vaccine-hesitant.”
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“Ya know, I don’t have an unimportant job,” Biden continued. “Would I take the vaccination if I thought it was gonna hurt me or affect my capacity? Look, we’ve got incredible scientific research on the three vaccines that we’re using now … and they work!”
Months later, Steele was taken off ESPN airwaves and pulled from high-profile assignments after she criticized ESPN and The Walt Disney Co.’s COVID vaccine mandate during an appearance on Jay Cutler’s podcast, “Uncut.” Steele later sued ESPN.
“Despite fully complying with ESPN’s policy, Sage Steele was punished for speaking her truth in violation of freedom of speech protections under Connecticut law and the U.S. constitution,” her attorney Bryan Freedman said last year. “ESPN violated her free speech rights, retaliated against her, reprimanded her, scapegoated her, allowed the media and her peers to excoriate her and forced her to apologize simply because her personal opinions did not align with Disney’s corporate philosophy of the moment. Sage is standing up to corporate America to ensure employees don’t get their rights trampled on or their opinions silenced.”
The lawsuit was settled this year, and Steele left ESPN to exercise her “first amendment rights more freely,” she wrote on social media.
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