‘Below Deck’: What Did Jemele Hill’s Mother Do When the White House Demanded Her Daughter Be Fired?
Journalist Jemele Hill was surprised by a phone call from her mother during her appearance on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen.
Along with a group of friends, Hill was the final charter guest on Below Deck this season. She chartered the yacht to celebrate her bachelorette party and didn’t appear to get off on the best foot with chief stew Kate Chastain. However, now she and Chastain are friends and Chastain claimed that Hill’s group were her favorites this season.
So when Hill appeared on WWHL, she was surprised by a call from her mother during the After Show. First, her mother, Denise Dennard expressed that she thought her daughter should have come down harder on Chastain, especially after Chastain referred to Hill as a bitch behind closed doors. But host Andy Cohen didn’t want to let Hill’s mother leave the line without asking one important question.
Hill’s mother tried to phone the White House
While Cohen had Dennard on the phone, he wanted to get her feelings on what happened when her daughter tussled with President Donald Trump. “It was pure shock,” Dennard admits. “Because when you see on the news, our president calling my daughter out to be fired. It was a conglomerate of emotions. So I did call the White House. I tried to get through.”
Hill nods her head in agreement that her mother did call the White House. Meanwhile, Cohen looks shocked. Hill then asks her mother to disclose the “smoke she got from Sarah Huckabee Sanders.”
Dennard asks Hill to jog her memory. Hill says, “If you see Sarah Huckabee Sanders in the street, what might go down?” Although Dennard insists she can’t remember, Hill assures Cohen it won’t be pretty if Dennard ever encounters Sanders. “She couldn’t get through to the White House, but she got through to us,” Cohen declares.
Hill took on President Trump
Hill referred to Trump as a “white supremacist” in 2017 in a series of tweets. At the time Hill was working for ESPN and the company scrambled a statement that Hill’s comments did not reflect the company. However, Hill doubled down. She tweeted that although she didn’t want to paint ESPN in a poor light, she still stood by what she wrote.
Later White House press secretary Sarah Sanders insisted Hill’s comments amounted to being a fireable offense and Trump demanded an apology from ESPN.
Hill shared on The South Beach Sessions podcast that her comments were not original. “I was in the middle of a Twitter conversation. I was replying to somebody. If I was really trying to make a bold statement, I would have added the damn president. I didn’t. I was just talking casually with somebody,” she said, The Washington Post reports. “It wasn’t even original. That’s what is so crazy. I got famous for saying something that wasn’t original. It wasn’t new. It was not breaking news. I thought we all decided this after Charlottesville.”
