Disney faces a desperate sell-off of ESPN and ABC amid internal turmoil triggered by Shannon Sharpe's rape allegations and George Stephanopoulos's $16 million settlement over false claims against Donald Trump. While CEO Bob Iger admits linear TV assets are burdensome after Nexstar's $10 billion offer pales compared to Disney's original $19 billion purchase, the network grapples with plummeting viewership for The View without Whoopi Goldberg. Ultimately, these scandals and financial strains suggest Disney must urgently restructure its media empire to survive shifting cultural tides and market realities. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, Qwen/Qwen3-ForcedAligner-0.6B, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Shannon Sharp Situation Details00:13:44
Welcome to Big Show.
Oh my gosh.
It just keeps getting worse for Disney, for ESPN, for ABC News.
We've got some details on the Shannon Sharp situation we've got to discuss.
I told you yesterday, CBS News was probably looking at the end of 60 minutes.
You know, the hour clock is kind of running its time.
New reports echoing exactly what I told you just yesterday.
And what is the deal with the former Patriots coach?
You know, Bill Belichick?
The Jennifer Hudson girlfriend thing.
Oh my gosh, the girlfriend from hell.
I'm getting a little worried about poor Bill.
I'm concerned he might be, I don't know.
What do you call this?
Trapped?
Whoa, wow.
Okay, we're going to talk all about it.
But first, ladies and gentlemen, Disney is desperate.
Disney is so desperate, if you would, to get rid of ABC and ESPN at this point.
But, but it can't.
We'll explain why.
But first, understand what this company is up against, right?
They've got this guy, Shannon Sharp, which maybe they thought was going to be a good hire.
Nobody really understood why they thought that would have been a good hire.
A great columnist in the New York Post has a terrific piece on this today.
He's like, what were you people thinking?
Like, how did you ever think this was going to go well, hiring this guy?
Of course, as you may know by now, Mr. Shannon Sharp has had a little bit of a run-in situation with the Diddy lawyer, Tony Busby, who has teamed up with a woman who Shannon claims he had a consensual relationship with.
She was an OnlyFans. star of sorts.
And well, things went a little sideways and now she's suing him for 50 million bucks.
He's had to step down from ESPN in the process.
Watch his statement here.
He's trying to say this is sort of like, oh, typical.
You're trying to paint me as a black man, blah, blah, blah.
You can tell he's reading it.
I want you to see it.
To my family, friends, supporters, and colleagues, I want to speak to you directly and from the heart.
This is a shakedown.
I'm going to be open, transparent, and defend myself because this isn't right.
This is all being orchestrated by Tony Busby, who has targeted Jay Z. Tony Busby targets black men, and I believe he's going to release a 30 second clip of a sex tape that tries to make me look guilty and play into every stereotype you could possibly imagine.
That video should actually be 10 minutes or so.
Hey, Tony, instead of releasing your edit, put the whole video out.
I don't have it, or I wouldn't myself.
You know what happened, and you're trying to manipulate the media.
The encounter in question took place during the day at her invitation.
And now that appears to be a deliberate setup, coordinated by Gabby, also known as Carly on OnlyFans.
Gabby and Tony Busby want $50 million.
What they're getting is sued for defamation and trying to take me down.
My career is all about real talk and honesty.
I know my family and fans know exactly what this is about.
And I'm going to be out there telling you whatever I need to say, just like I always do.
I love all you guys.
Okay, the whole thing was just super, super awkward.
I told you about the columnist right over at the New York Post.
The title of his piece, Phil Moschnik is his name, is it's no surprise ESPN's Shannon Sharpire has gone horribly wrong, horribly wrong, okay?
Like just a bad idea from the very beginning, he writes, and a bad idea that, by the way, is going to cost Disney more money.
Bob Iger's sitting there tearing his hair out saying, who the heck needs this between George Stephanopoulos and this guy?
Wow.
You got problems okay, so here is uh, the 50 million dollar lawsuit that he's writing about with the Nxfl star and Nfl star I there's a little x in there x Nfl star apparently engaging in x-rated behavior and um, the allegation, of course, is that he raped this woman, 20 years old, Tony Busby representing her, and he's like, no no no, the whole thing was consensual.
I'm a family man, but this whole thing was consensual.
TMC actually released a portion of this tape, this tape that Tony Busby has put out there.
Apparently the woman taped the whole thing or they were taping the whole thing, I don't know, but the 15 minutes of the tape is pretty darn bad, like pretty darn bad stuff.
And Sharp is calling them, saying, put the whole thing out, because what you're going to find is like this was all consensual blah blah, blah.
Anyway, it doesn't change the fact that this is a massive headache for one Disney I mean, it is, after all Disney Disney OKAY Disney, good family fun that it is.
Um, they're writing, why did ESPN, or what did ESPN see in Sharp that made him a must-hear commentator, like what was so great about this guy?
Uh, they say, you know, they had Stephen A Smith already right, so you kind of had some of that ground covered if you wanted to have this sort of you know loud mouth making loud noises rather than sense.
I guess that's a bit of a hit on Stephen Smith.
Why would ESPN regard Sharpe as worthy of a reported annual base salary of 6.5 million, with expectations of an extended huge salary ESPN employment soon to follow, Like, why would they hire him?
He had basically been tapped out at other networks.
So, what was so special about Shannon Sharp other than, well, you know, Disney is trying to be the anti woke, so they want to make sure they have enough diversity in their staff, right?
but why this guy?
He continues writing, it's as if Smith, who slipped into his dialect-diverse, antiquated, stereotypical black preacher man costume to address the brothers, needed Sharp's help.
In other words, he's like, you got that with Smith.
He's doing the whole shtick.
Why do you need Sharp in there kind of interfering with things?
But on ESPN, you cannot, he writes, exaggerate the importance of that night's Magic Timberwolves game on ESPN.
They're saying that, you know, basically ESPN holds its viewers in very low regard.
They have such disrespect for their viewers.
They don't think that they're intelligent because they think that they basically will want to see and hear these no better ideas form-fitting junk as they so now broadcast.
So it was kind of an interesting piece and really quite a takedown, if you would.
I would say Steven Smith, for his part, has come forward and said, oh, there's no way that he could stay on.
He's like, see ya.
Bye-bye.
Oh, we don't have to worry about you at ESPN anymore.
Steven Smith saying there's actually no way that Disney could keep him on, given all of these horrible, horrible rape allegations.
And let me read you his statement here that he told Deadline.
He's like, look, he's working at Disney, basically.
You know, I've been at Disney since October of 2003.
I know this place.
I know the worldwide leader that is ESPN.
And basically, there is no way in HELL that Shannon Sharp was going to be able to stay.
in the gig because of everything that had happened.
And I go back to this.
I think that what the New York Post reporter was writing was actually pretty important because everybody kind of saw this as why are they hiring him?
They've already kind of, if you want to say checked those boxes, right?
But, you know, they're all about diversity, et cetera, Disney.
This is Disney.
Don't forget Disney, which is down, what, 60% from its high?
Disney's just been a train wreck between Snow White, between Shannon Sharp, between all the other bad ideas that they have had over there at Disney, and I'll include Star Wars in that, everything's going wrong for this company.
And then, you know, they keep clinging to these woke ideas and these woke people, and they think that somehow that's going to help them.
In this particular case, look, you know, you're innocent until proven guilty, but I find it kind of ironic that Shannon Sharp's like, I'm a family man.
I actually had to look up whether he was married or not.
I'm like, how's his wife with that one?
Saying, listen, I just took up with an OnlyFans model.
What's the big deal?
Her name's Gabby.
She goes by Colby or whatever on OnlyFans.
And this was all consensual.
So I looked it up.
He's actually not married, but he has some kids.
I don't really think you want to purport yourself to be like this, you know, really great all-American family guy, shall we say, given your, well, tendency to clearly lead an alternative lifestyle.
In other words, maybe Steven Smith is right.
Like the Disney thing was never, ever, ever going to work out for Shannon Sharp, who's now, by the way, gone on leave.
I'm sure Disney's like, phew, we don't need this headache, right?
He's gone on leave and we'll see what happens.
But he's counter suing this woman and I guess Tony Busby.
But we'll see.
One thing that some of the articles pointed out, which I thought was sort of important, was that he actually went out there and made an offer of $10 million for this woman.
So that's a little bit peculiar.
And then they communicated this.
So here we've got it right here.
His defense is even more curious.
They write, as his lawyer admits Sharp offered at least $10 million to settle.
Such an offer doesn't represent a go away already nuisance solution or even a gold digger shakedown suit, as Sharp maintains, but rather thick smoke caused by a genuine fire.
In other words, $10 million is a whole lot of money.
She's asking for 50, but he's offering 10.
Why would he offer 10 unless maybe there was something there?
So we shall see.
But in other words, it's just another headache.
for ESPN, another headache for Disney.
And this is a company that has got plenty of headaches already, right?
ESPN is not the only disaster they have.
I'm talking about ABC News.
I'm talking about The View, Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar.
I'm talking about George Stephanopoulos.
I'm talking about the rest of the team over there at ABC World News Tonight.
They have a problem with their wokeness.
They are so biased in their agenda and it's coming back to haunt them.
You recall, of course, George Stephanopoulos went on set, interviewed Nancy Mays, kept using the word rape and calling Donald Trump.
A rapist.
This is not actually true.
The jury never convicted him of that.
And yet, despite knowing that and, by the way, a reporter should right but despite knowing that in certainty and having his producers tell him that George Stephanopoulos went through with it all anyway well, why would George do that?
Why would he do that unless he was just trying to take he wanted it cemented into the minds of the American people that this guy is something he's not.
And so, by saying it over and over again, perhaps he hoped that would be the you know the, the public's takeaway Instead, I don't think the public watches them anymore, frankly, because everybody's over here.
This is part of Disney's problem, too, because everybody's streaming and there's a different kind of consumption, if you would, of news content.
So instead of everybody saying, oh, yeah, Donald Trump is the worst thing, they kind of came away thinking ABC was the worst thing and that ABC had this bias.
And now we know that ABC had to settle to the tune of $16 million.
Georgie Poo is not very happy about it.
He's actually threatening to leave.
Well, buddy, you know, if you're that worried, if you're that upset, maybe you should leave.
I mean, at least the guy over at CBS, the producer had the decency to step down when he didn't like how things were going.
But no, George is making a lot of money, I guess, so he wants to stick with it as long as he can.
But I'll tell you, it's really not a good look.
It's just not a good look.
And I think ABC News is increasingly now a problem.
So they're dealing with these challenges, especially in light of the streaming business.
Reminder, subscribe, share, like here on the show.
And I'm looking at your comments live, and we'll get to some of them coming up.
But remember, they need to reinvest or reinvent, invent broadcast television.
They need to reinvest in themselves in terms of streaming, et cetera.
But how do you do that?
I mean, given that you're bringing in all this money, right?
You get paid whatever, $1, $2.
In the case of ESPN, it might actually be a whole lot more money.
How do you get, when you're getting paid from the cable companies and you can't actually stream live, what do you do with that side of the business?
And this is where they're really, really troubled.
This is where the view is troubled.
This is where ESPN is troubled.
This is why I think they decided to move forward with this new program on the weekend over the View in case you just don't get enough during the week.
And they decided they would be streaming without Whoopi, actually.
That was very interesting in the beginning.
I think they worked out something in her contract renegotiation, and now she's agreeing to go on the Saturday show.
But here's the thing.
It's not doing so well.
It's just not, because I don't think that the traditional medium translates.
Take a look at this.
This is the View weekend.
They got 97,000 views.
Guys, I think we had a show over the weekend that got 200 and some odd thousand views.
Right, so the view has all the resources in the world.
Giant sets, live studio audience.
They're pumping marketing money into this and all they can do is 97,000 views for their show.
You know, we're doing 200, 300, 400.
I mean, that's not unusual for us to see on the little Trish Regan channel right here.
Reminder to subscribe and keep those views coming.
But anyway, they've got 97,000 views on that line.
Now, I'm not going to begrudge them that at the start, right?
They're trying because they've got to do something.
They're restructuring now at ABC News.
Restructuring ABC News Assets00:04:33
They had a bunch of layoffs.
In fact, they laid off all of Whoopi's team.
They're writing, this is the guy who's actually the head of ABC News right now, the chief there, Alman Karmadanovich.
You know, I'm not even going to try and say his name because I'm surely going to make it something it's not.
Anyway, quote, this is not easy.
The entire industry has been challenged and restructuring the way we operate has unfortunately had an impact on some of our colleagues.
That would be the hundreds of layoffs.
We thank them again for their professionalism, dedication, and meaningful contributions.
Okay, I'll mean meaningful contributions.
Well, they're out now, and you're trying to figure out what the heck you would do.
Well, I'll tell you what the answer is.
You got to sell, okay?
You got to sell that company.
Bob Eiger, you know this.
You know this.
You said it yourself.
Go back two years ago, Sun Valley, speaking with my former colleague at CNBC, David Faber, and you admitted it.
Like these legacy businesses, these are not working for you.
And they weren't working then, they're not working now, so good luck on this.
I know you need to sell, you know you need to sell.
Apparently, you can't sell.
We'll get into that.
Transformative work is dealing with businesses that are no growth businesses and what to do about them, and particularly the linear business, which we are expansive in our thinking about, and we're going to look expansively about opportunities there because clearly it's a business that is going to continue to struggle.
Well, let's stop there for a second then and just let me ask you about it.
We're talking, I guess, ABC, the network, the stations, but then.
The cable networks as well.
Yes, correct.
FX, Nat Geo.
Is it possible you would look to sell them?
We're going to be expensive.
I think if you can interpret what that word means.
We're going to be expensive.
You can interpret what that word means.
It means you're going to sell.
Okay, so he wanted to sell them because that's really the only way he can move forward.
And so he tried to recover some value out of them.
But guess what?
They can't do it.
They can't do it.
So as a result of this, he had to come out and say, you know what?
I'm actually, I'm rethinking it.
Let me see if I can find you the article.
He started saying, no, they're not a burden.
They're actually not a burden.
This is in the Hollywood Reporter a month or two ago.
Bob Iger says Disney's linear TV assets are not a burden.
Well, you see, he has to say that because he couldn't sell them because the offer price was $10 billion from Nexstar Communications.
Okay, Nexstar was like, we'll take it off your hands.
It's a dying industry.
But guess what?
It still prints money.
I mean, it's not growing, but you know, you can still squeeze a little bit out.
If you get rid of Georgie Poo, if you get rid of Whoopi Poo, if you get rid of Joy Behar, oh my gosh, you might actually have a business.
So they just have to pare things down a little bit.
Well, Bob Igor's like oh dear, because you know we thought we could get a little bit more money for this thing.
It turns out it's only worth 10 billion dollars.
What are we going to do?
We spent 19 on it okay, so you'd be cutting it in half?
This is him telling the Hollywood reporter.
We are actually at a point where the linear networks in our company are not a burden at all.
They've actually become an asset.
He writes, and you know we feel good about things.
We feel good about things and uh, we're going to try and make it work.
So he's trying to shut down the M A rumor mill because basically they couldn't get rid of these things.
At the time Iger had tapped, you had former studio heads, Kevin Meyer, Tom Staggs.
They were trying to advise on the possible sale of linear assets beyond ESPN, beyond the ABC broadcast network and the FX channel, and now apparently these guys are busy trying to figure out how they can turn ESPN into a streaming business.
So that's the latest news.
They can't sell it.
Remember, $19 billion is what Disney paid for the network back in, I want to say the early 90s.
It is now in the marketplace today.
And this was like a year or two ago.
So it's probably worth less now.
It's worth $10 billion.
And so Disney's looking at it like, oh my gosh, well, what do we do?
Maybe we just keep these businesses and we try and transition them.
We try and figure it out.
Good luck with that.
So this is a marketing person at Disney whose last name is Fox.
noted that ESPN had reached some 200 million adults in the month of March on its digital platforms alone.