Elisabeth Hasselbeck from the ABC talk show The View should probably do a little less talking and a lot more thinking-before she talks, that is. This week she was talking about Dancing With The Stars contestant Erin Andrews and her choice of dancewear. Hasselbeck felt the outfits were too provocative and stated “Man, if I’m him, I’m like, I could have waited 12 weeks and seen this, without the prison time.” It was apparently Hasselbecks attempt at humor complete with bad english and attempt at some kind of hip slang.
This is so not-funny on many levels but the main reason this is no joke is because Erin Andrews (an ESPN reporter) has been in the news recently because of a much publicized peeping tom incident that included a guy stalking her in at least three cities as she traveled for her work. He took a picture of her through a hotel door peep-hole and put naked pictures of her on the internet. He has recently been prosecuted. For Hasselbeck to speak so lightly about something so serious remains one of those , I have a TV platform and can say whatever I want mysteries.
What really has many television viewers up-in-arms is the fact that as a Woman and a mother, why would Hasselbeck think stalking is fodder for humor. And as a 2001 contestant of the show Survivor, she spent 39 days (that’s how long she lasted) parading around the Australian Outback in a bikini or that stupid bandana around her chest as if it was really a top. It was a jungle for God’s sake, shouldn’t she have been wearing long sleeves, long pants etc. to thwart the bugs? Or, was she perhaps dressing provocatively for the TV cameras?
On Dancing With The Stars, the clothing is called “costumes” and costumes are performance related, either visually and/or for movement and other technical things that I don’t have a clue about and neither does Hasselbeck. The next day Hasselbeck apparently saw the error of her ways and words and apologized to Andrews on air in a flood of tears. Andrews wasn’t there of course, she was probably busy throwing darts at an old Hasselbeck Survivor poster. But, Andrew’s dancing partner Maksim Chmerkovskiy probably said it best when asked what he thought of Hasselbeck’s comments about his dancing partners clothing. “I design the outfits she wears for the show, so I assume she is jealous-and stupid.”
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