50 Cent Disses Gayle King Over Kobe Bryant Interview Questions

(AllHipHop News) 50 Cent has attacked U.S. TV personality Gayle King for bringing up Kobe Bryant’s 2003 sex scandal in an interview with basketball legend Lisa Leslie.

The CBS anchor scored a big news chat with the Women’s National Basketball Association icon, and during the TV interview, she dared to go where most have not in the wake of Kobe’s death in a helicopter crash last month.

King, who hit the headlines last year following her fiery interview with R. Kelly, suggested Bryant’s legacy was “complicated” before quizzing Leslie about allegations brought against Kobe by a 19-year-old hotel employee in Colorado.

The late sports icon was charged with felony sexual assault and apologized to the woman, insisting he thought the encounter was consensual.

The case was dismissed in 2004 because the accuser refused to testify in court. A civil case was settled in 2005.

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50 Cent was appalled King brought the case up in her interview with Leslie and took to Instagram to slam her, stating: “It was not complicated. You just said it was dismissed.”

Posting a video of the clip, he captioned it: “What is this, wait somebody gotta help me understand why they keep doing this. I apologize for my language in advance let’s talk about this.”

The rapper also posted a video of himself embracing the late sportsman.

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Meanwhile, King herself has slammed CBS bosses for teasing her news interview with footage of the sex scandal question, admitting she can understand why critics like 50 Cent are upset.

Posting a video on IGTV before she appeared on CBS “This Morning” on Thursday, she addressed the criticism she had faced over the clip the network aired of her interview with Leslie.

“I’ve been up reading the comments about the interview I did with Lisa Leslie about Kobe Bryant and I know that if I had only seen the clip that you saw I’d be extremely angry with me, too,” she confessed. “I am mortified. I am embarrassed and I am very angry.

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“Unbeknownst to me, my network put up a clip from a very wide-ranging interview totally taken out of context and when you see it that way it’s very jarring. It’s jarring to me. I didn’t even know anything about it. I started getting calls: ‘What the hell are you doing? Why did you say this? What is happening?'”

In the interview, Leslie insisted her friend Kobe was “not the kind of guy” who would “do something to violate a woman or be aggressive in that way,” insisting, “That’s just not the person that I know.”

King pressed: “But Lisa, you wouldn’t see it though. As his friend, you wouldn’t see it.”

Explaining herself in the IGTV video, King explains, “I reached out to Lisa because I know that she’s a longtime friend of Kobe’s to talk about his legacy and friendship. We had a really wide-ranging interview, talked about many things – his career, his passion, his sense of humor, the way he was mentoring other people, how he was starting his next chapter… And yes we talked about that court case because that court case has also come up.

“I wanted to get Lisa’s take on it as a friend who knew him well. During the course of the interview, I asked follow-up questions because I wanted to make sure that her position and perspective were very clear and at the end when she said it was time to leave it alone I thought that was powerful. And I insisted that be part of the interview because I thought that it put a nice button on that part of the conversation.”