A year to the day after they were first suspended by ABC News following the public disclosure of their personal relationship, Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes are speaking out about what happened.
The pair discussed their relationship and subsequent departure from ABC on the first episode of their new iHeartMedia podcast, called Amy & T.J.
Holmes and Robach, of course, were the co-anchors of GMA3, the early afternoon spinoff of the ABC morning show Good Morning America. About a year ago, a tabloid revealed that the two were in a relationship, and ABC News president Kim Godwin announced that they would be pulled from the show “temporarily” as the network figured out a response.
Ultimately, ABC parted ways with Robach and Holmes in January of this year, with a spokesperson saying that “we all agreed it’s best for everyone that they move on.”
“I guess the best way to sum us up, Amy and T.J., is that we’re the folks who lost the jobs we love because we love each other,” Holmes said on the podcast Tuesday. “And that is the bottom line.”
One of the name ideas for the podcast, Holmes said, was “‘Scandal-less,’ because this was a scandal that wasn’t.”
Robach and Holmes said that multiple “mainstream” news outlets opted not to report on their relationship when they found out that both were going through divorces, but that the tabloid report led to the fateful decision by ABC News to suspend them.
“We each got a phone call from our bosses saying that they had made the decision — and they made it again a point to say we hadn’t violated any company policy — but because we had become a distraction that they thought it would be best if they temporarily took us off the air to let things quiet down,” Robach recalled. “And I remember I said … Now this is going to be a story if you take us off the air, please don’t do this.”
“That was the morning we knew we would not be going back to that network,” Holmes added. “We knew that phone call sealed it, because you can’t come back from that.”
“I was sick to my stomach because we knew what was coming once that announcement was made,” Robach continued.
Robach said that their plan was to finalize their divorces, and then tell ABC management and the public that they were a couple, but that the tabloid report forced their hand. Holmes added that some of the media coverage framed them as “adulterers.”
“We thought in January, we’re going to go and walk in and explain to management that we are a couple … We’d actually even talked about doing it earlier,” Robach recalled. “Right before the pictures came out, we thought: Should we tell them what’s going on? And we thought, ‘Let’s just get these divorces cleaned up and then let’s do it.’ But we had every intention of doing it and we didn’t believe, and I don’t think we still do believe, we were doing anything technically wrong.”
“If we’d have put out statements about divorces, and then people found out we were dating, they would raise some eyebrows and go, ‘Oooh, okay, that’s still an interesting topic,'” Holmes added. “But doing it this way, the story became mainstream when they’re able to say ‘Morning Show Stars Suspended.’ That’s now a major story given the brand we were attached to. That’s a big, big deal. And we knew that that was going to be a big deal.”
But Holmes added that he didn’t initially think that their relationship would rise to the level of a national news story, acknowledging that because they were on a GMA show, he should have been more clear-eyed about things.
“In that world, affiliated with the show we were affiliated, that’s just a sexy freakin’ story,” Holmes said. “And I just don’t think we thought about it in that way, that anybody would give a damn what we were doing.”
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