Joan and Melissa Rivers: Lost Perspective on ‘Celebrity Apprentice 2’

Joan compared Annie to Mussolini, then “a piece of $#!t,” and then upped the ante to compare Annie to Hitler. In fact, Joan went to the effort to make appearances on other TV shows to reiterate that she still stood by those comments. It wasn’t just a spur of the moment thing.

Let’s measure this… killer of six million Jews plus millions of others vs. playing a TV game to win… Yep, those sins are equaly villainous… Not! Seriously, especially for a Jewish person to play the Hitler card in a TV game situation is an insult to the relatives of every Holocaust victim. She should email them all an apology!

Joan also made the uncalled for remark that Annie would spit on the sidewalk and drown her own mother in it. There’s no basis for that remark, and no room for such personal comments in a business environment.

Further, Joan made several disparaging comments about poker players, tarring them all with broad strokes. Her favorite seemed to be that every one of them is “trash.” At one point she said the money they donated “had blood on it,” and at the finale she identified it as “Mafia money,” which is also nonsense born of ignorance.

Annie correctly pointed out in the finale that if this were a real business environment, no one would be expected to endure Joan’s repeated personal attacks, some that were potentially legally actionable. However, Trump sanctioned the abuse throughout the series, so Joan kept bringing it. Even in the finale, when he offered both Rivers a chance to step back from their worse moments, they declined to do so. Shameful.

Although she denied it in the live finale, it was indeed Joan’s poor treatment of the party planner in the last task that almost scuttled the events of both teams. In fact, the planner subsequently called Joan “a monster” on Barbara Walters’ Sirius radio program. So, Joan’s denial of the truth when she insisted Annie was lying about the planner quitting when she knew otherwise, isn’t that an example of being “duplicitous”? Why, I believe it is!

The ridiculous thing about all of Joan’s attacks is that by the end of the series, pretty much every negative trait she attributed to Annie, she ended up exhibiting herself. She lied, she was disrespectful, she insulted people behind their back, she talked over everyone (even Trump) in the Boardroom, and she was duplicitous. It would be laughable if it were not so utterly pathetic that crony Trump made her the winner. When Piers named a contestant as “an embarrassment to the Trump organization,” it should have been Joan.

The bottom line is that there’s no room for bitter, personal insults in a business game, especially ones so unapologetically delivered with such hateful intent. And that is why the Rivers are inducted into an especially dark corner of The Reality TV Hall of Shame!

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Brian lives in Toronto. He spent a couple of decades working in middle management at The Prudential, primarily hiding behind the coffee machines in generally unsuccessful attempts to avoid his pointy-haired bosses. He can be reached at uncle_bto@rogers.com. He’d like to hear your opinions and promises to respond to all serious email.

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