Maria Menounos, one of the faces of E! News, weighed on in the issue of equal pay this week, feeling the need to pipe up after her colleague Catt Sadler left E! News after she learned her co-anchor Jason Kennedy was making almost double what she had been.
Sadler cried gender pay disparity and endeavored on a very public takedown of the network.
“How can I remain silent when my rights under the law have been violated?” she said in a statement. “Countless brave women have come forward this year to speak their truth. Females refuse to remain silent on issues that matter most because without our voices, how will we invoke lasting change?”
But Maria Menounos isn’t quite buying it. While she acknowledged that equality is important, she maintained that gender just is not the reason most women are getting paid less. It’s far less personal than that.
She used Lebron James as an example, explaining that the superstar gets paid more than most of his teammates — and nobody takes it personally.
“Sometimes there are those key players that are going to make more, who are seemingly doing the same thing, but have a bigger career, bigger name — a bigger name that they’ve built that is commanding of more money,” Menounos claimed. “So, there are going to be instances where it’s not always equal.”
Menounos had her own brush with reality after she had surgery to remove a brain tumor in 2017 so it’s likely she’s seeing things from a different perspective nowadays.
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