Kelly Ripa hopes to be an inspiration for women to stand up for what they deserve in the workplace. “It’s not just that I have a daughter. I have co-workers. I have people in my life that I care about. I don’t want them to have to scrape for the scraps.”
has spent 22 years as the host of a single daytime talk show, now earning a salary in the range of $20 million a year. She not only got movie-star rich as the co-host of “Live!”; she’s part of TV history, in a league of legends — Regis Philbin, Phil Donahue, Jerry Springer and Oprah Winfrey — who changed TV as they greeted millions of stay-at-home moms and dads each day.
Seacrest’s decision to join “Live!” in 2017 marked a turning point in Ripa’s professional life. She hadn’t been sure, before that, if she even wanted to continue on the show, because of the way ABC executives had treated her. For one thing, in 2016, they’d left her in the dark as they poached her co-host, Strahan, for a job anchoring “Good Morning America.”
Ripa says it was the network’s idea, not her own, to cast her real-life husband as her next permanent co-host. Initially, she thought it was a terrible idea, but she realized the choice would work for the audience, which has watched the couple on TV and has been uniquely invested in their lives for more than 20 years. They’ve worked together since they first met on the set of “All My Children”; played lovers in “Hope & Faith”; and jointly run a production company — Milojo — out of New York.
Ripa says that whenever she asked about those offices, she was told they were being reserved for executives visiting from the West Coast. “It was after my fourth year,” she says, “that they finally cleaned out the closet and put a desk in there for me. And so I was working in the janitor’s closet with a desk so that I could have a place to put things.”
“They said, ‘Oh, no, we’re saving that.’ And I said, ‘Saving it for what?’ And they go, ‘Well, for when the new guy comes.’ And I looked at them, and I said, ‘I am the new guy,’” Ripa recalls. “I just moved my things. I forced my way into the office because I couldn’t understand how I would still be in the janitor’s closet and somebody new would come in and get the office.
Ripa says she only began to receive what she considered fair pay when her bosses knew her contract was up and realized she could quit. “I don’t think they wanted to pay me,” Ripa says. “I think they had to pay me. I was trying to walk out the door and close it behind me. And I think they really figured out rapidly that they had screwed up in a major way, and it was not a good look. I think that was really the impetus behind paying me fairly. They had no choice.
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