Everybody makes mistakes! Steve Harvey‘s cringy 2015 Miss Universe pageant snafu took a toll on him then — and it still haunts him today.
“They said, we’ll announce the second runner up, and then we’ll have standing there the first runner up and Miss Universe, and we’ll do it that way,” the game show host, 64, recalled during an appearance on Comedy Gold Minds with Kevin Hart on Wednesday, April 7.
However, a third name was added the night of and he was told to read the next name from the teleprompter. “I looked at the next card. I said, ‘Miss Colombia!’”
At the December 2015 competition, Harvey mistakenly announced Miss Colombia, Ariadna Gutiérrez, as the winner. Minutes later, the Family Feud host came back on stage and corrected the mistake by giving the crown to the actual winner, Miss Philippines, Pia Wurtzbach.
“I took my stupid ass back out there. I should have let them announce it the next day in the newspaper. I wouldn’t have caught none of the hell I caught,” he said.
The Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man author revealed that the aftermath of that night turned into the “worst week” of his career. He described the way people threw rocks with “puta” messages over the gate of his Atlanta home following the pageant error.
Although Harvey still describes the incident as a “painful night”, he’s bounced back from it. He continues to host Family Feud, which he began hosting in 2010. Harvey also began hosting a New Year’s Eve special from Times Square in New York City for Fox in 2017.
Harvey has also been making recent headlines thanks to his stepdaughter Lori Harvey‘s relationship with Michael B. Jordan. “I have tried not to like him. I have tried to find something wrong with him that I could dig in … because I got rid of all of [Lori’s previous boyfriends],” he joked on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in late March.
Lori, 24, and Jordan, 33, became Instagram official in January after months of speculation that the pair were together.
“I like this one,” Steve said of Jordan in a January episode of the Steve Harvey Morning Show. “I still got my eye on him. I mean, I like him, but like I say to all of ’em, ‘I might like you, I might approve of you, but I got a thumb-sized section of my heart filled with nothing but pure hatred for your ass. Just in case I need it.’”
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