Barbara Walters Once “Lunged” at Andy Cohen During ‘The View’ Commercial Break: “How Dare You Insult Me On My Own Show”

The new ABC Barbara Walters documentary—Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything, with began streaming on Hulu today—doesn’t try to cover up the challenging side of Walters’s personality. And that includes the time she chewed out Andy Cohen for, more or less, calling her old.

Directed by Emmy-winning filmmaker and journalist Jackie Jesko, and produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Documentaries, Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything walks viewers through Walters’s career, from one of the first women anchors on the nightly national news in the 1970s, to the creation of the now infamous daytime talk-show The View in her later years. The doc makes clear that The View allowed Walters to loosen up and get a little silly with it—but she also never let go of her fierce sense of pride.

Case in point, TV personality and frequent View guest host Andy Cohen shares a story in the documentary of a time when he got the full force of Walters’s fury, simply because he said she was of “a different generation.”

“One of the last times I guest-hosted The View, it was the morning after the Oscars,” Cohen explains in his talking-head interview in the documentary. “Barbara said on the air that she didn’t really get American Hustle.”

The doc then plays a clip from that episode of The View, where Cohen says, in response to Walters, “I have to say, a lot of people of a different generation didn’t understand-“

Walters interrupts with, “Oh, thanks!”

Cohen, realizing he may have insulted the famed reporter, immediately backtracks with,”Is that bad to say?”

View audiences didn’t see this part, but in the documentary Cohen explains that, no, Walters was not joking, and yes, she tore him a new one as soon as the show cut to commercial.
Photo: Hulu/Disney/ABC
“Soon after I said that, they went to commercial break,” Cohen says in the documentary. “As the camera was swooping around the table, Barbara is lunging at me saying, ‘How dare you insult me on my own show?’”

In the archived clip from The View, Cohen can be heard saying, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry!” as the show cuts to commercial, while Whoopi Goldberg warns them both, “We’re on camera.”

To his credit, Cohen doesn’t seem to hold any grudges. In fact, he seems positively delighted by the memory.

“I got my ass handed to me by Barbara Walters,” Cohen tells the camera, proud. “Few can say that. Or, maybe, a handful… or more.”

Perhaps if Walters—who died at the age of 93 in 2022—were still alive, Cohen and others in the documentary wouldn’t feel quite so comfortable sharing their stories of Walters’s sometimes-volatile temperament. Oprah Winfrey, too, shares a story of Walters essentially stealing a Monica Lewinsky interview from her. But all the stories come from a place of respect. After watching this documentary, there’s no denying Walters was a force of nature.