Whoopi Goldberg was shocked that her View co-host Sunny Hostin would reveal family secrets on national television. Goldberg chastised her co-star on Wednesday’s broadcast of the ABC talk show after Hostin disclosed that her parents disguised the fact that they had a shotgun wedding 15 days after she was born.
“And now you’re telling everyone,” Goldberg said after hearing the story. Despite having a “really tight” relationship with her mother, Emma Johnson, Goldberg claims she “never told me anything” as a child.
“I said, ‘How old are you?’ And she said ‘Why do you need to know?'” Goldberg recalled. “‘But you’re my mother, I figured we could share that!’ To the day she died, I did not know how old she was. There were things she felt she did not need to share with me.”
“As an adult, I understand it. But as a little kid, that’s your mother!” she added. “But when she said no, it wasn’t like, ‘Aww mom!’ When she said no, that was it.” Hostin subsequently explained that her parents married 15 days before her birth. Goldberg insisted that discussing the tale publicly was wrong, stating, “I would take you out if you were my kid.”
This is not the first time Hostin has spoken up about her childhood. During an appearance on Tamron Hall in 2019, she discussed an experience that influenced her career choice as a child growing up in the Bronx: watching her uncle being stabbed.
“It’s something I don’t talk about a lot, but I thought it was time for me to start talking about it,” she said. “When I was about 7, I saw my uncle stabbed in front of me. [He was] my father’s only brother and I adored him. He was the fun uncle.”
“Just the two of us were there,” she continued. “He was dating someone who turned out to be married, and her husband came in and attacked him. I remember as a child just trying to stop the bleeding, just being so traumatized, thinking, ‘Please Uncle Ed, don’t die, don’t die, don’t die.’ And we never talked about it as a family, ever.”
In the same year, Hostin spoke about the tragedy in an interview with PEOPLE, confessing she felt “very, very helpless.”
Despite surviving the first attack, her uncle died a few years later as a result of the consequences of the stabbing. The assailant was never punished.
“A lot of times, children are left out of the equation, especially in low-income communities,” Hostin said. “You don’t get taken to a therapist. It colored the way our family operated, it changed how my father operated.”
“One of the things that were pretty horrible for me was that my family never talked about it. Ever,” she added. “We moved out of my neighborhood. I left all of my friends. And then, on top of that, we never spoke about it.”