Julie Chen Explains How Leah Remini 'Betrayed' Her & How They Eventually Became Friends Again

Julie Chen Moonves is opening up about her fallout from former friend Leah Remini and what led to their reconciliation.

The television personalities were two of the original co-hosts on the CBS daytime talk show The Talk, but Leah left after just one season and it was allegedly because of Julie.

Julie has revealed the story behind Leah‘s exit in her new audio memoir But First, God.

Keep reading to find out more…

“A couple of my cohosts, while I was away, went to the network and said, ‘We can’t work with Julie anymore. She’s too uptight. She’s not one of us. If she stays, we go.’ And they ended up leaving and I ended up staying,” Julie said in the memoir.

She continued, “But what was so hurtful and challenging about this time was that one of the people who left was someone who I became like overnight best friends with after working on The Talk. And that was Leah Remini. We were buddies. We were, like, going on vacation together, and when she went to the network with this request, I felt betrayed.”

Julie reconciled with Leah many years later after running into her husband at a party and asking for her phone number.

She said, “If I didn’t have Jesus in my life at that point, I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to hunt him down and say hello. I know God says to forgive. So I called her, she answered. We laughed. We buried the hatchet. And today we’re probably closer than ever. Leah did try to apologize to me a year after our friendship blew up, but I was too hard-hearted to accept it. Without faith in my life, I didn’t understand the importance of forgiveness, but the Bible tells us very clearly to forgive one another.”

In the book, Julie claims that she was forced out of The Talk by people at CBS.