Paula Deen sat atop an empire built on high-calorie Southern dishes and her own
outsized personality - until an unforeseen scandal brought her world crashing down around her. Now,
you have the chance to learn about and judge the tragic real-life story of Paula Deen for yourself.
In the early 1990s, Paula Deen's marriage was coming apart at the seams.
She wrote in her memoir, It Ain't All About the Cookin',
that the problem was her husband's alcoholism. Deen wrote of first husband Jimmy:
"He drank, and he drank way too much to suit me."
The final straw came when son Bobby's truck was repossessed after he regularly made the payments
to his dad, who was supposed to deposit the money in his checking account and make the payments.
Realizing she could stomach his bad behavior toward her,
but once it affected their children, the line had been crossed, she wrote:
"I told Jimmy I wanted out. All my feelings for Jimmy Deen died at that moment;
anything that had been left was gone."
Deen wrote in legal documents declaring their marriage to be:
"Irretrievably broken with no chance of reconciliation."
Paula Deen's food isn't known for being particularly health-conscious.
Complex put together a list of her "10 Deadliest Recipes," including some high-calorie creations
like fried butter balls, made of butter and cream cheese coated in breadcrumbs and then deep-fried.
But then in a Today interview in 2012, Deen revealed she had Type 2 diabetes.
Controversy erupted when she also revealed she'd kept that
diagnosis a secret for three years while continuing to cook high calories creations.
Explaining why she hid her diagnosis for so long, she told The New York Times:
"I wanted to wait until I had something to bring to the table."
While the American Diabetes Association listed many factors that contribute to developing Type
2 diabetes, the organization's director of education, Geralyn Spollett, told the Times:
"You can't just eat your way to Type 2 diabetes. Paula's food has
a lot of what we call the deadly triangle: fat, sugar, and salt."
Paula Deen's artery-clogging cuisine led to a war of words with fellow celebrity
chef Anthony Bourdain , who passed away in 2018. In a 2011 interview with TV Guide,
Bourdain was asked his opinion on various celebrity chefs. Bourdain said:
"The worst, most dangerous person to America is clearly Paula Deen. She revels in unholy
connections with evil corporations and she's proud of the fact that her food is f-ing bad for you.
I would think twice before telling an already obese nation that it's OK
to eat food that is killing us. Plus, her food sucks."
Deen fired back, telling Page Six:
"Anthony Bourdain needs to get a life. You know, not everybody can afford to pay $58
for prime rib or $650 for a bottle of wine. My friends and I cook for regular
families who worry about feeding their kids and paying the bills."
Deen's subsequent diabetes revelation and sponsorship
deal with the manufacturer of a diabetes drug gave Bourdain further fodder to tweet:
"Thinking of getting into the leg-breaking business,
so I can profitably sell crutches later."
Paula Deen's success didn't come without some help behind the scenes.
For more than 20 years, the secret ingredient in the kitchen of Deen's Savannah restaurant
was Dora Charles. A profile on Charles in The New York Times recalled that Deen once quipped:
"If it's a Southern dish, you better not put it out unless it passes this woman's tongue."
Charles told the Times that Dean once said to her:
"One day, if I get rich, you get rich."
That turned out to be far from true, as Charles claimed she was still making
$6.50 an hour even after Deen became a Food Network star. Charles said:
"It's just time that everybody knows that
Paula Deen don't treat me the way they think she treat me."
Charles also claimed that Deen once asked a Black employee to, quote,
"dress in an old-style Aunt Jemima outfit." Charles also alleged that
Deen requested she ring an iron dinner bell outside the restaurant. She stated:
"I said, 'I'm not ringing no bell.' That's a symbol
to me of what we used to do back in the day."
Paula Deen spent decades carefully constructing her own Southern-fried empire, but a lawsuit from
a former employee at her Savannah restaurant would become the first domino to fall,
kicking off an extraordinary chain reaction of self-destruction.
The Daily Mail reported that it all began when Lisa Jackson sued Deen and her brother,
Earl "Bubba" Hiers, over allegations of sexual harassment and racial discrimination.
The allegations also stated that Hiers would often watch pornography on his office computer
and pass around photos of women engaged in sex acts during meetings. Jackson,
the former general manager of The Lady and Sons restaurant, also claimed that both Deen
and Hiers were regular users of the n-word. Jackson was seeking a whopping $1.2 million
While the judge threw out Jackson's claims of racial discrimination,
the case ultimately concluded in a settlement. But the real damage
came when the National Enquirer published the transcript of a deposition that Deen
gave in the case. The transcript contains a number of shocking admissions, including confirmation of
her brother's porn-viewing and the revelation he had been to rehab to deal with a cocaine problem.
But it was Deen's response to Jackson's claims of racist language that would cause the most damage.
"Those allegations are a bunch of butter and oil."
"Did you say butter and oil?"
"No, Seth, butter and oil."
In the National Enquirer's transcript of Paula Deen's videotaped deposition,
she was asked if she had ever used the n-word. She responded:
"Yes, of course."
When asked to give some examples of why she would have used the racist slur, she admitted
using the word while discussing, quote, "a conversa­tion between
Blacks." Deen was also asked to express her thoughts on racial jokes. She said:
"It's just what they are - they're jokes [...] most jokes are about Jewish peo­ple,
rednecks, Black folks [...] I can't, myself, determine what of­fends another person."
The social media backlash was immediate. Some Twitter users created the hashtag
#PaulasBestDishes and made fun of her insensitivity,
while others simply demanded the Food Network yank her shows from the air.
Paula Deen's admission of using racial slurs wasn't the only shocking detail to emerge.
According to the transcript, plaintiff Lisa Jackson's lawsuit alleged that Deen, when
planning the wedding of her brother, instructed that the wait staff dress in insensitive costumes.
Asked to confirm Jackson's claim, Deen admitted that she cooked up the idea for
the plantation wedding after dining in a particular Southern restaurant. She said:
"The whole entire waiter staff was middle-aged Black men,
and they had on beautiful white jackets with a black bow tie."
She went on explaining that the particular eatery, quote,
"represented a certain era in America [...] after the Civil War, during the Civil War,
before the Civil War [...] It was not only Black men, it was Black women."
Asked to get a little more specific, Deen spelled it out. She said:
"I would say they were slaves."
After her deposition was made public,
Paula Deen was booked on The Today Show for an interview but wound up cancelling
at the last minute. She instead released a brief video in which she apologized:
"For the wrong that I've done. I want to learn and grow from this inappropriate and hurtful
language is totally, totally unacceptable. I've made plenty of mistakes along the way,
but I beg you, my children, my team, my fans,
my partners, I beg for your forgiveness. Please forgive me for the mistakes that I've made."
That video was taken down shortly after it went up,
replaced by a longer unedited version that saw Deen insist that, quote,
"my family and I are not the kind of people that the press is wanting to say we are."
Unfortunately neither video had the desired effect
and her apologies only caused the controversy to gain steam.
The sordid details unveiled in Paula Deen's deposition didn't go unnoticed by the Food
Network. Shortly after her admission of using racial slurs was made public,
the network issued a statement in the Los Angeles Times. The statement declared:
"Food Network does not tolerate any form of discrimination and is a strong
proponent of diversity and inclusion. We will continue to monitor the situation."
Hours after Deen's two apology videos were released,
Food Network had announced that a decision had been made, declaring:
"Food Network will not renew Paula Deen's contract when it expires at the end of this month."
Deen's damage-control strategy didn't work and in the eyes of the public,
the Southern chef was now done.
During an unhinged, tear-filled interview on the Today show, which she rebooked,
Deen insisted she wasn't a racist. She also claimed that what she said during
her deposition shouldn't have resulted in her Food Network firing. She stated:
"Would I have fired me? Knowing me? No."
According to this new account, she had used the slur just one time in her life,
after she'd been held up at gunpoint by a man in 1986. She told Matt Lauer:
"The day I used that word it was a world ago - it
was 30 years ago - I had had a gun put to my head."
Deen ended her interview on a conspiratorial note, implying she'd been set up. She stated:
"There's someone evil out there that saw what I had worked for and they wanted it."
When Paula Deen addressed being dropped by Food Network,
she expressed gratitude for all the companies she was in business with that were standing by her.
Unfortunately for Deen, that belief was already evaporating.
Entertainment Tonight reported that Deen was now so universally loathed
that companies began dropping her left and right. After the QVC home shopping network
put their relationship with Deen on hold, Smithfield Pork dumped her as spokesperson.
Retailers Walmart and Target both severed their business agreements, declaring they would no
longer sell Paula Deen-branded merchandise in their stores. And Las Vegas-based Caesars
Entertainment likewise severed ties with Deen. A Caesars spokesperson in a statement said:
"It is in the best interests of both parties to part ways at this time."
Novo Nordisk, manufacturer of the diabetes drug Deen had been endorsing, also ditched her.
Paula Deen watched her business partnerships disappear and her television career come
to a halt. But The New York Times reported that her upcoming cookbook,
Paula Deen's New Testament, skyrocketed to No.1 on the Amazon sales charts as fans
pre-ordered the book several months ahead of its October 2013 release.
"Matt, I've learned so much over the year, I really feel like it's gonna require another book."
Despite the success in the midst of a scandal,
Random House publishing announced it would no longer be releasing the book. Random House also
announced it was cancelling a five-book deal with Deen that was signed the previous year.
According to HuffPost, the situation grew so dire that Deen turned to a heavy hitter in the
PR world: Judy Smith. One of America's top crisis management professionals,
Smith was the inspiration for Olivia Pope, played by Kerry Washington in ABC's hit drama Scandal.
An associate confirmed that Smith had taken Deen on as a client, but the company was, quote,
"not at liberty to discuss the situation any further at this time."
Paula Deen's racism scandal was two years in the rearview mirror when a social media
blunder brought it back into the spotlight. In 2015, The Independent released a photo that was
shared on Deen's Instagram account in which she's costumed as Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy
while her son Bobby Deen is decked out as Desi Arnaz's character, Ricky Ricardo.
There was one not-so-teensy problem with the photo:
Bobby's face had been darkened with makeup. As it turned out,
the photo was apparently taken back in 2011 during taping of a Halloween episode of her cooking show.
For critics of Deen, her response spoke volumes. Deen's rep issued a statement that placed the
blame on Deen's social media manager for posting the photo. The statement said:
"Paula immediately had this picture taken down as soon as she saw the post
and [apologized] to all who were offended. As such,
Paula Deen Ventures has terminated their relationship with this Social Media Manager."
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