Beyoncé and Jay-Z have received a public apology from Piers Morgan after the polarizing talk-show host aired inflammatory allegations about them on his program.
About a week after interviewing Jaguar Wright on Piers Morgan Uncensored — during which the singer-songwriter called the Roc Nation founder and Sean “Diddy” Combs “monsters,” and claimed that the famous couple had hundreds of victims — Morgan kicked off the Tuesday (Oct. 8) episode of his show by sharing he’d been contacted by the Carter family’s lawyers, who denied Wright’s allegations. Noting that “there are legal limits” that even he must follow, Morgan went on to explain that he’d obliged a request from the attorneys to remove the claims from his on-camera interview with Wright before issuing an apology to Bey and Jay.
“Jaguar Wright unexpectedly made several serious allegations about Jay-Z and Beyoncé during that interview,” he told viewers of his Oct. 2 interview with Wright. “As I said, in the moment, they were not present to respond or defend themselves, but now they have. Their lawyers contacted us to say that those claims were totally false and have no basis in fact.”
“We’ve therefore complied with the legal request to cut them from the original interview,” the former host of CNN’s Piers Morgan Live continued. “Editing interviews is not something we do lightly on a show called Uncensored. But, like the proverbial cries of fire in a crowded theater, there are legal limits on us, too. And we apologize to Jay-Z and Beyoncé.”
Billboard has reached out to Wright for comment.
Elsewhere in his opening remarks Tuesday, Morgan tried to justify why he’d invited Wright on his show in the first place. “The reality of the modern world is that pretty much everyone has a platform as long as they have something to say that other people want to hear,” he said. “The people making these claims have an audience with or without shows like mine.”
Morgan also noted that Wright has been garnering a lot of attention amid Diddy’s ongoing fall from grace. The Bad Boy Records founder is currently being held in custody as he awaits trial on charges of sex trafficking and racketeering following his Sept. 16 arrest.
Watch Morgan’s apology to Beyoncé and Jay-Z below.