Jenny McCarthy Looks Back at ‘The View’ & Thinking Barbara Walters May Have Dementia

Martin Holmes March 25, 2025, 9:26 am

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Jenny McCarthy and Barbara Walters — Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for iHeartRadio; Cindy Ord/Getty Images

Jenny McCarthy has been reflecting on her time as a co-host on ABC’s The View, including why things didn’t work out and a telling moment with the late Barbara Walters.

Appearing on the latest episode of Maria Menounos‘ Heal Squad podcast, McCarthy explained, per Us Weekly, how she was “hired to bring pop culture to The View” when she joined the show in 2013. “They got rid of — at the time — Joy [Behar] and Elisabeth [Hasselbeck]. They wanted to do a whole flip of the show and lighten it up.”

However, she noted that things quickly changed, pointing to a moment when her co-host, Walters, couldn’t remember Katy Perry despite having “just interviewed” her for a special. McCarthy said after the “Roar” singer’s name was brought up on the show, Walter asked, “Who’s Katy Perry?”

“It was the first sign that I realized that Barbara was suffering from beginning stages of dementia,” The Masked Singer judge continued. “I was like, ‘Oh s***.’ It was literally not even a week into the show. They were like, ‘We’re flipping it. There’s no more pop culture. We’re going back to politics.’ [Barbara] knew politics, but she didn’t know pop culture.”

Walters retired in 2016 and passed away on December 30, 2022, at age 93. While there had been reports of her suffering from dementia in her later years, neither Walters nor her friends and family have ever confirmed this to be the case.

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McCarthy left The View in 2014, noting she just didn’t make a good fit for the show. “They want you to fight,” she told Menounos. “They wanted to immediately switch from light and fluffy to fight. I’m not a fighter… I choose the side of peace in any fight. You want to be right, go ahead with that, and I’m going to have my peace.”

The former Playboy model is currently loving life, especially working with her husband, Donnie Wahlberg, on Investigation Discovery’s docuseries Very Scary Lovers. However, her brief period on The View still sticks with her over a decade later.

“When they announced [me joining] The View, it was crazy. Immediately there was a change.org petition to get me off the show,” she recalled. “They were blowing up The View. ‘How dare you hire her.’… It was the hardest job in the world because it was not me.”