Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) said Monday that she will not be going on ABC again after a heated exchange with host George Stephanopoulos on Sunday.
“I won’t be going back on ABC anytime soon. I told him as I was walking out, ‘Good effing luck getting me back on,’” she told NewsNation’s Leland Vittert on “On Balance.”
She added, “I cursed on my way out. I didn’t do it on air, but I was upset.”
Mace and Stephanopoulos engaged in a testy debate on Sunday’s episode of “This Week” when he asked her how she could endorse Trump after he was found liable for sexual battery in a defamation lawsuit with E. Jean Carroll last year.
He had opened the interview by playing a clip of her delivering testimony about being a victim of rape shortly before she announced her bid for Congress in 2019. Mace criticized Stephanopoulos for “shaming” her by asking why she supported Trump throughout her appearance on ABC.
Stephanopoulos argued that his question was not meant to “shame” her and, at one point, called her “courageous” for coming forward as he continued to press her on the question.
She told Vittert that she thought she was going to talk about the 2024 elections, not about her testimony about being raped.
“So I was all ready to talk about Donald Trump versus Joe Biden and the 2024 race for the general election; the President had just given his State of the Union, you know, all of that I would imagine would have come into a conversation about 2024. But the guy literally led with me being raped. And you can see the pain on my face,” she said, adding that it is “painful” to watch the testimony.
She said “every woman in this country should be offended by the interview and then by the reaction.” She said on Fox News’s “The Faulker Focus” on Monday that Stephanopoulos “tried to bully” her during the interview.
Mace also described how she left things with Stephanopoulos after the interview as “very awkward,” saying that the ABC host was “angry.”
“But you know, just giving me the side eye and being very ugly. Just his whole demeanor was nasty. But that’s what these people do. That’s what the far left does,” she said.
A spokesperson for ABC News stood by Stephanopoulos’s interview when reached for comment by The Hill.
“George did his job by asking meaningful questions that are relevant to our viewers,” the spokesperson said.
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