Ex American Idol judge, Kara Dioguardi sat down with Matt Lauer at the Today show this morning to discuss her time at Idol, surviving sexual abuse and date rape and more.
“As far as I’m concerned, ” says Kara in her new book, Hell of a High Note, “American Idol Season 8 might as well have been called ‘Survivor’. Every moment was mentally, physically and emotionally challenging. Every old fear or insecurity about the way I looked, what I said and who I was leaped to the forefront of my mind before each show…it was torture.”
When Kara was molested at 11 years old, she told her mother, who did nothing about it. Before her mom’s death in the late 90’s from Ovarian cancer, Kara was able to reconcile the issue with her.
See the interview after the jump.
The Daily Beast review is HERE: 1
On watching Adam Lambert and Kris Allen sing “No Boundaries” on the S8 final: “Watching them sing that live was like watching a plane fall from the sky.”
Kara says she was hired to be the “polarizing” 4th judge and was unaware that she’d been hired in part, she writes, “to keep Paula in check, since her contract was up in a year.”
Also, check out this interview from AOL.com HERE.
Were you fired or did you quit?
I called them after I saw reports about the show and they said now that Ellen is leaving it’s put everything up in the air because now we need to replace two people so we don’t know what’s going on. So I asked if I was fired and they said “no, ” so I said well last week we were talking about auditions, am I definitely doing the show? And they said, “We can’t say that for sure but you’re definitely not fired.” I thought I’m not going to hang around and wait to see what happens, so I sent them a letter asking them to release me from their contract which they would not do until they sorted it all out. I think the reality is that the panel was not set up until the very end.
You never had a problem with Paula but you had problems with Simon.
I never had any issues with Paula. It was more they brought me on and didn’t tell her. With Simon I felt like he wasn’t letting me … and he was the key to the panel. For whatever reason, I just felt like the newbie. But then we got to a place where we respected each other and I learned the most from him.
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