My Remarks on Nikki Haley’s ‘Prime’ Were ‘Totally Misconstrued’

Don Lemon says his widely condemned on-air comments about Nikki Haley being past her “prime” were “totally misconstrued.”

The former CNN host was fired last year by the network two months after he made the remarks during his ill-fated run on CNN This Morning. Lemon spoke about the incident in a new interview with The New York Times ahead of the release of his new memoir this week.

“That was totally misconstrued,” Lemon told the Times of his comments about Haley, who was at the time running for the Republican presidential nomination. He meant to convey that the general public might consider Haley a has-been, the newspaper reports, rather than expressing a view that he personally held.

“Anyone who knows me knows,” he told the Times. “I came from a household of women, from a community of women who supported me my entire life.” He added: “I know sounds cliché, but my best friends are women.”

In February 2023, Lemon was asked to react on air to a request Haley had made for politicians over the age of 75 to face mental competency tests. “This whole talk about age makes me uncomfortable,” Lemon said at the time. “I think it’s the wrong road to go down. She says people, you know, politicians are suddenly not in their prime. Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime. Sorry, when a woman is considered to be in her prime in 20s and 30s and maybe 40s.”

Lemon added at the time that such a view was “not according to me,” but dug deeper into the point when asked what he was talking about by his co-host Poppy Harlow. “If you google ‘When is a woman in her prime,’ it’ll say 20s, 30s, and 40s,’” he said, adding: “Don’t shoot the messenger, I’m just saying what the facts are.”

Later in the day, he posted a statement on X saying the reference he’d made to a woman’s prime “was inartful and irrelevant,” and he regretted it. “A woman’s age doesn’t define her either personally or professionally,” he added. “I have countless women in my life who prove that every day.”

He subsequently apologized to colleagues on CNN’s morning editorial call, saying he “did not mean to offend anyone” and what he’d said “came out wrong and I wish I hadn’t said it.”

When CNN announced in April 2023 it had “parted ways” with Lemon, Haley celebrated what she called a “great day for women everywhere” in a tweet with the hashtag: “#StillInMyPrime.”

Lemon told the Times he struggled with depression following his ouster from CNN and occupied himself by making dog food and laundry detergent. He also stopped working on his book, I Once Was Lost, which is set to be published on Tuesday.

The book partly addresses his short-lived partnership with X, which ended abruptly after Lemon grilled the company’s owner, Elon Musk, about taking drugs and embracing conspiracy theories in what was supposed to be the first episode of a new show on the platform. Lemon is now suing Musk over their scrapped partnership.

Lemon nevertheless told the Times he wouldn’t change anything about their heated interview. “I went into it with the best of intentions,” Lemon said. “The outcome was the outcome. Am I happy about the way I was treated? No. Do I think it was fair? No. And I don’t think he believes in free speech.”