WTF: Shaunie O’Neal Says she Feels As Popular As Michael Jackson

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WTF: Shaunie O’Neal Says she Feels As Popular As Michael Jackson

Posted at 07/18/2011 by Staff 0 Comment

Shaunie O’Neal continues to create controversy wherever she goes. A week or so ago she made headlines for penning an open letter to CNN in which she claimed that she was not portraying black women in a negative light on her reality show, ‘Basketball Wives’ that regularly depicts women of color bickering and fighting.

Now, in an interview with Ebony/Jet she’s comparing her newfound celebrity with that of Michael Jackson’s celebrity… ummm….

On Being Embraced By Fans:

I’m starting to get how Michael Jackson might have felt back in the day,” she says laughing, and only half-kidding. “I’ve never felt so much love, and never really knew that it was that kind of fan base. I never really imagined we would be these celebrities because of the show.”

On Trying To Bring Some Balance To The Miami Show:

“I’m trying to get some type of balance on. Even Basketball Wives Miami — can we show Tami and I going to Project Girls and giving a girl a semester’s worth of tuition? Can we show that we actually have sat down and had good times and laughed like girlfriends? It’s not always the two minutes of drama that you get after eight hours of taping and somebody getting on somebody’s nerves. I get that it sells; I get that that’s what people wanna see, but can we show that these ladies actually can conduct themselves in a respectable manner? That they do know how to use the English language correctly? We aren’t always going off.

On Working With Shed Media & Not Being Happy With the Los Angeles Cast:

“Honestly, they’ve distorted it a little bit. I really came in with the concept of having a group of women that come together and are associated by the game of basketball, whether it be their husbands, fiancés — there’s some long-term relationship with a man in basketball and the game of basketball — and that’s how we formed this sisterhood and friendship,” she says. “The L.A. cast — there are some wives and fiancés, which I’m fine with. But there’s a little bit of trash kind of sprinkled into that cast that I’m totally against. I was really very hands off with that cast.”

“Yeah, you know they have Jackie Christie, I love her — they have a long lasting marriage and it works. There’s also Malaysia Pargo, you’ve got Imani who was the former fiancée of Stephen Jackson — they went to the altar, you get that connection. These ladies have been around forever in the game of basketball. But then you’ve got people that just might’ve slept with somebody. I’m not OK with that,” O’Neal says. “It’s just drama and … that’s not my vision. I don’t think that all money is good money. I don’t need it that bad. So we are having some issues. I’ve kind of just had to take a backseat and shut up and just let it go, let it ride. It’s David and Goliath right now.”