Piers Morgan issued an on-air apology to Jay-Z and Beyoncé this week regarding an interview with Jaguar Wright, who made allegations on Morgan's show against the superstar power couple that turned out to be false.
Wright, a singer, recently appeared on Morgan's show Without censorshipwhere he talked about the recent arrest of Sean “Diddy” Combs. “For four years I've been screaming not only Diddy, but Diddy and Jay-Z are monsters,” Wright said during his interview. Elsewhere, he claimed that Jay-Z and Beyoncé both have hundreds of victims.
On Tuesday, Morgan revealed on his show that lawyers for Jay-Z and Beyoncé contacted him and that Wright's claims “were totally false and have no basis in fact.”
“The problem with platforms, the reality of the modern world is that pretty much everyone has a platform as long as they have something to say that other people want to hear,” Morgan told his audience. “That's why we invited [Wright] to be interviewed. The people who make these claims have audiences with or without shows like mine.”
He continued: “Well, Jaguar, unexpectedly, made several serious allegations about Jay-Z and Beyoncé during that interview. As I said at the time, they were not there to respond or defend themselves, but now they have. We had lawyers contact us to say that those statements were totally false and had no basis in fact, and so we complied with the legal request to remove them from the original interview.
Morgan concluded his message with a direct apology. “Editing interviews is not something we do lightly on a show called Without censorship,” he said, “but like the proverbial shouts of fire in a crowded theater, there are legal limits for us too. And apologies to Jay-Z and Beyoncé.