The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
Bill Maher Uses Diddy to Blame the Victims, "And Just Like That" Premiere Flop, and Frenemy Tactics
Tue, 3 Jun 2025
Maureen skewers Bill Maher's jaw dropping commentary during his "New Rules" monologue where he unapologetically blames women for not escaping their abusers soon enough, blasting the lists of reasons he gives for why victims of abuse should know better. She also takes a swipe at the premiere episode of "And Just Like That," with its unrealistic plot lines and feeble attempt to keep Sarah Jessica Parker's character interesting. And then Maureen is joined by Mike Albo, author of "Underminer," to discuss toxic characteristics in friendships.Aware House: Visit https://awarehouseshop.com/discount/THENERVE & use code THENERVE for 15% off your first order. Firecracker Farm: Visit https://firecracker.FARM & enter code Thenerve at checkout for a special discount!
Chapter 1: What did Bill Maher say about victims of abuse?
And that's namely mutilate their genitalia, marry them off as small girls to adult men, cover them from head to toe in burqas, denying them their education, their sexual agency. If you're raped, You're probably going to get murdered by a member of your own family, a male family member in what are called honor killings.
And, you know, the right to speak or sing outside of the four walls of their own homes. And those voices, a passerby can't hear them either. Okay. So now let's talk about what went down on Friday night on his show, where he often, more often than not, he will have two male panelists. Before COVID, there used to be three. Now it's down to two. And more often than not, it's two guys he's talking to.
And then when he does have a woman on, he will often roll his eyes in awe. utter contempt at whatever point she might be trying to make. These are guests in your house. I would consider that a guest in my house. I wouldn't invite people on to roll my eyes at them or like smack the table, you know, and smirk and talk down to them. You know, okay.
Like on a, there was a 2002 episode, 22, sorry, 2022 episode on a show a few years ago, he had a A guest named Chris Catherine Rampell. Sorry, Catherine Rampell. She was a WAPO op-ed columnist, and she was talking about restricted abortion. And Bill blew it off, saying, it doesn't affect my life. I ain't getting anybody pregnant. No, he's not.
Bill instead infamously dated a woman who goes by or went by the name Superhead. She was a lot younger, and her real name was Corrine Steffens. And when they broke up after two or three years of dating, I think it was on and off dating, she said this to Vibe magazine, and I quote, Bill wants someone he can put down in an argument.
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Chapter 2: What are the complexities of leaving an abusive relationship?
Her quotes, her words, not mine, tell you how ghetto you are, how big your butt is, and that you're an idiot. That's why you never see him, she says, with a white girl or an intellectual. I might as well have been a Muslim woman with my head wrapped, walking 10 paces behind my man. Interesting.
Most recently, he's been photographed with Al Pacino's sugar baby, nor Al Fala, if I'm saying that correctly. Bill is 68, nor is 30. And Bill, you know, he was something infamously of an incel as a teenager and young man. He talks about this all the time on his show. I don't think he uses that word, but he talks about all the time.
It's still with him how girls and women wanted nothing to do with him in high school and college. He hasn't gotten over that. He was also a habitué at Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion. And there are no shortage of former playmates or girlfriends of Hefner's who have come forward lo these many years to say what a house of horrors that was. And not just the stuff they were forced to do sexually.
You know, Bill would say I'm using the word forced. probably like inappropriately, but you know, what do you, what do you want to call it? Coercion. We'll go with that. Okay. And, and I'm not just talking, I mean, I'm talking like hygienically because there were strangers in that house, all having group sex and all variety of just whatever, you know? So Bill gets on TV last Friday.
And he decides that his closing monologue, he's going to, I guess he calls it his editorial, he's going to use the Diddy trial as, I guess, his Trojan horse to talk about women who are abused by their partners, women who are stuck in relationships with men that are violent. And he's here to tell us it's all our fault. It's all the fault of these women.
If you are getting beaten up by your man, your husband, You know, it's your fault. If you don't leave after the first one, your fault, okay? We're gonna take this guy apart, okay? We are going to metaphorically savage him limb from limb, and we are going to leave his verbal carcass to be feasted upon by wild boars. Roll this clip. Beginning.
Things have changed enough so that moving forward, the rules should be, if you're being abused, you gotta leave right away.
Okay, I'm just going to say this. If it were that simple, if the women who typically get into abusive relationships have a lot of backstory and a lot of complicated emotional, psychological, maybe physical trauma, you know, and abusers can spot these women like that.
So if it were that simple and there were just an algorithm, a simple equation that women could follow, you know, there would be no more women for men to beat the shit out of. Okay, Bill? Moving on.
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Chapter 3: How did the premiere of 'And Just Like That' disappoint viewers?
But if we're going to have an honest conversation about abuse, we also have to have an honest conversation about what people are willing to do for stardom. If you want a number one record on the chart so bad you'll take a number one in the face, some of that is on you.
And if you're doing it for love, well come on, Oprah and Dr. Phil and every podcaster in the world have done a million shows by now about how abuse is not love and abusers don't change. If it happened once, there will be more of it.
So, Oprah, we're going to get to Oprah on this very, very topic. We should know because Oprah told us. Oprah, Oprah, who blamed us all for making her feel bad about being fat and having to lie about going on Ozempic. I'm not hearing any of that shit, okay? This is an extremely complicated issue that...
more than one extremely powerful, successful, famous woman of great means and resources has found herself in. The next example Bill gives us is that of the British singer FKA Twigs, who had dated the actor Shia LaBeouf and has filed suit against him. for abuse in their relationship. And everybody knows in Hollywood, Shia LaBeouf, allegedly, he's a handful.
I believe he was arrested for assault in, I think, Sundance one year. I'd have to look that up. But anyway, listen to Bill on why FKA twigs should, I guess in his estimation, take her fucking lumps. Pun intended.
But by her own account, she said, the whole time I was with him, I could have bought myself a business flight plane ticket back to my four-story townhouse in Hackney, London. Really? Then why am I reading about this? Then do that. Buy that plane ticket, even if you have to go coach. If you're literally being held captive, that's one thing.
But if you're putting up with whatever for love or for your career, then you need to have a little more honesty and accountability about that. Ike Turner was a psycho just like Diddy, but in an era where there was no movement to help her, Tina Turner somehow got away and she did it with 36 cents in her pocket and a mobile card.
Okay. To FKA Twigs, Bill, the reason she's saying that she still, with all of her money and her resources, didn't book that plane ticket is the very point. He had infected her mind. He had fucked her up psychologically.
women don't stay because they enjoy being treated like punching bags by men okay excuses for men I should say they stay because their minds have been so fucked with and they can't believe this is happening to them that is the exact fucking point and you are just way too smart to not understand this to be so willfully ignorant and we're gonna get to Tina Turner by the way who you know it's not like I kid her once and she was out the fucking door it took her years and she had kids with him so fuck off okay
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Chapter 4: What toxic friendship dynamics are discussed?
And she gets with Chris Brown and they go to the Grammys. And the next day we all went online, opened the paper, and we saw what Chris Brown did to Rihanna. And here she is talking to who Bill thinks should be teaching us about this complicated issue, Oprah fucking Winfrey, whose response is frankly less than stellar. Let's take a look at this.
In 2009, just days after Rihanna and her then boyfriend, pop star Chris Brown, were photographed seated next to each other smiling, this image was leaked to the public. In the early morning hours of February 8th, 2009, Chris Brown and Rihanna left Clyde Davis' annual pre-Grammy party.
According to police reports, while driving home, the two got into a heated argument, which escalated into a vicious and violent attack.
First of all, fuck Oprah. I don't know if it was her legal team or not, but you could push back for calling that a fight that, quote, escalated. We all just saw Rihanna's face beat into a pulp in that clip, okay? That's not a fair fight. You know, again, a man assaulting a woman like that, that's not a man, and that is a vicious assault.
And Chris Brown, by the way, just got arrested again in England, right? he was stupid enough to go back because there was a warrant out for him for assaulting, I believe, a music manager in a nightclub. He broke a bottle over the guy's head. The guy fell to the floor and then he started kicking and punching him. That's Chris Brown. Those guys do not fucking change. But okay.
So Rihanna sits down with Oprah and talks about this and listened very closely to how she talks about what happened to her And what she was thinking in the immediate minutes, hours and days after that vicious assault on her.
But nobody could feel that more than me. I was hurt the most. Nobody felt what I felt. So it was... You were hurt the most because it happened? It happened. It happened to me. And it happened to me in front of the world. It was embarrassing. It was humiliating. It was hurtful. You know, it's not easy. I lost my best friend. Everything I knew switched. Switched in a night.
And I couldn't control that. So I had to deal with that. And that's not easy for me to understand or interpret. And it's not easy to interpret on camera. Not with the world watching. So it was hard for me to even pay attention to my mind and figuring things out because now it became a circus and I felt protected. Like, I felt like the only person they had right now is him.
It was a weird, confusing space to be in, because as angry as I was, angry and hurt and betrayed, I just felt like he made that mistake because he needed help. And, like, who's going to help him? Nobody's going to say he needs help. Everybody's going to say he's a monster without looking at the source. And I was more concerned about him.
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Chapter 5: How do celebrity experiences reflect on domestic violence?
Chapter 6: What are the implications of Diddy's trial on discussions of abuse?
Oh. Yeah, yikes. I don't know. I think that, um... I can't imagine if I had been like let I was very, as you know, sequestered when I first started out. And if I was just allowed to be like young and with a young boyfriend who's also a star and, you know, you're working and you're both. I don't know what goes on. You know what I mean? So it's like I wasn't really allowed out of the house.
I wasn't really allowed out of the house. For Mariah Carey to say that on national television took a lot of guts because that guy, I believe, was a very, very dangerous guy. And when she finally got that divorce, it had the feeling of like... Again, it's just the feeling I got from all the reading I did about it, but that she basically kind of escaped with her life.
She had to sing the kind of music that Tommy Mottola wanted her doing. She wanted to be young and cool and like... running with the hip-hop crowd and doing music that was, like, of the moment, not, like, torch songs, you know?
So there were always rumors that that was an abusive relationship, and she has asked directly, and I think she had to sign the mother of all NDAs to get out of that, but you notice she never uses her ex-husband's name. But listen to her try to answer this question of, have you been abused like that?
No, you've never been abused like that, ever been hit by anyone. Anyone ever abused you?
Abuse has several categories.
You've been emotionally abused.
Emotionally, mentally.
Why is it hard to get out of it?
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Chapter 7: How do pop culture icons address their past trauma?
This is a show that, by the way, put Sarah Jessica Parker in a fucking horse and carriage ride, horse and buggy ride with the Russian guy. In winter to show how romantic they were. And that's something I can assure you that no native New Yorker has ever been in one of those. I refuse not only just because it's a cliche. I think those horses are abused and I think it's a huge crime.
It's a huge animal rights crime. But no. So Rosie O'Donnell is like she goes to see Wicked and she's wearing a Wicked shirt and T-shirt and she wants to meet Miranda in Times Square. And Carrie and Miranda are laughing about what a hick she is. Nice. Nice. OK, now we're going to we're going to get to the real the real crime here. Once you see the scene, you can't unsee it.
And if you haven't seen this episode, I don't know whether I should advise you to watch it because it's so fucking wild and disturbing or avert, avert, abort, abort. You know, that's me talking to Jax Taylor at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Abort, abort, abort. So I'm going to let – okay, I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this for you.
So we've had this story spun that this is a huge win for Carrie, okay, that she – so the way they talk about it is that Carrie knows that Aiden's coming back. Aiden's going to come back. That's why she's not delusional, thinking that they're in a loving, healthy relationship, even though he said, I'm not going to see or talk to you for five years. And I don't – Don't go and be with anybody else.
Don't have sex with anybody else. Don't go on a date with anybody else. Don't eat so much as look at another man. It's like you're dating Bill Maher, okay? And so they say that she was so secure in her knowledge that Aiden would never be able to resist Carrie for that long, because really we're talking about Sarah Jessica Parker, not Carrie Bradshaw, that Aiden would come back.
He'd come running back, you know, so enraptured by her youthful beauty. Just her whimsical young ways. So he cold calls her in the middle of the night. He wakes her up. And he's like, I want to have some phone sex. And she's like, okay. That's a big win. That's a big win. That's what the kids used to call a booty call. Okay? He just wants to get his rocks off.
And he's like, oh, I miss you so much. He just wants to get his rocks off. Okay? So he... We are subjected to sites... We should never have seen this. And I don't understand why Sarah Jessica Parker went along with this. Is Michael Patrick King in her ear being like, this is so edgy and cool and we're going to go viral and people are going to love you for it.
They're going to say you're braver than like, you know, like who calls themselves brave? Like, you know, actors go nude. They're like, oh, I was so brave. Okay. So. She begins masturbating. We watch Carrie Bradshaw administer to herself while she's on the phone. And this is how old-timey. When I said these women are old, I mean philosophically, technologically old.
They're not in the real world with us. She's having... She's masturbating while holding her iPhone with her other hand to her ear. Like most people, this would be a FaceTime with like a computer or like a phone, or she would just put it on speaker or she would be like, wait, let me get my earbuds in. Okay. But. Okay, so that's one.
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