'Good Morning America' Scandals You Never Knew About

Good Morning America is one of the country's top-rated morning news programs, but if tabloid rumors are true, it's also the show with the most backstage drama. Who's the diva on set? Which anchors can't get along? Find out why GMA sometimes makes the news instead of reporting it.
ABC reportedly went into "crisis" mode in May 2015 after George Stephanopoulos admitted to donating $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation since 2011.



Strahan's run on Good Morning America has already been plagued by nasty rumors. Included on the list: a Sept. 1, 2017 report from Page Six alleging that Strahan ticked off ABC News when he refused to cut short his holiday to cover Hurricane Harvey–the storm that devastated his hometown.

"ABC News asked Strahan to come home from his vacation. He's from Houston. But he refused and is still floating around on a yacht in Greece somewhere. ABC is really upset with him," said one source, with another adding the staff at ABC "just cannot believe he didn't come back."

Others downplayed the situation. A senior executive producer of Good Morning America insisted the team "spoke with [Strahan] every day. Michael was very clear he wanted to be part of the coverage, and we decided the best plan was for him to lead the charge covering the recovery."

Whatever the case, Strahan was back on the air by Sept 5, 2017.



In August 2016, Amy Robach found herself in hot water when she used the racial slur "colored people" while discussing a report on the controversy over casting actress Zendaya to play Mary Jane in Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017).

According to People, Robach apologized for her "mistake" that same day, telling The Associated Press that she meant to say "people of color" on air and that what she actually said was "not at all a reflection of how I feel or speak in my everyday life."

Still… Oof.



In 2014, Page Six reported that a 43-year-old man named Troy Warren was arrested after showing up to the Good Morning America studios and threatening anchor Robin Roberts. Warren reportedly told GMA's security director that Roberts owed him money, saying, "When I see her, I'm going to punch her in the face." According to Page Six, Warren had visited the studio eight times between June 10 and June 24 of that year.

The report came nearly a month after a homeless man dropped by GMA's Times Square studio and threatened to stab talk show host Michael Strahan with a knife.



At the end of 2013, Roberts officially came out as gay by thanking her girlfriend of ten years, Amber Laign, in a Facebook post that detailed Roberts long and painful battle with MDS, or myelodysplastic syndrome. Roberts, whose sexuality was the subject of rumors for years, was criticized by some for not coming out sooner.

In an interview with Parade magazine, Roberts said her reservations had a lot of it had to do with protecting her girlfriend's privacy. "News flash: Some people like their anonymity," she said. "This is what's right for me. Love is love, and I'm grateful to have that. Sometimes there's a stigma attached to how people view you if you're living a certain way." She continued, "But I don't care; you gotta live your life. You gotta find what happiness is and what it means for you, and you can't get caught up in what someone is saying about you on Twitter. You don't go through a year like I did to not be happy and not make your own choices."



What would a successful morning news program be without some alleged backstage drama? Buried deep in a story about Josh Elliott's messy exit from ABC came a report from TMZ alleging that Lara Spencer and Amy Robach "hate" each other and "can't hide their contempt." Even worse, TMZ claimed that the senior vice president of ABC News, James Goldston, actually confronted Robach and called her "toxic" for creating on-set tension.

Spencer and Robach denied their feud in a video broadcast by TMZ in April 2014, but that didn't do much to stop the bleeding. The next day, sources for Radar Online spilled the beans on their alleged feud, claiming Robach hated Spencer because she "shamelessly flirts" with men on set and allegedly abandoned Robach during her breast cancer battle.



More signs of tension on the GMA set leaked in 2014 when ABC allegedly buried news of Lara Spencer's promotion to co-host in an internal memo. According to sources for TMZ, the awkward timing was deliberate. On the one hand, the network allegedly gave Spencer a title bump to keep her happy after her rival, Robach, was promoted a few weeks prior. On the other hand, the network supposedly couldn't make a big deal out of it because "[Roberts] can be quite a diva, and GMA didn't want to ruffle her feathers," TMZ reported. That might explain why the memo referred to Roberts as "the captain of our team." Ah, office politics.