Mo’Nique is spilling it all in her latest interview with The Hollywood Reporter as she opens up on her decision to no longer share an open marriage with her husband Sidney Hicks. While the comedian previously said that either of them sleeping with other people wouldn’t be a deal breaker in their relationship, her viewpoint of sharing Hicks with someone else has certainly changed with time — and with good reason. “Life began to happen,” she said. “I began to see a strength I had never seen before. He loved me at my worst. I didn’t want to sacrifice that just for a lay. So I grew out of that.”
Mo’Nique first met Hicks when she was in the 10th grade but it wouldn’t be until 2006 when the pair would tie the knot, one year after welcoming their twins. But her decision to not only share an open relationship with her husband/manager isn’t the only thing that’s changed for the 55-year-old after having ended her feud with Lee Daniels last summer. As fans will recall, the pair had butted heads over Mo’Nique refusing to promote her 2009 movie, “Precious,” during awards season if she wasn’t going to be compensated since that wasn’t part of the contract she’d signed.
RELATED: Mo’Nique & Lee Daniels End ‘Precious’ Feud & Will Work Together For Netflix Thriller ‘Demon House’
Nearly a decade after their fallout, Lee Daniels has finally apologized to Monique. This comes years after Mo’nique’s fall out with Oprah WInfrey, Tyler Perry and Daniels following their hit movie “Precious”. pic.twitter.com/FGGLdZqTCu
— Blex (@blex_media) April 2, 2022
Mo’Nique later said she had been blackballed in Hollywood by her friend, as well as the film’s producers Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey because of her decision to respectfully decline the press tour in order to spend time with her family instead. Soon after the debacle, Winfrey invited Mo’Nique’s family onto her now-defunct talk show after her brother Gerald reached out and wanted to publicly apologize for molesting her as a child. The comedian claims she gave Winfrey the go-ahead to tape the episode but was blindsided to find out that her mother, father, and other brother, who had all “downplayed” her abuse in the past, were also included in the televised conversation.
Because Winfrey allegedly knew that Mo’Nique had not been close to several of her family members, including her mom, she was baffled to see the episode air without her approval, causing an even bigger divide between the two. “I reached out to everybody I could to try to get to Oprah. No. Nothing. It just went dead.”
It wouldn’t be until 2014 when Winfrey and Mo’Nique would come face to face and the latter was invited to Alfre Woodard’s home to help celebrate Lupita Nyong’o’s Oscar nomination for her role in the critically-acclaimed film, “12 Years A Slave.” There, she would run into the OWN founder, who she couldn’t help but confront about what happened at her show and why she hadn’t returned her calls.
And UNTIL Mo’Nique gets her public apology, this is her stance on Oprah Winfrey: pic.twitter.com/0Qj2u1DeT3
— those MIND-BLOWING things. (@TheGreatIsNate) February 4, 2020
“Oprah Winfrey was sitting on my right. And then I turned to her and said, ‘Now I need to talk to you,’” she recalled. “There were some phenomenal Black women there. You could have heard a pin drop. I said, ‘Since you didn’t want to return my calls, for whatever reason, I’m going to say this right here.’”
But Winfrey apparently had no idea Mo’Nique had taken issue with the episode because that information was never passed over to her, she claimed. Winfrey went on to respond by telling her, “I’m going to look into your mother and father being on the show, because I didn’t know anything about that,” and ‘If I’ve done anything to offend you, I apologize.’”