When Maria Menounos asked Catt Sadler if she’s planning to sue E! News over a pay disparity, Sadler simply replied, “Not today.” Sadler, who quit the network after learning of a pay gap between herself and her male co-host Jason Kennedy, discussed the possibility of legal action against the company in a conversation with Menounos on SiriusXM. “By the way, there is something called .. .the [equal] pay act,” she said. “It is unlawful to discriminate, it is sexual discrimination, so you better believe that people are going to say on record what protects them in a certain, particular instance.” When Menounos asked whether Sadler had any plans to sue in the future, Sadler didn’t provide any further details.
Sadler also recently wrote an essay for Coveteur discussing her reasoning for leaving E!, describing a “massive” gap between what she and Kennedy were being paid. “You see, I didn’t start out on a crusade to be a voice for gender equality in the workplace,” Sadler said. “I didn’t have grandiose plans to organize powerful people and roar about equal pay. For me, at that time, it started out as simply the ‘right thing to do.’” She said she did not want to leave her role at the time, but that “it was important to explain how I had been wronged and how I knew in my core that to stay would mean collaborating with an evil system.” NBC has defended the disparity between Kennedy and Sadler’s pay by saying there is “a lot of misinformation” out there, and that “Catt Sadler and Jason Kennedy had different roles and therefore different salaries. Catt was focused on daytime. Jason Kennedy is on primetime evening news, plus red carpet. Our employees’ salaries are based on their roles and their expertise regardless of gender.”
