In response to the backlash, Harvey spoke with Entertainment Tonight today to further explain his memo — and he’s not apologizing.

“I could not find a way to walk from the stage to my dressing room, to sit in my makeup chair, to walk from my dressing room to the stage or to just sit and have lunch without somebody just walking in,” he told ET. “I’ve always had a policy where, you know, you can come and talk to me — so many people are great around here, but some of them just started taking advantage of it.”

He continued, “I’m in my makeup chair, they walk in the room. I’m having lunch, they walk in, they don’t knock. I’m in the hallway, I’m getting ambushed by people with friends that come to the show and having me sign this and do this. I just said, ‘Wait a minute.’ And in hindsight, I probably should’ve handled it a little bit differently.”

While recognizing that he perhaps should he dealt with the situation in a different manner, Harvey — who also hosts NBC’s “Little Big Shots” and ABC’s “Family Feud — explained that he was “asking everyone to simply honor and respect” his privacy.

“If you come out your house, you don’t want anybody on your porch waiting on you. You walk to your car, you don’t want people bothering you on your way to your car. Everybody wants the freedom to be able to move around,” he said. “I just didn’t want to be in this prison anymore where I had to be in this little room, scared to go out and take a breath of fresh air without somebody approaching me, so I wrote the letter.”

“I don’t apologize about the letter, but it’s kind of crazy what people who took this thing and ran, man.”

Come Sept. 5, Steve Harvey will premiere the new version of his talk show, Steve, after a move to Los Angeles and a switch in focus to more comedy and celebrity. The new show is produced by IMG-WME and distributed by NBCUniversal Domestic Television Distribution.

“I created a concept with [Executive Producer] Shane [Farley],” said Harvey during a panel at the 2017 TCA summer press tour. “I wanted to bring late night TV to daytime. I think that’s what’s missing. After doing daytime for five years, no one watches daytime for takeaway anymore. They need to just laugh in the middle of the day, I’ve been restricted on that in the past five years. People need to have a place to go to laugh instead of waiting until 11 p.m. at night.”

Off the bat, Harvey addressed a harsh memo he sent to the staff of his Chicago-based talk show at the start of last season.

“I learned two things from that email. Number one, I can’t write and I should never write. I wrote that email a year ago. Somebody didn’t get a job in L.A., so they sent it to [Robert] Feder in Chicago. I knew I was in trouble when I saw it [reported] on CNN,” Harvey said. “I thought it was cute, you all didn’t.”


That said, Harvey is bringing 10 staffers with him from Chicago to his new show being shot on the Universal Studios lot in Burbank, Calif., to help fill out a staff of about 60, said Farley.