'It doesn’t define me'
Tamron Hall won’t allow any job to determine her worth.
NBC announced in a statement in February that the Today show anchor, who served 10 years at the network, would be leaving NBC News and MSNBC when her contract expired at the end of February, just days after learning she’d be losing her 9 a.m. time slot because of the incoming former Fox News star Megyn Kelly, joining the show in September.
Hall, 46, also released a statement via the network after her departure was announced: “The last 10 years have been beyond anything I could have imagined, and I’m grateful. I’m also very excited about the next chapter. To all my great colleagues, I will miss you and I will be rooting for you.”
Following her exit from the network, Hall said she received two different types of calls from people inquiring about her departure.
“Some would call and say, ‘Oh my God, are you OK?’ And I was like, ‘What happened? Who died?’ and then there were other people who said, ‘What’s next?’ ” she said at the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council’s Summit Salute on Thursday, according to Page Six.
But Hall said that she doesn’t “want a friend who calls me saying, ‘Oh my God.’ ”
“It’s a job. It doesn’t define me. It doesn’t determine what I do … how I treat people. I’m going to always look you in your face and say, ‘Thank you’ and ‘Please’ — and if you make me mad, a good cuss word — but in the end, a title can’t define you,” said Hall, Page Six reports.
The former Today show anchor added: “When your card no longer says anything beneath it, but your name, are you still you? Can you still savor the victory — the moment that you were able to take that dream? I never imagined that I would be on the Today show.”
After she left the network, a source close to the situation told PEOPLE that Hall, who was offered millions to stay, “wasn’t going to settle for sitting on the sidelines.”
“Tamron’s a woman of integrity,” said the anchor’s good friend, TV writer-producer Mara Brock Akil, who used Hall as the muse for Gabrielle Union’s career-driven character on the hit BET show Being Mary Jane. “And she’s writing her own story.”