Jillian Michaels rose to fame for her dedication to fitness, but it seems she doesn’t always apply that same dedication to friendship.
Bob Harper, who cohosted 12 seasons of The Biggest Loser with Michaels, said in a recent interview with The Guardian that she was not among the alums of the controversial reality competition series who reached out to him after he suffered a heart attack.
“We weren’t besties, but we were partners on a television show for a very long time,” he said. Michaels’ silence “spoke volumes to me,” Harper continued, adding, “I would not expect Jillian Michaels to do anything other than what she wants to do.”
Entertainment Weekly has reached out to a representative for Michaels for comment.
The Biggest Loser wrapped up its 18th and final season in 2020, by which time Michaels hadn’t served as cohost in six years. But Harper and Michaels launched the series together, driving hundreds of contestants through grueling trials and tribulations to lose weight over the course of their dozen shared seasons.
Harper had a major heart attack he described as “widowmaker” in 2017, three years after Michaels left the series for good. “I was in full cardiac arrest… My heart stopped. Not to be dramatic, but I was dead. I was on that ground dead,” he explained at the time, saying he believed the only reason he survived is that two doctors happened to be at the gym where he went down.
Trae Patton/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty
Jillian Michaels and Bob Harper on ‘The Biggest Loser’
The Biggest Loser was criticized during its time for the quality of its weight-loss regimens and allegations that contestants had been given caffeine pills. The series’ history will soon be explored in Netflix’s documentary Fit for TV: The Reality of The Biggest Loser, which promises to unpack the good, the bad, and the ugly of the contentious reality program.
“Producers love that sh–, they were like, ‘We want them to puke! We want the madness of it all!'” Harper says in a trailer.
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Michaels has since moved on from reality hosting to broadcast news punditry, though she hasn’t retired from controversy. She drew ire this week for a series of controversial statements made on CNN’s NewsNight With Abby Phillip, in which she defended President Donald Trump’s call for the Smithsonian Institution to remove so-called “improper ideology” related to aspects of American history like the system of chattel slavery, and instead “celebrate American exceptionalism.”
Trump is “not whitewashing slavery,” Michaels argued, insisting that “you cannot tie imperialism and racism and slavery just to one race, which is pretty much what every single [museum] exhibit does.”
Host Abby Phillip said she was surprised that Michaels appeared to be “trying to litigate who was the beneficiary of slavery,” but Michaels held firm: “Every single thing is like, ‘Oh, no, no, no, this is all because white people bad’… That’s just not the truth.”
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