Jemele Hill insists she's "always had a very good relationship" with former ESPN president John Skipper despite the fact that he suspended her for tweets criticizing Dallas Cowboys' owner, Jerry Jones.
Jones had threatened to bench players who "disrespected the flag" by kneeling during the national anthem, to which Hill responded that if viewers and fans disagreed with the view, they should boycott the team's advertisers.
Hill had also previously drawn the ire of US president Donald Trump while host of ESPN's SportsCentre, labelling him a "white supremacist".
Speaking to OTB AM host Eoin Sheahan at this month's Web Summit in Lisbon, she discussed the tweets and how it impacted on her career as ESPN host.
"When I made those comments about the President, [Skipper] was not happy with me," she explained.
"Not necessarily because he wanted to challenge what I said or what I believed, but because of the very difficult situation it put ESPN in.
"ESPN have unfortunately been in the middle of that discussion [about sports and politics] because people have looked at the network and said that it's too political - and use that as a means to attack the network.
"My comments coming out didn't help the narrative. John was understandably very angry at me.
"Now, he did not suspend me right away. I was suspended by some tweets I made about the NFL and Jerry Jones and that he said that he would cut anybody who decided to kneel during the national anthem.
"My point to the fans was that if you were so upset by that why don't you make the choice with your remote and stop putting it on the players to have to stand up to these owners."
"You name it, I was called it. I was weirdly impressed by those who did snail mail [...] You gotta be committed to racism to send me that snail mail!" 🗣@jemelehill on the negative reaction she received following her tweets about @realDonaldTrump 📠| https://t.co/z0h6S1b1ws pic.twitter.com/esPFDYcrOt
— Off The Ball (@offtheball) November 14, 2018
She continued: "You have the power, you're the consumer.
"If you want to support Colin Kaepernick's cause or support the players who you feel that have been pushed into this anthem policy change, then boycott.
"The word you can not bring up usually is boycott when you work for a network in business with all the leagues.
"So I was suspended for two weeks after that.
"The day before I came off my suspension, John and I had breakfast. We've always had a very good relationship.
"I told him then, I'm not going to take back what I said - but I understood exactly why he suspended me.
"So there's never been any bad blood between the two of us."
