TV Star Slams Betty White as ‘Passive Aggressive’ Woman Who ‘Fat Shamed’ Her

A TV veteran claims The Golden Girls star Betty White, who died at age 99 in 2021 as one of TV’s longest and beloved mainstays, had a nasty side off camera.

All in the Family actress Sally Struthers recounted on the Jan. 13 episode of Let’s Talk About That! With Larry Saperstein and Jacob Bellotti that she wasn’t the biggest fan of White.

“I know everybody loves her. They loved her so much,” said Struthers, adding “They signed petitions to get her to guest host Saturday Night Live. I know all that.”

However, Struthers, 77, said she didn’t have “such a great experience with her,” calling her a “very passive-aggressive woman.”

At one point Struthers said they were meant to star together in a TV game show pilot and she went to White’s home to work on the show.

White asked her housekeeper for something to eat, remembered Struthers. “Then the plate was set in the middle and it was cookies, I think,” she said. “So I reached for a cookie and she said in front of everyone, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that if I were you dear, you don’t need a cookie.’”

The moment gave her pause, said Struthers. “Totally fat-shamed me in front of the rest of the people in the room,” she said. “And I thought, ‘Gosh, that’s not nice.’”

Out of her White’s Golden Girls co-stars, Struthers said she had much more positive memories of Bea Arthur, who guest-starred on All in the Family as Maude in the second season of the series.

“Bea Arthur comes in and she’s a force of nature,” said Struthers. Arthur died at age 86 in 2009.

During script run-throughs, Struthers said Arthur would use expletives “filthier than a drunken sailor” to get laughs out of the producers.

“Sometimes they’d look up. But you couldn’t count on them for a lot of laughs ‘cause they were too busy making sure we said the words that were on the page,” said Struthers, adding that Arthur would “put all sorts of expletives in her lines to shock these men.”

Before starring in The Golden Girls, Arthur starred in her own eponymous show called 1972 Maude, based on her All in the Family character.

Interestingly, Arthur was also not a fan of her co-star on The Golden Girls, with White saying that

“Bea was not that fond of me,” White told Joy Behar on a recent episode of ‘The Joy Behar Show.’ “I don’t know what I ever did, I don’t know. But she was not that thrilled with me.”

With a smattering of film roles across the ’70s and aughts, Struthers has also worked steadily in TV, appearing in Gilmore Girls and General Hospital, among other credits.