While appearing on Monday’s episode of The View to promote her new show, Good American Family, Ellen Pompeo got candid about the hardships she’s had to navigate in her career, including receiving death threats for being married to a Black man.
Here’s what she said about the hateful comments and how they’ve made her stronger.
Pompeo says she’s ‘had death threats from being married to a Black man’
TV Insider reported that when Pompeo was asked how she handled reading negative tabloid headlines about her early in her career, she offered an unexpected response.
“I think all young women struggle with confidence, and it makes you super self-conscious. But I also had other fish to fry,” she said. “I had bigger things [to worry about]. I had death threats from being married to a Black man. It’s not the only thing I dealt with.”
Pompeo’s husband, Chris Ivery, is a record producer and writer who’s worked with artists like Rihanna. According to People magazine, the pair met at a grocery store and soon learned they grew up minutes from each other in Boston.
“We were friends for six months; then one night she just looked different to me,” Ivery told the outlet. “We were six degrees our whole lives, so I feel like we were sort of meant to be,” she added.
Per TV Insider, the couple tied the knot in 2007 and have three children.
Pompeo has talked about her experiences raising biracial children
In 2018, while appearing on an episode of Jada Pinkett Smith’s Facebook Watch talk show Red Table Talk, Pompeo talked about one incident that involved her daughter Stella, who is biracial, and a young Black girl who came to their home, Atlanta Black Star reported. According to Pompeo, the child seemed uncomfortable when she realized Pompeo, a white woman, was Stella’s mother.
“The little girl came in, and I introduced myself, and I said, ‘I’m Stella’s mom.’ She looked at me, and she was almost scared,” Pompeo recalled on the show. “Then she went right to Stella and said, ‘That’s your mom? I thought that was your mom,’ pointing to the nanny.”
Red Table Talk co-host Willow Smith said the child may have been “confused,” but Pompeo quickly shut that down.
“Confused, yeah, but again non-trusting, possibly,” she said.
Pompeo also opened up about growing up in a racist environment while on the show.
“I grew up in an Italian-Irish neighborhood in Boston. … It doesn’t get more racist than that,” she expressed. “The racism is what drew me to Black people, to brown people, because I was like, ‘What is it?’ It just made me so curious.”
