Sally Struthers Says She Was ‘Fat-Shamed’ by Betty White

Sally Struthers is opening up about some negative memories of Betty White.

On the Jan. 13 episode of Let’s Talk About That! With Larry Saperstein and Jacob Bellotti, the 77-year-old actress spoke about some of her past interactions with White, who died in 2021 at 99 years old. 

The All in the Family star told the hosts that the house used for the exterior of the Golden Girls house was “up the street” from where she lived in Los Angeles’ Brentwood neighborhood. Then, she said that “now that she’s gone,” she wanted to talk about White.

“I know everybody loves her. They loved her so much,” Struthers said. “They signed petitions to get her to guest host Saturday Night Live. I know all that. I didn’t have such a great experience with her.” She called her a “very passive-aggressive woman.”

The Gilmore Girls actress said that once, she went to White’s house to work on a pilot for a new game show. White asked her housekeeper to bring them something to eat.

“Then the plate was set in the middle and it was cookies, I think,” Struthers 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 hosts were shocked. “Totally fat-shamed me in front of the rest of the people in the room,” Struthers said. “And I thought, ‘Gosh, that’s not nice.’ ”

Struthers had much more positive memories of another Golden Girls star, however: Bea Arthur. Arthur guest-starred on All in the Family during the show’s second season as Maude, the cousin of Jean Stapleton’s Edith Bunker.

“Bea Arthur comes in and she’s a force of nature,” Struthers told the hosts of the star, who died in 2009 at age 86. She remembered that before filming an episode, the cast would do a run-through for the producers and people from the network. “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.”

But Arthur was “filthier than a drunken sailor” and “put all sorts of expletives in her lines to shock these men,” the actress shared. Arthur ended up starring as Maude in an eponymous All in the Family spin-off before joining Golden Girls.

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Struthers also told the hosts that she would often run into Arthur at the grocery store and end up laughing with her in the aisles. “She would trash everyone we ever knew,” the actress remembered. “I loved how filthy she was.”

Struthers, who won two Emmys for All in the Family, most recently starred in A Man on the Inside with Ted Danson. She also starred as Babette on Gilmore Girls and has worked widely as a voice actress on series including Dinosaurs and TaleSpin, in addition to a recent theatrical production of An Old-Fashioned Family Murder.