When audio of a segment in which he compared his toast tastes to the skin color of Black women he considered appealing leaked earlier this week, a radio host for a Buffalo, New York rock station got into major trouble. Now, one of the women mentioned, Halle Berry, an Oscar-winning actress, has heard about the segment and has called it “disgusting.”
Rob Lederman, host of 97 Rock’s “The Morning Bull,” started a riff about making breakfast and his preference for toast. The former stand-up comic got into an odd conversation about the dark bread he loves, comparing it to the Black women he considers sexy.
Lederman said his toaster is set to “the attractiveness of women that I find attractive,” so he’ll never hit Serena Williams’ level of attractiveness. For his toast, he listed Berry as a “comfortable” color.
“But I am very comfortable at a Halle Berry level. I need a little bit of mulatto still coming through,” Lederman said while other people in studio laughed, later adding that “Gayle King is not even on my toaster level.”
A Buffalo-based ESPN reporter posted the clip without much commentary hours after it aired, and it ignited outrage throughout Western New York and beyond.
97 Rock immediately lost sponsors after the video went viral, and those in the studio were roundly chastised in the local news. The Buffalo Sabres fired Rich “Bull” Gaenzler from his in-arena hosting job, and the radio station suspended him. Lederman, on the other hand, had been shot by Wednesday and expressed regret for remarks that he said “sounded terrible.”
Berry, on the other hand, received the recording on Friday, retweeting Marcel Louis-Jacques’ tweet of the audio and calling the segment “disgusting,” among other items.
