In June 2013, Paula Deen was an emotional mess and the empire she spent 30 years building was on the verge of collapse.
A former employee had filed a lawsuit against her that alleged racial discrimination and sexual harassment, and then Deen herself admitted under oath to using the n-word. Several months later, all the charges in the suit were dropped but not before major companies such as Target, Food Network and QVC had severed business ties with Deen.
She did an interview with Matt Lauer on The Today Show that was a PR disaster and decided to return to that same show this morning 15 months after melting down on camera.
Deen now admits that she cannot bear to watch the footage from that painful time, as she told Lauer this morning,
"I looked at none of it, Matt, because I didn't recognize that woman. That was a woman in trauma, in, I would say shock, trying to understand what had happened. The cold, hard fact, Matt, is I probably should not have been here. I probably should have been at home, maybe even under the care of a doctor."
Deen also did perhaps the wisest thing possible in the aftermath of her empire-leveling scandal: She went home and did nothing. Instead of trying to repair her image, Deen took time off and used it to regroup, and the distance allowed her to see things from a different perspective.
She has now returned to the business world a lot smarter and is in the process of launching her own digital empire. She is also extremely sorry for her actions in the past because, as her business crumbled, it put a lot of people in corporate America out of work.
Deen says her current goal is to "make people happy, not to bring sadness."
Do you think Deen's second chance in the business world will be as successful as the first? Leave a comment below.
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