She knew the deal.
Whoopi Goldberg has hit out at Meghan Markle for claiming she felt “objectified” while working as a briefcase girl on “Deal or No Deal.”
The former royal, 41, made the assertion in an episode of her “Archetypes” podcast on Tuesday, saying she was “forced to be all looks and little substance” during her 34-episode stint on the game show back in the mid-2000s.
But Goldberg, 66, did not feel sorry for the star during a segment on Wednesday’s episode of “The View,” where she bluntly stated: “That’s TV, baby … what did you think you were going to do? You know that’s what the show was.”
Goldberg continued her diatribe against Markle, saying that she didn’t believe viewers were actively objectifying the star on screen.
“I don’t know that the people who are sitting there [watching] are thinking about you like that. They’re thinking, ‘I want the money,”’ she declared. “[‘Wheel of Fortune’ hostess] Vanna White is always in something interesting and beautiful, and she’s been doing this [forever].”
“The objectification might be coming from you and how you felt about how these women were being portrayed, and that’s what you have to change, because we’re performers,” Goldberg continued. “When you’re a performer, you take the gig.”
The EGOT legend continued hitting out against the “Suits” star, implying that her comments could have been insensitive to both viewers and other briefcase girls on the show.
“You left, and that was your prerogative. I feel bad, because I don’t think people were looking at these girls like this, I think they want the money,” Goldberg declared.
She ended her argument by warning Markle not to make “the other women [on ‘Deal or No Deal’] feel bad, because they’re trying to make a living, too.”
Markle hit headlines on Tuesday when she made the “objectification” claims while speaking with Paris Hilton on her “Archetypes” podcast, during which she broke down the “bimbo” stereotype.
The star said she would be on set for the game show and think back to her time as a college intern at the US Embassy in Argentina, where she was “being valued specifically for my brain.”
“Here, I was being valued for something quite the opposite,” she said about “Deal or No Deal.”
“There was a very cookie-cutter idea of precisely what we should look like,” Markle added, sharing that girls would line up at tapings for different stations where they would put on lashes, get extensions put in or get padding in their bras — and they even received spray tan vouchers every week.”
“It was solely about beauty, and not necessarily about brains,” she said.
Markle shared one detail she would “never forget,” when one producer on the show, who couldn’t pronounce her last name, would scream, “Mar-kell, suck it in!” repeatedly.
She ended up quitting the show, revealing she was “thankful for the job, but not how it made me feel, which was not smart.”
“I was surrounded by smart women on that stage with me, but that wasn’t the focus of why we were there,” Markle said.
“I would end up leaving with this pit in my stomach, knowing I was so much more than what was being objectified on the stage,” she continued. “I didn’t like feeling forced to be all looks and little substance. And that’s how it felt for me at the time, being reduced to this specific archetype.”