Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has been unceremoniously axed over the phone. From Juan Williams to Shannen Doherty, see other stars who didn’t get their pink slip in person.
“I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone,” former Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz wrote to her employees on Wednesday night. “It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.” Bartz, who was hired by Yahoo with a mandate to revive the company’s flagging brand, had a rocky two-year tenure, and even outsiders suspected that her corporate future was in doubt. But an insider told The Wall Street Journal that Bartz was still surprised by her ouster. This is a phone call she was not expecting.
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After being fired from NPR for saying on The O'Reilly Factor that Muslims on planes made him nervous, Juan Williams went to Fox News to vent about his treatment—where he had immediately been given a $2 million, three-year contract. According to Williams, Ellen Weiss, NPR’s head of news, called him and told him he “had made a bigoted statement.” When Williams asked for an “eyeball-to-eyeball, person-to-person” conversation, Weiss replied that “there’s nothing you can say that would change my mind. This decision has been made above me.”
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Caddie Steve Williams’s firing was galling enough after Williams carried the golf pro’s clubs for 12 years, serving as a groomsman at his boss’s wedding (Woods was also a groomsman at his), and holding Woods as he wept for the death of his father. But according to Williams, Woods ended his caddie’s lengthy service with a phone call. Woods’s agent contests this claim, saying Woods fired Williams in a face-to-face meeting.
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According to former costar Holly Marie Combs, Shannen Doherty was fired from the WB’s witch show Charmed with a phone call—at night, while she was on a TV-movie set in Winnipeg, Canada. "How do you go from directing the season finale to being [given] a pink slip over the phone, when [you're] in another country, at eight at night?" Combs told TV Guide. "It was really a tacky way to go about it." The firing was all the more surprising because, according to Combs, Doherty had just asked to be released from her contract because of tensions with her other costar, Alyssa Milano, and WB refused.
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Paulina Porizkova was very open about her unceremonious firing from America’s Next Top Model, telling Craig Ferguson on The Late Late Show that she was booted over the phone—and on her 44th birthday, to boot. “The reason I was told I was fired was because it seemed that America’s Next Top Model has gotten too fat and they needed to cut some fat, and the fat was me,” she said. Writing on The Huffington Post, Porizkova compared her firing to being in a falling elevator and to “a slap in the face that takes you backward to sink into your well-worn couch and to reexamine your life, to reevaluate your place in the world.” Ouch.
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An injury ended his football career, setting up “Stone Cold” Steve Austin to become one of the biggest wrestling stars of all time. Austin achieved significant fame in the late 1990s as a hard-drinking troublemaker who feuded with mentors and rivals. But the first stage of his career with World Championship Wrestling came to an end with another injury: a torn triceps suffered on tour in Japan. WCW’s president also believed Austin wasn’t “marketable” and fired him over the phone. Austin went on to win 19 championships and become a global wrestling superstar.
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Miss Sprint Cup Paige Duke was the face of NASCAR’s top racing series until some long-forgotten nude photos emerged in the summer of 2011. She had sent the pictures to an ex-boyfriend, who was rumored to have been a football player at Clemson University and later in the NFL. When the pictures appeared online, Duke was fired immediately over the phone without being given a chance to explain. She called her job the “best job in the world,” and crusaded to no avail get it back.
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The baseball legend wasn’t always appreciated like he would be in 2000, when he was inducted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame. He started his career with the Cincinnati Reds and was a crucial part of the team’s “Big Red Machine” that won five National League titles between 1970 and 1976. Pérez came back to be the Reds’ manager in the early 1990s; the team’s owner, Marge Schott, was widely and repeatedly reported making racist comments about the Reds’ black players, and some thought bringing him on board was Schott’s attempt to appease angry fans. However, he only lasted only 44 games. "The only thing I didn't like was the way I got fired—by a phone call,” Pérez said.
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Comedian Sarah Silverman only survived a year on Saturday Night Live before being canned because only one of her sketches survived to dress rehearsal, and none ever aired. But her bosses added insult to injury by giving her—or her agent, rather—the news by fax. Silverman parodied the humiliating ordeal on an episode of The Larry Sanders Show, in which she played a newcomer whose jokes were ignored by the sexist chief comedy writer.
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