EXCLUSIVE: Isaiah Washington Breaks His Silence In Interview

By Keith Boykin, in pop culture
Friday, June 22 2007, 10:07AM

DEVELOPING STORY -- The phone call caught me off guard. As long as I've been talking and writing about Isaiah Washington, I have never met the man or spoken to him, despite the arguments by some critical commenters that I've "defended" him because of a supposed friendship we have. That's not the case.

Washington called me last Sunday for the first time to speak about the brewing controversy and to tell me his side of the story. It took several days for us to connect, but last night we finally spoke.

I stepped out of a DNC dinner when I received his first call, and Washington told me that he had wanted to call me for six months to share his side of the story but he had declined to do so out of "loyalty" to ABC and Grey's Anatomy's black producer Shonda Rhimes.

Listening To Washington

In his first voicemail message on Sunday, June 17, Washington said he was "trying real hard not to incite an unnecessary war," but he wanted the rest of the story to come out. "A lot of people made a lot of mistakes," he said. Washington said he had "owned up" to his mistakes, but added that there were "some things that happened October 9 on the set that were never addressed, that were covered up," he said. "The truth will set you free," he added. Washington seemed reluctant to disclose the new information then out of fear that it might hurt Shonda Rhimes's show. "Apparently that's what's gotten me in trouble, trying to be loyal and a defender of something that obviously has not been interested in defending me."

Then last night he filled in the details. Washington said he stood behind everything he said in his hometown paper, the Houston Chronicle. "I'm not firing back at anybody else in the cast but T.R. Knight and Katie Heigl because they both know as well as Chandra Wilson knows that T.R. Knight was very tactical in trying to remove me from the show because he knows and I know that I was gagged, and he has been working on a conspiracy to get Patrick Dempsey and myself off the show for the last year and a half."

According to Washington, "He had led me to believe that Patrick Dempsey was so abusive and so horrible to people in a two and half hour conversation on the plane. For two and a half hours, this boy talked me ear off, Keith, about how horrible Patrick Dempsey is and how he needs to be removed from the show. And in my argument, the irony of it is that Patrick happened to show some behavior that was very in line with what T.R. was telling me on the plane and I challenged T.R. to deny it or say this isn't true."

He went on: "All the dirty macking he gave me about Patrick Dempsey led me to believe that Patrick was trying to treat me in a disrepectful manner in the same kind of manner apparently accorded to T.R. that Patrick had treated him. And even to this day, Patrick Dempsey and T.R. still have a rift and are still not on speaking terms. They do not talk to each other...I know Patrick Dempsey has supported me by stating that if there is anyone that needs to be fired it is T.R. Knight because he has created such a negative environment on that set because he felt like he has not been treated and giving the same kind of leading man type of story lines that have been given to Patrick and Isaiah. He felt like his character has been treated very caricatureish and dopey. That's why you see his character changing so signifcantly...This is something that T.R. Knight has been trying to do and using the incident of the so-called F-word that was targeted at him, which is a flat out lie, to blackmail the writers into doing his bidding, and it's not working. The producers are not happy about it, and quite frankly, they think something has gone awry with T.R. Knight... But all of them, including the producers all the way up to Touchstone, are not happy.

"And let me be clear Keith. All of this I'm saying to you has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he's gay. He came out October 19 as purely a tactical move to do exactly what he did, get public opinion in an outrage to lead him to believe that he is being picked on because he is gay. He could care less about the gay community."

Speaking Of Washington

To be clear, I have never defended Isaiah Washington's use of the F-word. I have said repeatedly that the word was wrong. But I have also declined to join the army of people who have called for Washington to be fired from Grey's Anatomy. To me, his history of support for the LGBT community argued that he should get the benefit of the doubt. The f-word using Isaiah Washington is not the same man I first saw on the screen playing an openly gay man in Spike Lee's groundbreaking 1996 film Get On The Bus.

Last night Washington told me in no uncertain terms that he had not changed. He said he's still the same person he was before who always believed in respecting everyone regardless of their sexual orientation. He said he supported the gay community in the past and continued to do so today. And it was T.R. Knight, he said, who had pimped the LGBT community. Washington charged that Knight was not on the set the day when the f-word was used, that it wasn't used in a critical way, and that it wasn't used against Knight.

Washington went on to say that he wanted to give me a "scoop" on the story but couldn't do so because I hadn't gotten back to him in time. He pointed me to an article in the Houston Chronicle yesterday that he said was mostly accurate in describing his side of the story.

But assuming he was right about the use of the f-word last fall, why did he use the word again at the Golden Globes in January? When asked that question, Washington told me that he was responding to a reporter in the audience who had yelled a question to him about the incident with T.R. Knight.

I told Washington that the footage I had seen only showed him speaking at the mic and did not seem to show anyone asking a question about the issue. It looked to me as though Washington just started shooting off about the issue for no reason. But Washington said the part of the discussion where the question was asked was cut out from the stories in the media.

I've worked with the media for 20 years, and I think what could have happened was that the questioner was not on camera or on mic, and therefore the question might not have been picked up by the cameras that were hooked up through the mult box to the main microphone.

I spoke to Washington again late last night and by text message early this morning. He told me he was planning to tell all when he appears on Larry King Live on CNN.

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