Jemele Hill and Cari Champion brought Stephen A. Smith onto their podcast this week for a 95-minute conversation that turned a long public dispute into something said out loud, in full, and on the record. The talk ran through sports, politics and media careers, but it quickly centered on the same question that had followed all three for months: who said what, and who never called whom back.
That is why the episode is drawing attention now. Hill and Champion had spent the previous year trading barbs with Smith through their own platforms, and the conversation gave listeners a direct look at the break between them. Smith had already been criticized after replacing Michelle Beadle and Cody Decker in the SiriusXM lineup last summer, and Champion later questioned in a following-fall Instagram video why he had resisted calling out Beadle for so long while also raising his comments about Jasmine Crockett and the Ray Rice remarks that led to a suspension at in 2014.
Smith pushed back by saying Hill and Champion should have come to him directly with their concerns. He said the problem was not that they spoke, but that they did not speak to him. Hill answered with a sharper memory. She said Smith never called her or reached out during her suspension after she called Donald Trump a white supremacist, and she pointed to Will Cain as someone who did check in behind the scenes. That set up the episode’s clearest fault line: Smith wanted private contact before public criticism, while Hill said he had not offered her that same courtesy when she needed it.
Hill also read back remarks Smith had made in the Washington Post, using them to frame what she saw as a double standard. She told him, “It’s not that I expected you to be silent, but during that entire time, Stephen A. you never called me, you never reached out, you didn’t say anything.” Later, after Smith answered, she added that he had left her without a simple, private check-in — “Hey sis, you good” — and then expected more from her than he had given. Smith later took credit for Champion’s First Take role and for helping build the careers of Black women in sports media, which Hill said made her cringe and called unbecoming.
The exchange did not erase the disagreement, and it did not settle the broader argument around how Smith treats Black women in sports media. What it did was move the fight out of posts, clips and side comments and into one long conversation that made each side answer the other in real time. If there is more to come, it will likely come in a second part of the podcast. But for now, the record is clear: Hill and Champion confronted Smith directly, and he finally had to answer back.
