Sharon Osbourne is facing criticism after a revelation about how she sacked a former assistant during an appearance on Would I Lie To You?.
The music manager and former X Factor judge was a guest on the Christmas special of Would I Lie To You? on Thursday, where she shared a story about how she forced one of husband Ozzy Osbourne’s former staff members to go back into a house fire to retrieve some of her family’s expensive artworks.
Recalling the story, Sharon revealed that after lighting candles in their living room one Christmas, she came downstairs to discover that Ozzy’s arm and “half his hair” were on fire, angrily remembering that the assistant in question was “sleeping” at the time of the incident.
After helping Ozzy, Sharon told her fellow panellists: “I thought, right, where is that [censored] assistant? So I go into the guest house, and he’s like ‘is everything alright?’ and I’m like, ‘no, the house is on fire, get out and help, go in and get the paintings out’. And I said, ‘you must go in and find the dogs’.”
She continued: “So he has humming and ahh-ing – this ex-assistant – so anyway, he did get the dogs. And the fire engines arrived, very lovely people, and they came and they had this oxygen for the assistant. So I said, ‘how very dare you. You work here. You get more paintings out’.”
Sharon then claimed she took the mask off Ozzy’s former assistant’s face and “put it on my dog”, to applause from the studio audience.
Host Rob Brydon then questioned how the assistant came to be sacked, to which Sharon responded: “Well, after this terrible night, he was not talking to me. And Ozzy and I were recounting everything, we were laughing and laughing, and [the assistant] said, ‘I don’t see what’s funny about any of this’.
“He said ‘I think I’m going to have damaged lungs’, and I mean… ‘please’. So then, I just said ‘if you don’t think that’s funny, do you think this is funny… you’re fired!’.”
Sharon then confirmed the story was true, but while her fellow panellists laughed off the revelation, many people on social media were shocked by what the TV personality disclosed...
HuffPost UK has contacted representatives for Sharon Osbourne for comment.
Sharon is currently in the UK appearing in the Christmas live show Nativity, alongside Rylan Clark-Neal and both Danny and Dani Dyer.
Over the Christmas period she’s also been on Michael McIntyre’s Big Show, where she played Send To All, and recently appeared as a guest panellist on Loose Women.