Sharon Osbourne has backtracked on her controversial claims she fired a personal assistant after sending him into a fire at her home.
The former X Factor judge faced a backlash following an appearance on Would I Lie To You? over Christmas, 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.
Sharon then confessed to firing him when he told the star he did not find the incident funny after she’d later laughed about it with Ozzy.
However, Sharon now has a different version of events, claiming she was “joking” during her appearance on the BBC panel show, and actually fired the assistant years later.
Speaking on her US TV show The Talk: “I told a true story about a fire I had in my house. He went in, he got the paintings out. And then, just to be precocious, I said at the end of this little thing I was doing, ‘Oh, and then I fired him.’
“It was a joke because I was on a comedy show. I fired him about 15 years later.”
During her original recollection of 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.
She said: “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!’.”
HuffPost UK did not receive a response from Sharon’s representatives after contacting them last month.