Outrage Erupts Over Jenny McCarthy’s Shocking Claim She Could Spot Barbara Walters Had Dementia Based on This One Interaction

Jenny McCarthy is stirring up controversy once again, this time claiming she diagnosed legendary journalist Barbara Walters with the beginning stages of dementia based on a single interaction during their time on “The View.”

The 52-year-old former Playboy model, who has no medical credentials, has a history of pushing questionable health claims, including widely debunked theories linking vaccines to autism. Now, she’s adding Walters to her list of unverified diagnoses.

During a March 25 interview on Maria Menounos’ “Heal Squad” podcast, McCarthy discussed her brief and tumultuous time as a co-host on “The View” from 2013 to 2014.

The former MTV star detailed the challenges she faced on the ABC talk show, including a chang.org petition to get her off the show, but it’s her off-the-cuff medical assessment of Walters that has many raising eyebrows.

According to McCarthy, for that one year, she was specifically hired to inject pop culture into “The View” following the departures of Joy Behar and Elisabeth Hasselbeck.  Producers wanted at that point to “lighten up” the show’s tone.

“A week into hosting ‘The View,’ Barbara Walters — I had mentioned something about Katy Perry, who Barbara just interviewed on her ’10 Most Famous People of the Year’ thing — and she said, ‘Who?’” she recalled.

Adding, “And I said, ‘Katy Perry.’ And she says, ‘Who’s Katy Perry?’” McCarthy recalled. “It was the first sign that I realized that Barbara was suffering from beginning stages of dementia. I was like, ‘Oh s—t.’ It was literally not even a week into the show.”

McCarthy claims this moment triggered a sudden shift in the show’s direction, with producers allegedly abandoning their pop culture focus to protect Walters.

“They were like, ‘We’re flipping it. There’s no more pop culture, we’re going back to politics,’” she said. “So she didn’t look bad. She knew politics, but she didn’t know pop culture.”

The claims about Walters, who passed away in December 2022 at age 93, remain unverified, according to the New York Post.

While there were reports of Walters experiencing cognitive issues in her later years, neither she nor her family ever confirmed such a diagnosis. The legendary broadcaster retired from television in 2014 but hadn’t been seen publicly since 2016.

Post readers quickly criticized McCarthy’s armchair diagnosis.

“Wow Jenny is confusing advanced age with dementia. Hey newsflash names come and go when you’re a senior,” wrote one commenter.

Another added, “Agree, and heaven forbid that a 70-80-year-old professional news type doesn’t know or care about some new pop singer.”

One reader sarcastically noted, “Latest dementia test has only one question: ‘Who’s Katy Perry?’ I would fail that question so I guess I have dementia.”

This isn’t McCarthy’s first foray into controversial medical pronouncements.

On the same podcast, she said that her vegan lifestyle almost killed her, and now she eats meat again.

“I tried vegan, and I almost died. I literally almost died,” she said.

She continued, “I was exhausted, fatigued, I was a mess. So, I went on a low histamine diet; I went on every one of ’em. Finally, my functional medicine doctor said to me last year, ‘It’s time for you to go full carnivore.’”

Another medical assessment she made aligns with the man that she and her husband endorsed for president in the last election, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Jr.

Following her son’s autism diagnosis in 2005, she became a vocal critic of vaccines, suggesting the mumps-measles-rubella vaccine triggered his condition — a theory that began in 1998 with a now-retracted medical paper published by British Dr. Andrew Wakefield. Although Wakefield has lost his license to practice medicine and his contention about the MMR vaccine has been thoroughly discredited by scientific research, his invalid claims about the MMR vaccine have gained widespread acceptance.

McCarthy’s infamous 2008 statement in PBS, “If you ask 99.9 percent of parents who have children with autism if we’d rather have the measles versus autism, we’d sign up for the measles,” drew sharp criticism from medical professionals and public health advocates. The health care community’s response to McCarthy’s quip came 16 years before the current deadly measles outbreak sweeping Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, infecting more than 450 people, most of them unvaccinated.

McCarthy’s stint on “The View” lasted just one season, with the actress claiming she was a poor fit for the show’s confrontational style.

“They want you to fight,” she told Menounos. “They wanted to immediately switch from light and fluffy to fight. I’m not a fighter… I choose the side of peace in any fight.”

While McCarthy has moved on to other endeavors, including judging “The Masked Singer” and co-hosting a docuseries with her husband, Donnie Wahlberg, her pattern of making unsubstantiated medical claims continues to raise eyebrows.

From vaccines to dementia, McCarthy seems determined to play doctor—regardless of her lack of medical credentials or the potential harm such public speculation might cause.