Amber Rose is ready to spill the celebrity tea on her new VH1 talk show.
“The Amber Rose Show,” premiering July 8 on VH1, is produced “Dr. Phil” McGraw and his son, Jay. It will touch on a range of issues including pop culture, relationships, motherhood and one of Amber’s favorite subjects: sex.
“I did a segment on ‘The Doctors’ about slut-shaming which coincided with my Slut Walk,” says Rose, 32. “Dr. Phil saw it and said that I needed my own talk show. I was surprised he reached out to me; it’s an unlikely pairing, but when we began to talk we meshed well and understood each other, which is really most important.
“He is a feminist in his own right.”
With sex expert Dr. Chris Donahue on the show, and over 11 million followers on social media, Rose — called “Muva Love” by her fans — hopes to use this new platform to get her voice across, using talk show host Wendy Williams as an inspiration. “I love Wendy [and] I listened to Wendy on the radio growing up before she had a talk show.” she says. “She just didn’t give a f–k and that was so inspiring. With my talk show I also don’t give a f–k, but I don’t come from a malicious place. I just say how it is. I pride myself on being an open book and I am extremely relatable. I did not grow up with money — I’m a down-home South Philly girl and I don’t give a s–t because I have lived that life.”
The cropped-haired Rose recounts being a stripper at the age of 15 to support her family. But even before that she experienced hardships in school and later on in her adult life. “The thing that people fail to realize is that I was called a slut in high school before I even had sex,” she says. “I was a virgin. I was called a slut when I was in a relationship with a famous man [Kanye West] … Then a year goes by and I meet the love of my life, my husband Wiz Khalifa, and then I am still a slut and I’m a ‘rapper-f–ker’ and ‘star-f–ker’ and I am like, ‘Whoa, what is going on?’ So it just got to the point where I was like, ‘I can’t cry about this. I am just going to embrace the word ‘slut’ and not let it hurt me anymore … So now I am extra slutty on purpose just to piss people off because I get a kick out of it.”
Rose is always ready to defend herself and her family, and that’s when the Philly tends to come out of her. This includes derogatory comments made by West, when said he had to take 30 showers after dating Rose, as well as comments made towards her-now-ex-husband Khalifa and their 3-year old son, Sebastian.
“I can’t help where I was raised. I don’t listen to what people say when they say I have to be a certain way for the public or media. I just do me,” she says. “You just have to jump on board for the ride and put your seat belt on.”
One other title that Rose doesn’t want is “role model” — and she’s not shy about saying so. “I don’t want that responsibility of people looking at me as a role model,” she says. “I don’t want young girls to say, ‘I can be a stripper and then have a really cool life then get with someone famous and become famous myself like Amber.’ There is so much that went into that; it’s my life path and it’s not for everybody.
“So I speak to adults and mothers and they can tell their kids what they want to teach them. The only child I have to teach is Sebastian.”
And when it comes to critics and naysayers saying that Rose doesn’t deserve a talk show — and constantly referring to her as West’s ex and baby mother to Khalifa, Rose had this to say: “I did not ask to be famous. People would yell at me and get so mad at me for being famous for no reason and I am like, ‘Yeah, I know. I don’t know what the f–k you want me to do about it. The s–t just got handed to me, bro.’ It’s not my fault that people paid attention to me … I didn’t ask for this s- -t. I have my own house, my own employees, my own business team.
“If you just call me ‘Wiz Khalifa baby mama’ I am going to have an issue with that. Not now, in 2016. Don’t do that to me.
“At the end of the day I am my own person and I work really hard for this.”