If there's one memory Anderson Cooper has tried to put out of his mind, it's the moment when Madonna spanked and humped him onstage during her 2015 concert at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
The singer was on her Rebel Heart tour at the time. During Wednesday's episode of Kelly Ripa's Let's Talk Off Camera podcast, the 56-year-old journalist admitted to still feeling "mortified" about what took place that night. Madonna apparently pulled Anderson up on the stage and claimed that he had been "very bad," and then proceeded to spank him.
“I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” Anderson recalled during the podcast. “I was terrible. I danced terribly. It was mortifying.”
He went on to add that he didn't expect for Madonna to grind on him during the performance. She also handed him a banana, and he was captured eating it on the large screen.
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“I open it up and I start to peel it and eat it,” he explained. “And then all of a sudden, I start lowering down on this little electronic elevator disappearing on the stage just, like, eating this banana. To this day, I don’t know what happened."
That wasn't the last time Madonna danced with him, though. During a 2017 episode of Live With Kelly and Ryan, she asked the political commentator to make it up to her in front of the audience.
She also spoke about his awkwardness during the 2015 concert. “I want to talk about something that you weren’t good at. I’ve danced with you at nightclubs [and] you were very free and cool," she said. "And then when you got on stage, I was like, ‘Who is this guy?'”
Though Anderson did agree that he botched his performance, he defended himself. “It’s one thing dancing with you at a nightclub,” he replied. “It’s intimate and stuff. [But] in the Barclays Center with all these people? … You didn’t just dance with me, you bent me over, you slapped me, you did something else to me and then you handed me a banana.”
He then added that he was still "thrilled to walk into the CNN newsroom after [being] … humped on a stage by Madonna.” He asked her when she was going back on tour, hoping for an opportunity to redeem himself, to which she teasingly replied, "Soon."
Now, amid her recovery after being hospitalized due to a “serious bacterial infection” in June, Madonna has resumed rehearsals for her upcoming Celebration tour. The singer made the initial announcement for the tour in January.
