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De Laurentiis said the forward he turned in for her first cookbook was so bad, her editor rewrote it.
Giada De Laurentiis opened up about some of the adversity she faced as a woman trying to make it in the food space early in her career -- accusing Mario Batali of focusing more on her body than her cooking.
During an appearance on Samah Dada's On the Menu YouTube series, the Food Network star brought up "a person we're not supposed to talk about, but we're going to," referring to Batali, who was accused by four women of "inappropriate touching" -- three of them former employees.
According to De Laurentiis, she asked Batali to write a forward for her 2005 cookbook, Everyday Italian, and he agreed.
"He's really the main guy I had worked with, he's a legend in the Italian space. In that time, he was," she explained of the ask. "I felt like his stamp of approval would have been huge for me. He said he would and he wrote it."
But when he turned it in, it wasn't what she was hoping.
"When I read it, I cried. Because I realized, 'Ah, he's basically saying that I've gotten to where I've gotten, and I've had this little bit of success that I had, because I have big boobs, and that if he had boobs, he would even be much further,'" she explained, not revealing the exact comment he wrote.
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View Story"Because I'm, like, a joke, right? To him, it was like a little bit of a joke," she continued. "And so I called my editor, and I was in tears. I'm like, 'Clearly I can't use this. So now what do I do?' She was like, 'We'll rewrite it and we'll send it to him for approval.' So we did, we rewrote it. But I will never forget ... that's basically what a lot of people figured, cute girl with big boobs, that's why they're watching her and that's why she's successful."
Per De Laurentiis, that attitude toward her followed her for "many, many years," not really coming to an end until she opened up her restaurant on the Las Vegas strip.
"All of a sudden, that changed everybody's perspective. It legitimized me in my own community," she told Dama. "I think that was like impressive and a lot of other chefs -- including Mario -- were like, 'Wow, we never thought that would ever happen. And, be careful, because you might be gone tomorrow.'"
Following allegations of sexual misconduct, Batali settled lawsuits with two of his accusers. He subsequently issued an apology for his "past behavior" and took "full responsibility" for his actions, and has basically fallen off the map since.
