Anderson Cooper admits he felt ‘mortified’ when Madonna spanked and humped him onstage
Anderson Cooper has tried “to forget” the time Madonna spanked him onstage during a 2015 concert.
The journalist told Kelly Ripa’s “Let’s Talk Off Camera” podcast listeners Wednesday that he is still “mortified” about being spanked and humped by the Queen of Pop at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
“I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” the 56-year-old recalled. “I was terrible. I danced terribly. It was mortifying.”
Cooper noted that he “didn’t expect” Madonna, 65, to grind on him and hand him a banana during the “Unapologetic Bitch” performance.”
“I open it up and I start to peel it and eat it,” the political commentator remembered. “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,” he continued.
Madonna called out Cooper’s awkward reaction to her NSFW dance moves during a December 2017 episode of “Live With Kelly and Ryan.”
She joked, “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. And then when you got on stage, I was like, ‘Who is this guy?'”
While the Emmy winner admitted to “botch[ing]” the performance, he did defend himself at the time.
“It’s one thing dancing with you at a nightclub,” Cooper told the “Material Girl” singer. “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 did say, however, that he was “thrilled” to “walk into the CNN newsroom after [being] … humped on a stage by Madonna.”
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The Grammy winner asked Cooper to “make it up” to her in front of the talk show’s cheering audience, with Ripa, 52, praising his “better” attempts.
Cooper asked when Madonna was going back on tour, perhaps hoping for a chance to redeem himself, and the songwriter teased, “Soon.”
Although she announced her “Celebration” tour this January, she paused her prep after being hospitalized for a “serious bacterial infection” in June.
Madonna has since resumed rehearsals amid her recovery.
