Paula Deen Says She Wanted to Send Matt Lauer a Sympathy Note Over His Own Scandal

When revisiting a 2013 interview with Matt Lauer addressing her racism controversy, Paula Deen revealed her reaction to the former Today host’s own scandal four years later.

In Canceled: The Paula Deen Story, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 6, Deen remembers the media backlash that followed her termination from the Food Network,  as a result of her admission to using a racial slur in a sworn deposition. 

The deposition was part of a lawsuit filed by Lisa Jackson, a former manager of one of Paula’s restaurants, Uncle Bubba’s Seafood and Oyster House. A federal judge in Georgia dismissed the lawsuit after a settlement was reached, but the controversy cost her numerous business deals. 

In the film, Deen says of the interview with Lauer, “It was terrible.”

“She was scared as could be,” Paula’s son Bobby Deen, 55, says in the documentary. “She was terrified, and sad and hurt and upset. It was all kinds of things.”

Paula’s other son, Jamie Deen, 58, recalls Lauer’s demeanor when questioning his mother during the segment.

“He was a little tough, he was a little on his high horse. It’s really hard for me even to watch, just because of the level of uncomfortability that my mother had.”

Paula’s husband, Michael Groover, claims of Lauer, “He was interrogating her like a Gestapo agent.”

One clip from the interview shows Lauer asking Paula whether her appearance on Today is only “to stop the financial bleeding.”

Jamie then points out that Lauer later “found himself in a very similar situation, where his world fell apart.”

NBC News fired Lauer, who’d anchored Today for two decades, after a sexual misconduct review in 2017.

Paula remembers how she felt when learning of Lauer’s scandal.

“I wanted to send him a note when his troubles started,” she says. “I was just very sympathetic to anybody that went through that kind of pain.”

She adds, “But some people deserve it.”

Director Billy Corben tells PEOPLE that his documentary explores the idea that “not all cancellations are created equal.”

Corben says when Paula made the comment on Lauer, everyone at the filming “could feel it in the room.”

He recalls thinking, “Well, that’s going to be in the final cut.”

In the documentary, the culinary star tells her side of the scandal that shattered her multimillion-dollar empire.

Paula maintains that when she admitted to having used the racial slur, she was referring to a 1987 incident, when she was held at gunpoint while working at a bank. 

“I’m looking for the truth,” she said at the PEOPLE/EW and Shutterstock studio at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday, Sept. 7. “The truth, if you watch the film, you will find it out.”