It’s taken more than three years, but Hoda Kotb is finally giving her side of the story about why she disappeared when Meredith Vieira visited her.
“Do you remember when you came to visit my child?” Hoda asked her fourth hour guest co-host Thursday, referring to the time Meredith stopped by her apartment a few years ago to see her daughter Hope when she was a baby.
“Oh, when you left me, you went upstairs and never came back?” Meredith responded, while Hoda laughed. “That was unbelievable. I’m meeting the baby. I don’t think you excused yourself. Finally, like, 20 minutes later, I go, ‘Well, I guess I should leave.’ I don’t know what’s going on.”
Hoda said she was upstairs, but Meredith was left in the dark.
“We were having a conversation and then you just — it was the oddest thing because you’re not rude,” Meredith recalled. “So I thought, ‘Oh, my God. Is she sick?’ And nothing.”
“I think I was putting the baby down, and then I just got tired,” Hoda said.
Meredith said there was no goodbye, so she “quietly left.”
“I know, I remember because later I go, ‘Meredith?’ and then you were gone,” Hoda said.
In 2019, Meredith discussed what happened while guest-hosting TODAY with Hoda & Jenna with Jenna Bush Hager. She said Hoda twice told her that her other daughter, Haley, needed a nap before going into Haley’s room and closing the door.
It was at that moment that Meredith realized Hoda wanted her to leave.
“I didn’t pick up on the cue,” she said before joking that she was left standing there before exiting the apartment.
“This is the thing: We know that about Hoda,” Jenna said.
Jenna said Hoda is known for these kinds of vanishing acts.
“She has this thing called the Ho-dini,” Jenna said, noting that her co-host is known for going to events, staying an appropriate amount of time and then just disappearing.
“So, I should not be — and I wasn’t — insulted by it, but I really shouldn’t be because it’s just the Hode,” Meredith said.
“That’s how she is,” Jenna said.