Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes on How ‘GMA’ Colleagues Reacted to Romance

Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes are opening up about how their former coworkers responded to their relationship.

During the June 12 episode of their podcast Amy & T.J., which was filmed live in New York City, the former GMA3 co-hosts looked back on the moment their relationship was publicly revealed and how the people they worked with responded at the time.

Robach, 51, explained that the pair returned to work two days after initial news broke that they had a “private relationship,” and clarified that the photos taken of them “did not catch [them] cheating.”

She continued: “But when we came back for those two days, we were surrounded with support. My dressing room was full of all of our colleagues—”

“Some of it fake, some of it fake, absolutely. Some of it was BS,” Holmes, 46, interjected.

“But once it was clear that we weren’t coming back,” Robach said with a laugh, “I never heard from most people again.”

Holmes admitted that he could understand where some of their colleagues were coming from, saying, “And we get that to a certain degree, right? Everybody’s trying to hold on to their job. They don’t want to be seen as being an ally of the two people that ABC News doesn’t like.”

“And for us, even we stayed away from some of our former colleagues because we were worried about them,” he continued, before noting that they had lunch with co-host Michael Strahan during their last week. “You wouldn’t believe the effort we put into it with Strahan.”

Holmes then revealed that they would speak with Strahan about what time to arrive in comparison to when they would arrive, noting they were trying to “protect Strahan from [them].”

“That is the shame I’m talking about,” he explained. “This is a guy we’ve been very close to for 10 years now, and even we didn’t want to get whatever our ‘stank’ is on him for some reason. And we’ve struggled to get out of that mindset. But friends like that do help, and time helps.”

Robach added how the backlash they experienced felt like she “murdered someone.” However, she did note that in rare times when they would walk down the street, they received “a lot of people yelling support. Like ‘We support you.’ ‘We love you.’ ‘Love is love.’”

“No one came up and said anything horrible to our faces, but it was just all the comments and all the commentary and all the headlines, it just, it weighs you down to the point where you think ‘I’m the worst person in the world,’” she said. “And you do feel like you’ve committed a crime.” 

“It’s bizarre… It was strange to me to suddenly, you know, to be this, this just hated horrible person for loving someone. It was frustrating, too, because the narrative was not true,” she continued.

Holmes also said the fact they stayed silent in the immediate aftermath was partly to blame for why the narrative got out of control.

“We lost the narrative off the top, is the problem. Once people were told what it was, and we didn’t come out and make a statement,” he explained, adding that they drafted statements that day, but ABC News allegedly rejected them.

“Once we lost that ability to speak and to control the narrative, it was done, and in the social media age, nothing we could do,” he said, as Robach concluded, “Perception becomes reality.”

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Holmes and Robach parted ways with the news organization and their roles at GMA3: What You Need to Know in January 2023 following the revelation that they were dating. Although the couple’s off-camera relationship did not violate policy, and both Holmes and Robach were privately separated from their spouses, ABC News said at the time their relationship posed an “internal and external disruption.”

“After several productive conversations with Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes about different options, we all agreed it’s best for everyone that they move on from ABC News. We recognize their talent and commitment over the years and are thankful for their contributions,” an ABC spokesperson said in a statement at the time.

In an earlier episode of their podcast, Holmes admitted they were “angry as hell” after their exit but have since come to see the silver lining.

“We do want to say ‘Thank You’ to ABC News. We’ll be honest that we were angry as hell at ABC News for quite a while, but only with time and with perspective, we can appreciate them recognizing something in us, putting us together in the first place, set us on a course to get better health and happiness to where we can come out of it now healthier and happier than we’ve ever been in our adult lives,” he said.