Steve Harvey Defends Telling Staff to Avoid His Dressing Room

Steve Harvey isn’t sorry for his views on workplace behavior.

That’s the message he sent on Thursday in response to an online furor over his demands to the staff of his daytime program, “The Steve Harvey Show,” that no one enter his dressing room without an appointment or approach him in hallways.

“Look man, I’m in my makeup chair, they walk in the room. I’m having lunch, they walk in, they don’t knock,” Mr. Harvey told Entertainment Tonight in an interview published Thursday. “I’m in the hallway, I’m getting ambushed by people with friends that come to the show and having me sign this and do this. I just said, ‘Wait a minute.’ And in hindsight, I probably should’ve handled it a little bit differently.”

Mr. Harvey issued his don’t-bother-me marching order to his staff in a memo before the start of the fifth season of his show. It was leaked to Robert Feder’s media blog. In the memo, Mr. Harvey wrote, among many other strict instructions:

“There will be no meetings in my dressing room. No stopping by or popping in. NO ONE.

Do not come to my dressing room unless invited.

Do not open my dressing room door. IF YOU OPEN MY DOOR, EXPECT TO BE REMOVED.”

After the memo surfaced Wednesday on Mr. Feder’s blog, there was a torrent of tweets mocking Mr. Harvey.

Mr. Harvey defended the memo after the leak.

“I could not find a way to walk from the stage to my dressing room, to sit in my makeup chair, to walk from my dressing room to the stage or to just sit and have lunch without somebody just walking in,” Mr. Harvey said to Entertainment Tonight. “I’ve always had a policy where, you know, you can come and talk to me — so many people are great around here, but some of them just started taking advantage of it.”