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MSNBC anchor Katy Tur said she was “puzzled” when her now-estranged father — legendary journalist Bob Tur — told her he was transitioning to become a woman.
“My dad said, ”I am a woman’,” Katy Tur told CBS Sunday Morning, as she recounted their conversation from nearly a decade ago while promoting her upcoming memoir, “Rough Draft.”
“And I said ‘What?’ And my dad said, ‘I’m a woman, I’m transitioning, I’m going to become a woman’.”
The 38-year-old journalist is the daughter of media power couple Marika Gerrard and Zoey Tur — who before transitioning to become a woman gained fame as the helicopter cameraperson who was the first to film pivotal events in Los Angeles, including the 1992 riots and the OJ Simpson police chase in 1994.
Gerrard, a retired broadcast journalist and photographer, and Tur went on to co-found the Los Angeles News Service.
The 2013 phone call would be the last time Tur talked to her dad, who has never met the two children she has with CBS News star Tony Dokoupil.
“I remember being at first puzzled and saying, ‘You gotta be joking. You’re kidding, what are you talking about?'” she said on the CBS morning show.
“And my dad was adamant,” she said. “‘I’m the wrong person. I’m going to become the right person. Don’t you see? This is why I’ve been so angry’.”
“And it was really just, it was a lot,” added Tur, who made a name for herself as MSNBC’s reporter covering Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Tur said that her dad confessed to being violent with his wife and two children, including throwing batteries at her, her brother, and her mother.
Zoey Tur told CBS Sunday Morning that she “failed” her daughter.
“She [Katy] really looked up to me, and I failed her,” Zoey Tur said.
“No father wants to fail their daughter…Throwing batteries? Probably, yeah. Punching walls? There were a couple.”
Zoey Tur said that her behavior during the marriage to Gerrard was due to her not being able to be her true self.
She said she made the decision to transition while sitting in a Florida hotel room. Had she not become a woman, she said she would have ended her life.
In 2016, Zoey Tur said in an interview that coming out as transgender caught her daughter and ex-wife off guard.
“They knew I was bisexual. That was acceptable. The transgender stuff, no. No, that crossed the line,” Zoey Tur said.
“Rough Draft” was published by Simon & Schuster.
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