Pam Grier Shares 'Hanging From Tree' Lynching Claim on The View — Never Mentioned It In Her Memoir

We have questions for Pam Grier and the NAACP.

Say what?

Actress Pam Grier, who famously recalled in her 2010 memoir — "Foxy: My Life in Three Acts" — the time when her doctor asked if Richard Pryor had been dipping his penis in cocaine and then having sex with her, revealed today on ‘The View’ that she witnessed a lynched body hanging from a tree in Columbus, Ohio as a child. 

The sex thing made the memoir. The lynching story? Nope, she saved that one for MLK Day on "The View." 

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In fact, the word "lynching" appears one time in 76-year-old Grier's biography. The word "sex" appears 30 times. Cocaine makes it in 16 times. The word "racism" is mentioned twice.

The lynching story just magically ends up on live television months after revealing she's in a "cosmic relationship" and she's "horny as f--k." 

But, there she was today on live TV telling us all about that lynching story she's been holding onto since she was a child. 

"My mom would go, 'don't look, don't look, don't look,' and she would pull us away because there's someone hanging from a tree," Grier told Whoopi, Sunny and the others. "And they have a memorial for it now where you can see where people were and left. And it triggers me today to see that a voice can be silenced and if a white family supported a black, they're going to get burned down or killed or lynched as well."

OutKick reached out to the NAACP to get a reaction to Grier's claim and for any supporting evidence to support the claim. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, there has not been a single lynching documented in the history of Columbus, Ohio. 

Furthermore, America's Black Holocaust Museum lists the last documented lynching in Ohio as taking place in 1911.

Doesn't Pam Grier think there might be a family out there that would like to know what happened to its loved one?

What road was Pam Grier on with her family when she saw the person hanging from a tree? Why hasn't she told this story before? And what is this memorial she's talking about? 

According to OutKick research, we're unable to find any record of a lynching in Columbus, Ohio in the early 1950s. Remember, Pam was born May 26, 1949. 

And why wouldn't Pam tell that story to help seek justice for the family that lost a loved one? She released her memoir during the Obama presidency. It doesn't get much more favorable of a time to release a story she'd been holding in her whole life than when the first black president is in the White House. 

Yet, here we are in 2026 hearing about this lynching story. 

Did Sunny Hostin or Whoopi ask her why she never told that story? Of course not. 

Instead of telling us what should've been the most important story of her life in her memoir, Grier instead gave us intimate details of her sex life with Richard Pryor

The two were dating around 1975 and 1976. 

Pam wrote: 

I was a little tired from a lot of work and trying to manage Richard, but I felt healthy enough when I went in for my annual checkup with my gynecologist. After the exam, however, he asked me to step into his office to talk. I was scared because that had never happened before. 

I sat opposite him and he said, "Pam, I want to tell you about an epidemic that’s prevalent in Beverly Hills right now. 

It’s a buildup of cocaine residue around the cervix and in the vagina. You have it. Are you doing drugs?" "No," I said, astonished. "Well, it’s really dangerous," he went on. 

"Is your partner putting cocaine on his penis to sustain his erection?" "No," I said, "not that I know of. It’s not like he has a pile of cocaine next to the bed and he dips his penis in it before we have sex." I had a nauseating flash of one of Richard’s famous lines: Even my dick has a cocaine jones.

Then, in the book where Pam fails to tell us the lynching story, she tells the story about how she gave Richard Pryor oral sex and that's how cocaine ended up in her system. Via semen. 

Lynching? Nope. 

Richard Pryor with cocaine in his semen? Yep. 

I hope you all see why I'm having trouble with this unchecked MLK Day special story Pam shared on The View as Minneapolis tensions rise and scumbags like Dom Lemon fan the flames. 

Carry on. 

Written by
Joe Kinsey is the Senior Director of Content of OutKick and the editor of the Morning Screencaps column that examines a variety of stories taking place in real America. Kinsey is also the founder of OutKick’s Thursday Night Mowing League, America’s largest virtual mowing league. Kinsey graduated from University of Toledo.