Jewel Was Removed From Radio Station After Calling Host ‘Small Penis Man’

Jewel has revealed that she once was removed from a radio station after insulting the penis of the host.

“My whole career, the slant that the media gave it was through a really, I dare say, patriarchal lens,” the singer told Stereogum while promoting her new album, Freewheelin’ Woman. “You think of my origin story, right? The whole world knows I lived in my car — they think because I was fighting for my dream of music. That is an absolute misrepresentation of what happened.”

The singer revealed that the was a time when she had to sleep in her car, as the only way to receive her paycheck was to sleep with her boss at the time.

“I refused to be leveraged and he wouldn’t give me my paycheck and I couldn’t pay my rent and I started living in my car and then my car got stolen and I was homeless because of that, because I wouldn’t bang a boss,” she said.

Jewel recalled many other moments where she had faced sexism. In the interviews that she did in the ’90s, when she became notorious for mouthing off and was sometimes removed from radio stations, the singer explained that her behavior back then was due to the immense number of inappropriate questions that male journalists would ask her.

“I remember South Carolina, live on air, ‘Hey, you may have heard me describe my next guest as a large-breasted woman from Alaska. Jewel, how are you?’ I said, ‘You must be the small-penis man I’ve heard so much about from South Carolina.’ Escorted out of the radio station. Like, that was just life. That’s what life was like,” she said.

The Masked Singer winner also talked about how she was belittled in a live interview with former MTV anchor Kurt Loder, in which he talked negatively about her poetry book and spoke over her.

“I was so pissed,” she said. “He was just a d–k. What an ass to show himself like that. It was almost that thing where you’d feel sorry for somebody — it’s like, ‘Wow, here’s a full-grown man who does news for children, on a children’s network, for teenagers.’ Yeah. You’re bitter.”

Jewel kept fighting for the career though.

“My ambition was to be one of the best singer-songwriters of all time, which is a really ambitious, crazy goal. But it meant, again, always putting the art first,” she added. “It meant ‘hardwood grows slowly,’ meaning I wanted to be around for 60 years. If you grow too quickly, that’s bad for a long-term arc. There’s no shortcut to building something that hopefully lasts a long time.”