Keke Palmer is currently promoting her memoir, Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative. She’s written about being a child star, supporting her family, learning how to control her image and analyzing her own fame and charisma. There doesn’t seem to be a lot in the book about her past relationship with an abusive partner, Darius Jackson, although I don’t believe they’ve worked out all of their custody issues, so there might be a legal reason to keep those conversations under wraps. One of the headlines from the book promotion is Keke talking about her time on Ryan Murphy’s Scream Queens, and how she had a falling out with Murphy. Plus, there’s a funny/terrible blind item about one of her Scream Queens costars.

Perhaps the most revealing Hollywood anecdote is about Ryan Murphy, who created the 2015 Fox show “Scream Queens,” which Palmer co-starred on for two seasons. She describes how she’d been given her shooting schedule and arranged to fulfill another business obligation on a day off. But when that day rolled around, she writes, production told her that she was actually needed on set. She decided to keep her prior obligation, which she writes resulted in an angry phone call with Murphy in which he “ripped” into her and told her she was unprofessional.

“It was kind of like I was in the dean’s office,” she says now, reflecting on the interaction. “He was like, ‘I’ve never seen you behave like this. I can’t believe that you, out of all people, would do something like this.’”

Palmer apologized and thought everything was copacetic between them — until a few days later, in her trailer, a co-star gave her a different read on the situation. “I said, ‘Ryan talked to me and I guess he’s cool, it’s fine,’ and she was like, ‘It’s bad,’ trying to make me scared or something, which was a little irritating.”

Prior to the incident, Palmer felt she might go on to be one of those people “you keep seeing in Ryan’s world — Sarah Paulson, Emma Roberts.” But in standing up for herself, Palmer says, she believes she ended that possibility.

“I’m still not sure Ryan cared, or got it, and that’s okay because he was just centering his business, which isn’t a problem to me,” she writes in the book. “But what I do know is even if he didn’t care, and even if I never work with him again, he knows that I, too, see myself as a business.”

“Scream Queens” — which also starred Roberts, Ariana Grande, Billie Lourd, Abigail Breslin and Lea Michele — does not seem like it was a positive experience for Palmer, per her book. In another part of the book, she describes how a white actor on the show, whom she calls “Brenda,” once made a racist remark to her on set. Palmer writes that Brenda was upset over a clash with a colleague, and she tried to calm her down by suggesting that everyone “have fun and respect each other.”

“Keke, literally, just don’t. Who do you think you are? Martin F— Luther King?”

Palmer says she declined to name the offending party because she wanted to take the power out of her words and not make the moment about Brenda. “It was such a weighted thing that she said, but I didn’t allow that weight to be projected on me, because I know who I am,” Palmer says. “I’m not no victim. That’s not my storyline, sweetie. I don’t care what her ass said. If I allow what she said to cripple me, then she would.”

[From The LA Times]

Every story I hear about how Ryan Murphy runs his productions is like this – miscommunications, yelling, drama, and turning a blind eye to truly problematic sh-t. While Murphy might be one of the most successful men in television, he genuinely seems like an awful person to work for. As for the Brenda blind item… who said “Who do you think you are? Martin F— Luther King?” Ariana Grande? Emma Roberts? Lea Michele? It does not sound like Billie Lourd or Abigail Breslin, but it’s weird that it sounds like something Lea, Emma AND Ariana would have said. While Lea has a history of saying racist sh-t, my guess is… Emma.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.