Icon Robin Roberts recently admitted to being human.
In anticipation of the launch of her new roundtable news talk series on Disney+, Turning the Tables with Robin Roberts, the Good Morning America anchor sat down for an exclusive conversation with PEOPLE and said there was one interview she almost said “no” to doing.
Reminder, Roberts has been conducting top-notch interviews with the utmost professionalism for decades and has gone back-and-forth with legendary names in entertainment such as Ozzy Osbourne and Michael Jordan.
But a sit-down with President Barack Obama was a little different. It was personal.
“I’m going to get real right here. I can’t believe I’m going to share this. I was ill but people didn’t know I was ill, it was the second time around, and I was asked to go to the White House to interview then-President Barack Obama,” she said.
“They said that he was going to most likely change his stance on marriage equality. I had not come out yet.”
Roberts had previously gone through a bout with cancer.
PEOPLE took a deeper dive into the reasoning behind Roberts’ nerves regarding the interview with the 44th President of the United States.
“So here I am going to interview him, and I was like, ‘Oh, are people going to ask me about (Amber Laign)’ I wasn’t ready,” she said.
Laign is her current partner of over 16 years.
“If I was walking down the street with Amber, I would introduce her as my girlfriend. I wasn’t hiding, but I wasn’t ready for the world and I was fearful.”
That’s when she shockingly revealed that she almost passed on the opportunity.
“I almost said, ‘I’m not going to do the interview,’ and I’m thinking, ‘Robin René Roberts, this man is going to change the course of so many lives and you’re afraid that you’re going to be outed? No.’
“I marched there and I did the interview and I’ll never forget sitting across from him and saying, ‘President Obama, have you changed your stance on marriage equality?’ And he said yes.”
She has interviewed Obama multiple times since 2012.