Elisabeth Hasselbeck apparently thinks there's more behind David Hernandez's American Idol seventh-season ouster than just a lack of home viewer votes for the former male stripper.

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"My mind went, 'You know what?  This is a conspiracy," said Hasselbeck during Thursday morning's live The View broadcast on ABC.  "American Idol maybe didn't want to deal with the fact that he had this shady -- so-called -- past and they blocked all of his phone calls of people voting for him.'"

Hasselbeck's fellow The View co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar weren't necessarily buying what the former Survivor: The Australian Outback castaway was selling.

"They blocked his phone calls?!" said a surprised Goldberg.

"No!" responded Behar.  "This is [Hasselbeck's] paranoia."

"I'm making up my own conspiracy theory.  This is my paranoia," agreed Hasselbeck.  "Because he's good -- he is good -- despite his... whatever he was doing on the side.  But I think he actually deserved the spot to be there and I feel like maybe they were just trying to get him off the show."

Hernandez was ousted from Idol's seventh season after "over 29 million" home viewer votes were cast following Tuesday night's live performance episode broadcast -- slightly more than a week after it was first revealed he "steadily worked" for three years as a male stripper at Dick's Cabaret, where he appeared fully nude and performed lap dances for the establishment's "mostly male" patrons.

Syesha Mercado and Kristy Lee Cook were revealed to be the other members of this week's bottom three vote-getters, and Hasselbeck thought Cook should have been the one to leave instead of Hernandez.

"She wasn't as good.  Her song definitely wasn't as good," she said.  "David Hernandez -- remember, this great singer and then there was this idea and this information came out about him that he may have been working in a male strip bar or something -- but he has an incredible voice and he's so talented and last night, he was in the bottom three and he got voted off."

Despite Hasselbeck's self-described conspiracy theory,  Idol executive producer Ken Warwick previously stated Hernandez would not be disqualified from the competition because his past "won't make a difference" and "the public will make the decision anyway" -- which is exactly what happened.

"The conclusion we've come to is everybody's a whore a little bit," said Behar.  "Everybody whores themselves just a little bit."

"Whoring to one person is not whoring to another," replied Goldberg.  "That's the bottom line."
About The Author: Christopher Rocchio

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