Lisa Guerrero gives us the scoop on how that viral interview with Kenneth Copeland went down.
The investigative journalist and Inside Edition correspondent ("basically, I chase bad guys") explains to ET, as part of our Unfiltered series, that the encounter was an unexpected one, and it required Guerrero to go into full investigative journalist mode quickly.
Guerrero had previously made many attempts to speak with the Texas-based televangelist on the controversy over his private jet use to no avail. She and her team took matters into their own hands as they followed Copeland to Branson, Missouri in May, which he was visiting for seminars. On the third day of surveillance, while she was taking a break to gather herself at her hotel, Guerrero's producer unexpectedly called her.
"I get back to my hotel, you guys. I'm in the shower and I hear the phone ring, and I'm like, there's no way. There's no way. I reach my hand out and it's my producer going, 'He's here, you need to get back right now. Get in the car, you need to be here in five minutes. Come back,'" Guerrero says.
"So I've got a full head of hair, wet. I jump out of the shower. I grab a sweatshirt and my wet hair I put back in a ponytail, which I never do on camera for this. A half a billion have seen it; billion with a B," she continues.
Guerrero ran after Copeland as he made his way to an SUV.
"We weren't expecting him to stand there and talk to me for so long, but he did," explained Guerrero. "And when he did and he got really angry at me, and kind of, he flirted with me, he tried a couple of different tactics to get me from asking him the question that I kept going back to, which was: Did you say you won't fly commercial because you don't want to get into a tube with a bunch of demons, and is it fair to your donors that you're spending millions of dollars on private jets?"
The reporter continued to stand her ground, staying true to the purpose of an investigative journalist.
"The job of a journalist is to hang in there and ask the questions," she affirmed. "You can't control if they run away from you or what they say to you, but you can control your demeanor and you can control the questions. And that's what I did."
Born in Chicago and raised in San Diego, Guerrero didn't always have her eyes set on a career in broadcast. She was an actress before she became a journalist, appearing in TV shows like Aaron Spelling's Sunset Beach.
Professionally, Guerrero chose to go by her Chilean mother's maiden name (her father's last name is Coles), who passed away from cancer when Guerrero was 8 years old.
"Because my mom died when I was 8, I was missing something," she reminisced. "I felt disconnected to her because she wasn't physically here, and I realized in my twenties I just felt like I looked more Latina, I feel like I connected to the Latino side of my family."
With her mother's passing, Guerrero credits her father for instilling the outlook that beauty comes from within at an early age.
"I didn't have a mom to kind of teach me the ways of 'beauty,' but I had an amazing dad who loved me and didn't care what I looked like," the brunette beauty says. "So I kind of got that message that it doesn't matter what you look like. You don't need makeup to be beautiful. You don't have to shop at expensive places to look good. Your beauty is something that is inside of you, not on the outside of you."
"I've been on camera my entire adult life," she added. "I've always felt a pressure to look good on camera because of course television is a visual medium. But, as I've gotten older I've realized that I'm never going to look 25 again and that's OK. It's OK to have experience. It's OK to have lines around your eyes and age spots. It's okay not to be perfect. Perfect is boring. What's more interesting is experience and a sense of humor, a sense of confidence."
Watch Guerrero's full interview in the video above and peek at more episodes of Unfiltered below.
