B. Smith's Husband Dan Gasby Faces Sunny Hostin Live on 'The View' After She Criticized Him

His other critic from The View Whoopi Goldberg was absent from Thursday's show due to an illness

Dan Gasby appeared live on The View on Thursday and spoke with one of his critics, Sunny Hostin.

Gasby first faced backlash after going public with his girlfriend, Alex Lerner, and making her a part of his life with wife Barbara “B.” Smith as she battles Alzheimer’s disease.

Whoopi Goldberg used The View to castigate Gasby for allowing The Washington Post to take a video of Smith in her current condition. “I didn’t want to see that,” she said. (Goldberg was absent from Thursday’s show due to an illness.)

And Hostin, who said she is a friend of Smith’s and Gasby’s, called giving Lerner her own bedroom in their home “very disrespectful.”

While sitting beside Gasby on set and with Lerner in the audience, Hostin traded criticism for inquiry, saying she doesn’t understand how Lerner can spend the night with Smith under the same roof.

“B. can’t consent to that,” Hostin said.

Dan Gasby and Sunny Hostin. ABC

Gasby reiterated that he and Smith talked this about this possibility following her 2013 diagnosis. “She said to me, ‘I want you to go on,'” he said. “I’m not doing anything we didn’t discuss.”

Hostin then asked: “Did she say you can have your girlfriend live in our home?”

Gasby explained that he sold their house on the water for a fully fenced property when Smith’s wandering became dangerous.

In this week’s issue of PEOPLE, Smith’s step-daughter Dana Gasby, 32, described Smith as a “physically strong toddler who speaks in gibberish,” and who sometimes needs to be forced to shower and use the toilet.

Andres Kudacki

“I wanted her to have the dignity of freedom,” Gasby said on The View Thursday, “sanity for me and at the same time I want to make sure that as long as I have her, and I could have easily placed her in facility, I would not do that.

“This notion of vows, I am keeping my vows,” he says, “vows are to protect, to care for…”

Dana, Gasby’s daughter from a previous marriage and raised since the age of 5 by Smith, told PEOPLE that “fraudulent friends” like Goldberg and Hostin “know nothing.”

“I have not seen them here,” said Dana, who moved back home three years ago to care for Smith and fully supports the relationship between her father and Lerner. “They don’t call my family. I see them talking on TV and how do you know what your supposed ‘friend’ would want?”

Gasby says he struggled with loneliness and depression as Smith’s Alzheimer’s progressed. “I was tired,” he told PEOPLE. “I was miserable.”

After befriending Lerner in the summer of 2017, and their subsequent relationship, Gasby’s emotions and spirit have been lifted, he says.

ABC

View panelist Meghan McCain said she had met Smith when she lunched at a B. Smith’s restaurant in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station.

She asked Gasby if Smith would want to be seen today “in a way I don’t remember her?” (McCain noted her family didn’t allow photos and videos of her late father John McCain during his struggle with brain cancer.)

Gasby replied: “B told me, I want you to tell and show it, warts and all.” He added: “The one thing I know is consistent, we made these plans a long time ago.”

Ana Navarro, another co-host, closed the segment by saying: “This is a heart-wrenching situation, judgmental people, you gotta walk in the shoes.”