Jenna Bush Hager Blames Hoda Kotb After Dropping Her Phone in the Bathtub

A soak in the tub turned into a small catastrophe for Jenna Bush Hager, and she knows exactly who to hold responsible: her old co-host Hoda Kotb.

The anchor, 44, owned up to the mishap on the Monday, September 7, episode of Today With Jenna & Sheinelle, saying she dropped her phone straight into the bathwater while reaching for an inspirational video Kotb had texted her.

The blame, she decided on air, belonged with Kotb.

The story spilled out as Bush Hager and co-host Sheinelle Jones watched a clip of another parent fishing a phone out of a ball pit. That prompted Bush Hager to cop to her own recent disaster: a phone lost not to a toddler, but to her bathtub.

She was easing into the water, she explained, and went to pull up the clip Kotb sent when her phone slipped right in.

"Sometimes I feel like — and I don’t know, tell me if you hear me — when we’re running ourselves totally ragged to do these things for our kids or sometimes at work, stuff like that happens," Bush Hager said. “’Cause you’re totally run ragged and you forget. You’re not, like, thinking really.”

“It was 9 p.m. and my kids were with their grandparents," she added. "I was in the bathtub and I was like, ‘Ooh, yeah — Mommy needs a little relaxation!’"

Since the whole reason the phone was in her hand was Kotb's message, she reasoned with a laugh, the fault was clearly not her own.

“Actually, I’ll blame it on Hoda Kotb,” she said, turning directly toward the camera. “Yeah, Hoda!”

After that, Bush Hager made a recovery attempt that no one should ever try at home. She said she ran the wet phone through a forced charge before bed, telling Jones, "Mama usually emergency overrides it." But her trick didn't save the device.

She was jolted awake later that night by silence.

"My sound machine turned off," she said. "I was like, 'Oh no, my alarm isn't going to go off.'" She also worried about being home alone and the potential of a stranger breaking into her home.

The good-natured finger-pointing is really a sign of a friendship that's outlasted the pair's shared desk.

Kotb and Bush Hager anchored the fourth hour of Today together for over five years before Kotb exited the morning show in January 2025, and Jones stepped in as Bush Hager's co-host on the renamed program this year.

Kotb left to spend more time with her two young daughters and has since kept busy with wellness-focused projects since walking away from the anchor chair.

Bush Hager, the daughter of former President George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush, came aboard Today as a correspondent in 2009 and grew into a fixture of NBC's mornings. She took over the fourth hour with Kotb in 2019 and has stayed in the co-host seat through the show's recent reshuffles.

Stories like the bathtub saga are the type of banter she's typically known for from show to show.

New episodes of Today With Jenna & Sheinelle air weekday mornings on NBC, with a new season starting Tuesday, September 8.