A shocking new tell-all book lays bare the TV host’s private world, and she’s not going to be happy, reports Matthew Denby.
Oprah Winfrey has been rocked by a bombshell new biography, which delves into her controversial private life and airs allegations she invented many of her stories about her tough upbringing.
The star, who won over fans with her story of overcoming a childhood so poor the only pets she had were cockroaches, is stunned by claims in Kitty Kelley’s book, Oprah: A Biography, that she made the whole thing up.
“Where Oprah got that nonsense about growing up in filth and ’roaches I have no idea,” her cousin Katharine Carr Esters told the author.
“I’ve confronted her and asked, ‘Why do you tell such lies?’“Oprah told me, ‘That’s what people want to hear. The truth is boring.’”
More disturbingly, Katharine says no-one in Oprah’s family believes her story that she was sexually molested as a child – a situation Kitty admits is probably down to the family’s denial.
“I don’t believe a bit of it,” Katharine told the author. “No-one in the family believes her stories, but now that she’s so rich and powerful everyone is afraid to contradict her.”
The book also includes upsetting allegations that Oprah was a teenage prostitute. She has long been open about how her years of abuse led to promiscuity, but her half-sister, Patricia Lloyd, says things got a lot worse than that.
“After becoming sexually promiscuous, Oprah devised another way to make money,” says Patricia. “Whenever a guy arrived at our door, Oprah would give popsicles to me and our younger brother, Jeffrey, and say, ‘You two go out on the porch and play now.’”
Later in life she became more discreet. The author alleges that in 1989 Oprah paid an ex-boyfriend, Tim Watts, $50,000 to keep quiet about her gay brother who died of AIDS, and allegedly about her own love life, too.
“He said she did not want him to talk about her brother being gay,” said Judy Lee Colteryahn, who also dated Tim. “Tim also said he heard about some lesbian affairs.”
The book describes how Oprah was fixated on veteran US TV host Diane Sawyer, with the pair sharing “giggly late-night phone calls” and Oprah lavishing gifts on her, including “gigantic sprays of orchids and a one-carat diamond toe ring”.
For the story see this week’s Woman’s Day, on sale April 19, 2010.
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