Oprah's bizarre meltdown

Her best friend has moved on and she is piling on weight again – now insiders fear the talk-show queen is cracking up.

Her lavish Hawaiian estate should be a source of endless joy and relaxation for Oprah Winfrey, but instead the TV icon has become paranoid that her idyllic retreat is haunted by evil demons.

Her bizarre fears are so bad that before Oprah, 58, would sleep in the $30 million house for the first time, she brought in local holy men to “cleanse” the property, then held a “spiritual blessing circle” with her closest girlfriends. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s estranged wife Maria Shriver flew out from California for the ceremony, but noticeably absent from the week-long, girls-only trip was Oprah’s oldest, and once closest, friend Gayle King.

Now another member of Oprah’s inner circle tells Woman’s Day that the billionaire chat-show queen has “lost the plot” and her girlfriends are truly worried about her mental state. She seems to be battling without the constant support of Gayle, 57, who recently walked away from Oprah’s struggling TV station, the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), to host a morning show on CBS, a major rival channel.

An insider, who still works at OWN, explains, “Gayle warned Oprah she was making a lot of bad decisions, but Oprah wouldn’t listen. Her taunts about the network have got more and more cruel, and it’s driven a real wedge between them. They were bickering for months but now it’s out-and-out war and Gayle is determined that her CBS show will smash OWN in the ratings.” Heartbroken over the loss of the person closest to her, Oprah has fallen into a familiar “vicious cycle” of comfort eating – and is putting on weight at an alarming rate.