Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?

Speaker 1 Cool zone media.

Speaker 1 Welcome back to Behind the Bastards. We're on page 18 of 52.
I know. A podcast where Robert Evans accidentally wrote 20, almost 24,000 words about Oprah for this, these episodes.

Speaker 1 The normal length of a book is 50,000 words. So half of a book about fucking Oprah.
And like, I was having panic attacks at the end of this of like, oh my god, I'm leaving so much out.

Speaker 1 I'm leaving so much from like this

Speaker 1 really good book, Age of Oprah, out because like, I just don't even know how to like fit everything in. But I have to start this episode with our wonderful guests, the inimitable Bridget Todd and the

Speaker 1 glorious, sainted,

Speaker 1 I don't know, Andrew T. I'm trying to think of new

Speaker 1 adjectives. to

Speaker 1 become a saint. What did you do to become a saint? What's a saint?

Speaker 1 I think you actually have to die. No, you don't.
No, you don't. I think you don't have to die.
I'm down. You're probably okay.
Just let me know. I'm down.

Speaker 1 Bridget, you could also be a saint, but I'm not, I just don't get major Catholic vibes from you. Oh, I actually did go to Catholic school.
Oh, you did? Oh, shit. Okay.

Speaker 1 I'm going to redirect the habit that I've got headed for Andrew, and it's going to go to you. Andrew, sorry, you're not sainted anymore.

Speaker 1 You have to, you know, live virtuously. You have to die for the faith.
So, like, you have to marty,

Speaker 1 perform miracles and he's performed a miracle i don't know i don't know if all of these are required at once and i think there's every everyone who's made it on time for behind the bastards recordings and sat through a whole episode as a guest has performed a miracle i i was gonna say it has been a martyr but yeah

Speaker 1 my most miraculous thing is since we're doing video is i'm holding up my favorite coffee cup wow i love that you didn't by chance buy that in maryland did you that's giving me big maryland vibes it i'm i'm sure it's from Maryland.

Speaker 1 Um, Maine.

Speaker 1 Oh, they have uh, they do crabs out there too, no?

Speaker 1 Not good. Oh, could they? I can't imagine.
I'm thinking lobster. I'm getting my crustaceans.
It's so hardcore lobster territory.

Speaker 1 I don't know if lobsters and crabs fight. Sorry for we're already over.
We've the whole discussion has been how long this is going to be. And I've just tried to figure out if there's crabs in Maine.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Listen, listen.

Speaker 1 There's for sure crabs in Maine. They've got lobster at McDonald's in Maine.
Part three. But that's my whole point.
Part three seems normal. Part four is.

Speaker 1 There's no logic to the number of parts. This may wind up more episodes than we'd thought.
I have to start with something, which is a mia culpa. I made some mistakes in the last episodes, guys.

Speaker 1 Tell us. And I'm so, so sorry.
I'm so, so sorry. So here's the thing.

Speaker 1 When you're doing a podcast like this, like, it's a mix of you do a bunch of research and you write a bunch of things to get a bunch of facts out that you are as accurate as you can, but you're also having a conversation.

Speaker 1 So you do stuff like, oh, I'm bringing up the biblical story of Ruth. I don't know much about Ruth.
I only included it in the episode to make a bad joke about Star Wars The Phantom Menace.

Speaker 1 And so I made a comment about, I don't know, I think she's got something to do with Moses. She does not.
And all of the Bible people got onto me for that one.

Speaker 1 And I'm sorry. How big a part of your audience is the Bible people? A shockingly large number of.

Speaker 1 well, I think it's because we have a lot of like ex-vangelicals in the audience, like a lot of people who were raised evangelical

Speaker 1 and then got better.

Speaker 1 I'm just going to throw this out there. That wasn't an error.
That was a fucking dork trap and they all fell into it. They all fell.

Speaker 1 The same cannot be said for my heinous and unforgivable comments about the March of Dimes because I made a comment that like, I don't know, I guess it's probably a cancer charity.

Speaker 1 And then a bunch of people popped in and be like, no, it's for this. And then other people were like, actually, when Oprah was a kid, it didn't do that.
It was for a completely different thing.

Speaker 1 So we're all wrong. Although, again, it had nothing to do with cancer.
So I was wrongest. But like, you guys were wrong too, most of you who criticized me because it wasn't about that then.

Speaker 1 So fuck you. I love you.
I'm sorry. What is it for?

Speaker 1 It's right now, I think it's for like,

Speaker 1 let's look up the March Times. Let's get it right now.
Immature babies? Yeah, immature babies, but it was like about polio before that. And then I think that's a good idea.

Speaker 1 how dare you people trying to correct robert that is my motherfucking improve the health of mothers and babies right i'll just tell you

Speaker 1 robert robert is never wrong he's perfect yeah i never like say stuff during like one of the things you learn about yourself during doing this is like how often in daily conversation and we all do this you just like say things that are a part of your understanding of the world that are not right uh because that's like life we all pick up a bunch of bullshit like the number of times I just don't think you should have to apologize right now.

Speaker 1 I take that burden from you.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry for Robert, but he's innocent. All I'm saying is record everything

Speaker 1 you ever say in a single day of conversations with people and then run them by a fact checker. And you will be amazed at how much of like the load-bearing

Speaker 1 fat pillars of your reality are things you absolutely believe without thinking that are not true. It's amazing.
It's the worst part of being a podcaster.

Speaker 1 It's like having a public record of stupid shit that you thought, or if you're me, shit that you thought was pronounced one way and it's pronounced another way. The pronunciation.

Speaker 1 So for this episode, I spent almost three hours looking at Oprah's

Speaker 1 one of her charities' tax returns. None of that made it into the episode.
Turned out not to be interesting.

Speaker 1 But you know what I didn't remember to do was look up whether or not Ruth had anything to fucking do with Moses.

Speaker 1 I just don't.

Speaker 1 I think you just, you're, you're doing great, pal. I fail to see how this is a problem.
I think you're doing

Speaker 1 great. I just wanted to jump in March of Dime's previous polio charity.

Speaker 1 The way things are going, they might need to go back.

Speaker 1 I know.

Speaker 1 Again, I love polio, and I feel like because we got a lot of my favorite writers. Again, Robert wrote 52 pages.
Okay, let's get into this.

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Speaker 1 So when we left off, Oprah had gotten her first radio gig with a radio DJ who was surprisingly not problematic.

Speaker 1 John Heidelberg, people online have been pointing out other stuff about him, apparently fine.

Speaker 1 So congratulations, John Heidelberg.

Speaker 1 When we're talking about DJs being problematic, I'm talking about old-timey radio DJs, because if you look into the history of like very famous old-timey radio DJs, not a lot of them were great people, but apparently, John was.

Speaker 1 So, good for you, John Heidelberg. You win our Behind the Bastards Award for not being a sex best as a DJ in the 1970s.

Speaker 1 You're the only person who's won that award, by the way. Yeah, that's got to be a club of one.
Yeah, that is a club of one. You are the loneliest man in history.

Speaker 1 so the next several years of oprah's life involved a pretty boring time in college we're not going to get into it but she starts doing beauty contests and she's very good at beauty contests one of the biggest moments in her early life is she wins the misfire prevention contest

Speaker 1 now

Speaker 1 i know what you're all saying what the is mis fire prevention and To understand this, you have to know that back in the 1970s, everything was flammable. People only wore petroleum products.

Speaker 1 Every couch was made out of petroleum products. And everyone fell asleep with a lit cigarette in their mouth.
So everything and everyone was constantly on fire.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so this was a real problem. Also, everyone was on binzos.

Speaker 1 So you would, it was like every week in your neighborhood, either a drunk day labor like either either the husband would come home from like his work in a fucking law factory factory and pass out drunk with a cigarette in his mouth and wipe out the entire family, or the housewife would take too many benzos and pass out with a lit cigarette in her mouth and wipe out the whole family.

Speaker 1 But either way, whatever was happening, fire was killing absolutely everyone.

Speaker 1 And so we were like, we have to find the hottest person in order to represent not burning your family to death because you fell asleep with a lit cigarette in your mouth. And Oprah was that person.

Speaker 1 Isn't that nice?

Speaker 1 Fun fact about that. That's why we have like flame retardant couches now is because the cigarette industry was like, we can't keep getting popped for this.
We didn't have responsibility.

Speaker 1 We're fine with killing people so many other ways, but all these house fires are really cutting into our business.

Speaker 1 Please tell me the first fire-retardant couches were just made of asbestos. It probably will.
God, I'll probably go for a nice asbestos couch.

Speaker 1 To know that I'm both like sitting down on the couch to watch horrible news happen and also shortening my time on this earth, beautiful.

Speaker 1 Oprah was the first black woman to win the Missed Fire Prevention Contest.

Speaker 1 And that's great. During questioning by a panel of judges, she said that she wanted to be a journalist like Barbara Walters.
She was asked what she would do if she was given a million dollars.

Speaker 1 And everyone else in the contest expressed kind of like, I'll help the poor. I'll help my family.
Whereas Oprah just admitted, I would spend, spend, spend. I'd just be a spending fool.
Awesome.

Speaker 1 Actually, love that. You got to respect that.
Like, look, I grew up poor as shit. I would spend it.

Speaker 1 Now, this was definitely a legitimate win, Miss Fire Prevention. However, her next big contest win, the Miss Black Nashville contest, was a little bit shadier.

Speaker 1 Everyone involved about it seems to agree that another girl, Maude, had been a better contestant, but Oprah shocked everyone by winning.

Speaker 1 And the promoter of the event would later claim that several people complained to him, and so he did a recount of the votes and found out that Maude had, in fact, been the rightful winner, but her name had gotten switched with Oprah's by somebody for unknown reasons.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 we don't know what happened. Some people have theorized Oprah set the whole thing up somehow.

Speaker 1 I think there's at least an equally good probability, based on just like the vibes I get, that the promoter of the event kind of had a weird thing for Oprah.

Speaker 1 His name was Gordon L. Greco Brown, and I don't trust that name.
I just don't trust that name.

Speaker 1 That is the name of like a used car dealer from fucking Incina who also happens to be a neo-Nazi. I'm not saying that's Gordon El Greco-Brown.
I'm just saying that's the name Gordon El.

Speaker 1 That's what that conjures. Gordon L., like the letter El Greco Brown.
El Greco Brown. So he's Gordon Gecko L.
Brown. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 That man has so many different opinions on the various Coke dealers in his area that he has to keep track of them in a notebook.

Speaker 1 Anyway, when Oprah was notified, I'm not saying that about the literal, I'm not slandering the actual man. I'm just saying that's how his name sounds.

Speaker 1 Anyway, Oprah gets notified of this error that Maude really won. And she says, like, well, fuck it.
You guys gave me the award. I'm not giving it back.

Speaker 1 In Kitty Kelly's kind of mean biography, a lot is made about the fact that Oprah like doesn't give this up. And I don't know, I don't really care.

Speaker 1 Like you handed her the award, so she's not wrong to be like, fuck you guys. Oprah goes to Tennessee State University or TSU, which is a black college,

Speaker 1 but she doesn't go to the more prestigious and nearby Fisk University, known locally as the Black Harvard. I think this is just a matter of expense.
Oprah seems to be insecure about this later.

Speaker 1 She spends her social time hanging out at Fisk.

Speaker 1 Her dad is like, look, you know, I could afford to send her to TSU. And so I did.
I will say, because Kitty Kelly makes a lot about, like, yeah, Oprah couldn't get into the good school.

Speaker 1 She couldn't hack it.

Speaker 1 I've read

Speaker 1 from the anecdotes we get about TSU.

Speaker 1 It doesn't sound great.

Speaker 1 There's a good one from one of her professors, Dr. W.D.
Cox, that, and this is what this guy, Dr. Cox, this actual professor, says later about teaching Oprah.

Speaker 1 And I think he thinks this makes him sound funny. During our stay in the city, a girl was reported raped on the second floor.
I told a lie on Oprah.

Speaker 1 If Oprah had known about the rape, she'd have shouted, you who, I'm up here. Oprah didn't take too kindly to that joke.
She was quite provoked. Do you guys catch that?

Speaker 1 He is saying, a girl got raped and I said, hey, Oprah, you would like that. That's the

Speaker 1 talking about this decades later, being like, can you believe she didn't find it funny?

Speaker 1 That's nuts.

Speaker 1 That's insane. You just know somebody laughed at him, though, and he

Speaker 1 encouraged that shit. Maybe, or the whole, like, I don't know what things were like in the 70s.
Don't laugh at men's jokes that aren't funny. Just don't.
You should get fired for that.

Speaker 1 Period. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The whole joke is, I bet you'd like, get it. Like, that's

Speaker 1 wild stuff.

Speaker 1 And it's wild to me that he, like,

Speaker 1 even in retelling that, he's like, and she didn't even find it funny. She wasn't amused.
Can you believe it? He describes it as enjoying a little foolishness at Oprah's expense. Oh, he's still going.

Speaker 1 That's not what that is.

Speaker 1 A little foolishness would be like, you know, talking about, I don't know, the fact that she's obviously wants to be a star, making a little bit of joke about how she likes attention not that like that this is not that

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 and this this dude has been holding on to that joke for he told this to kitty kelly in 2010

Speaker 1 2010

Speaker 1 jesus christ oh man you just know like just i'm guessing based on his age that like she goes to see him in an old folks home and like his fucking kids come in they're like oh no get her out of here we can't let dad be talking to a journalist like oh my God.

Speaker 1 So, Oprah, the big standout detail from her college years is she plays Coretta Scott King in a local production of the tragedy of Martin Luther King Jr.

Speaker 1 And the main reason this is relevant is that a reviewer for the school paper reviews this play by saying, Martin Luther King murdered twice.

Speaker 1 I do love how bitchy that is. That's good.

Speaker 1 Holy shit.

Speaker 1 Imagine, because he had to have sat with that review title, just being like, I can't say this, can I?

Speaker 1 I'm so glad he went for it. Fuck it.
I'm doing it.

Speaker 1 Near the end of 1972, Oprah gets her first TV gig when her boss at WVOL called a local TV station, WTVF-TV, and told them that he had a girl who was interested in broadcasting.

Speaker 1 This was during a period where the FCC had just introduced diversity requirements for on-air talent, and Oprah was hired quickly. She generally describes this as an affirmative action hire.

Speaker 1 Again, the guy who hires her is like, no, she was the best qualified candidate. You know, I don't know.

Speaker 1 Either way, it doesn't really matter because this proves to be a very good hiring decision. The truth, Oprah was a skilled performer and had experience both on the radio and as a pageant winner.

Speaker 1 That said, she was hired to be a journalist, which she had no experience doing, and she winds up reporting on City Hall.

Speaker 1 She cheerfully admitted as soon as she starts the job, she tells all her coworkers, I lied during my interview. I don't know how to do this job.

Speaker 1 Like her first day, she tells the crew, I don't know what I'm doing. Please help me.
Because like I told the director I understood how to do this job.

Speaker 1 And it's a remark, it's a mark of her charisma that everyone on the crew's like, well, yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 That's kind of nice.

Speaker 1 Damn.

Speaker 1 Like, what a,

Speaker 1 it's not even a Hail Mary, but what a like, like high variance play the hey by the way what's up how do you do this job i mean that is how like entertainment works right like

Speaker 1 everyone i know in this industry has a story of like yeah i talked myself into a room that i probably didn't have the right to be in and then it worked out yes the b side of admitting it i i would say a lot less Yeah, I one of one of the, again, we're about to get into all of the horrible things Oprah's been involved in, but one thing that I do consistently admire about her is that she doesn't dress up this aspect of her life.

Speaker 1 She's like, yeah, man, I lied, cheated, and stole until I could be on TV.

Speaker 1 Which is everyone who gets famous on TV, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I got my first podcast job lying about knowing Final Cut Pro, and then I had to go on YouTube and learn how to use Final Cut Pro. Yes.

Speaker 1 That's how, look, kids, if you're looking at getting entertained, into entertainment, get good at lying because that's the job.

Speaker 1 Oprah experienced a ton. This is an uncomfortable transition, but a lot of racism on the job.

Speaker 1 A large part of it was like she's the first black on-air talent that they have.

Speaker 1 She winds up interviewing a lot of people who like, they see a black journalist and just start calling her slurs to her face.

Speaker 1 She won awards, though. She's very ambitious.
Her colleagues, that's the primary thing her colleagues from this period remember about her is that Oprah is a climber.

Speaker 1 She is somebody who is like crawling up to the top, right?

Speaker 1 At one point, she takes over for a producer who like she gets on set. He clearly doesn't know what he's doing for this Black History Week presentation, and she directs the entire segment herself.

Speaker 1 She is also, by everyone's admission, doing hella drugs during this period. Although everyone at the TV station is doing hella drugs, this is a local TV station in the 70s.

Speaker 1 I want to read a paragraph from the book, Oprah, a biography, based on a conversation with her former colleague, Patty Outlaw. It was just nuts working at that station.

Speaker 1 Drugs, drugs, drugs, all the time. Drugs all over the place.
They were even selling window panes of LSD in the hall.

Speaker 1 Drugs were so prevalent that the new staff gave Vic Mason, Oprah's co-anchor, a Coke spoon as a gift.

Speaker 1 Chris and I looked the other way, said Jimmy Norton, who confirmed that station management removed a vending machine once they discovered it had been rigged to dispense marijuana.

Speaker 1 That sounds pretty cool. Oh my God.

Speaker 1 This was in Chicago? Where was this? Yeah, no, no, no. They're not even in.
I think they're in that. Yeah, they're in Nashville still.
Nashville. Yeah.
They're in Nashville still.

Speaker 1 She does move up to the big leagues pretty quickly, but she doesn't go straight to Chicago. After a few years in Nashville, she gets a job in Baltimore.

Speaker 1 She's not really happy there, even though this is a big step up, Baltimore obviously being a bigger city, because she feels like she's on a ticking timer, right?

Speaker 1 But like by the time, her attitude is like, by the time I'm 24, I have to be where i want to be because then i'm like too old and washed up which

Speaker 1 you know that's the that's the way a lot of people feel that's the way tv is for a lot of women unfortunately but like it's certainly not going to be that way for oprah baltimore turns out to be a disaster though the longtime anchorman for the station who she is made to be like the co-anchor hates her uh and she's not really experienced enough like he's been doing it for decades she doesn't really know what she's doing yet so she very quickly gets demoted but she's still on contract.

Speaker 1 So it's one of those things where she's getting a lot of money, but she's basically not doing the job that she got hired to do.

Speaker 1 She's instead getting all these terrible little human interest stories that she considers beneath her. So this is a frustrating period, but her saving grace is always her ambition.

Speaker 1 Denied advancement at the station, she starts performing at churches, schools, and different black community spaces, building a fan base locally the hard way.

Speaker 1 She also has a series of interracial relationships while she is working at the station, which is noteworthy because that is not a common thing at the time.

Speaker 1 And the fact that she is dating white guys in her personal life becomes public news.

Speaker 1 A bunch of local white radio DJs make it like a reoccurring thing that they talk about on the air, like who Oprah is dating.

Speaker 1 I don't just bring that up to be like, wow, like, it's like, no, no, no, this is like, she has to deal with this being part of like local news. Can I say something?

Speaker 1 Because I do think it highlights how unequal the playing fields are for black women in media. I mean, black women across the spectrum of any profession, but like,

Speaker 1 local radio DJs, so people who ostensibly are also colleagues are also in media, making it a joke segment about who she is dating romantically, privately, like

Speaker 1 that, having to contend with that on top of having to do your job with all these eyes on you. I mean, like, it's completely ridiculous.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, like it's, it's nuts.

Speaker 1 And like, for an example of how fucking insane it is, one of these local radio DJs describes she's dating like a Jewish reporter, right, who works at a competing station.

Speaker 1 One of these guys on the radio describes their relationship as Omar Sharif is dating Aunt Jemima. Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 Oh boy.

Speaker 1 You should just explode when you say something like that.

Speaker 1 So she had always been something of a binge eater, largely as a response to stress.

Speaker 1 And as is probably probably not surprising, the stress of like being in the public eye and having all of this shit about you be public discussion causes that to be even more of a problem.

Speaker 1 In 1977, she starts paying a diet doctor to help her drop weight for the first time, and she starts attending Overeaters anonymous courses.

Speaker 1 A mixture of stress and starving herself causes her hair to fall out, or at least that's one story.

Speaker 1 Oprah later is going to insist that she lost her hair because executives at the station demanded that she go to New York for a French hairdresser to, quote, make me a Puerto Rican by bleaching her skin and changing her hair.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 Because you get these two different versions of how she loses her hair. It's very hard to say what the truth is.
The news producer is like the company didn't have the budget to send her to New York.

Speaker 1 She also claims that the former news director tries to get her to change her name to Susie. He denies this.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 It's all a little muddled. It doesn't, I don't know how much like where the truth lies here super matters, right?

Speaker 1 There's definitely some stuff that she's like exaggerating, but she's also literally people are talking about her relationships on the air in a very racist way. So like, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I feel like you get the general gist, which is that she is in an incredibly stressful and unfair situation here at work. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Like the public record is like, even if she's straight up lying about literally everything that

Speaker 1 is like hearsay, like, who cares?

Speaker 1 Yeah, right, right. Like, that's kind of where I land on this.

Speaker 1 That said, I will say the station allows her to work her way.

Speaker 1 Like, she is not like locked out of moving back up, and she works her way back up to reporting the news over the next couple of years in Baltimore.

Speaker 1 And in fact, she rebuilds her reputation with her bosses well enough that in 1977, the new station manager, William Baker, gives her the big break that is going to lead her to the position of kind of impossible wealth and cultural power that she's going to attain.

Speaker 1 He had been brought on to the station after creating in another station a morning talk show called Morning Exchange. And his job was to do the same thing for Baltimore, right?

Speaker 1 Morning shows are a new concept. Like this is

Speaker 1 the guy playing a video game while ranting about politics on a stream of 1977. It's like people waking up in the morning to see one to two charming.

Speaker 1 handsome people talk about bullshit while you like get the kids breakfasts ready, right? It's the hottest new thing in entertainment.

Speaker 1 Phil Donahue had kind of helped to kick off the trend of like talk shows in 1968, and his show, which was just named Donahue, had become like the most popular thing on television.

Speaker 1 Morning shows were a refinement of this idea, right? You generally have a male host and a female co-host.

Speaker 1 And this is how you lock in viewers who are either getting ready for work or like stay-at-home moms starting their day.

Speaker 1 Baker's wife, Jean-Marie, was the one who recommended Oprah to be the female co-host co-host of this new morning show.

Speaker 1 Apparently, at some sort of like work event, she sees Winfrey and she like says to her husband, that's your host.

Speaker 1 And Baker listens to his wife, which proves to be a wise decision because for whatever, I mean, there's a number of reasons, but tens of millions of American women feel the exact same way that the first time they see Oprah.

Speaker 1 Like, oh, yeah, this is somebody I want to watch every morning, right?

Speaker 1 So Jean-Marie was definitely key into something there. Oprah does not like that she's been picked for this job.

Speaker 1 She's horrified at first, actually, because in her attitude, she sees this as another demotion, right?

Speaker 1 She had been a co-anchor and then kicked down to doing these like human interest kind of like, oh, you know, there's a new, you know, it's the kind of stuff they make fun of at Anchorman, right?

Speaker 1 There's like a new puppy parade or some bullshit.

Speaker 1 And she's like, that's this. This is like fluff.
I want to be doing like, I think that the, I want to be Barbara Walters. I want to be doing something more hard-nosed.

Speaker 1 Part of what disgusts her is that a big thing on this morning show is dialing for dollars, which is a way that news stations would keep people watching.

Speaker 1 Cause you don't want anyone to switch to another channel if they get bored for a second.

Speaker 1 So you have this thing where periodically throughout the day, people submit their phone numbers to the station and we randomly Oprah draws one out of a bowl and the station will just send money to that person.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's how they and you have to be watching constantly to know if your number gets picked.
Like that's literally how they they're like bribing people. Please keep watching the show.

Speaker 1 I mean, gambling has never not been the underlying driver of everything. All of American society.
Yes. Yes.
This whole country is one big roulette wheel. And Oprah didn't want to be the croupier.

Speaker 1 It's a croupier for roulette. Is that how you say it? It is.
We're about to get another people being like, actually, you said it wrong, Robert. It's this.
I'm sorry.

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Speaker 1 And we're back. So Oprah's got this job offer to host this morning show.
And she's like, this sounds like death, right? This sounds like the end of my career.

Speaker 1 Like you're trying to fob me off on this thing and I will be locked into this, you know, doing something nobody respects for the rest of my life. The thing that she tells Baker is, I'm a news person.

Speaker 1 I don't want to do a talk show.

Speaker 1 Then she films her first episode and her mind completely changed. The way she describes this is as soon as she sits down and makes an episode of the morning show, her opinion on it changes on a dime.

Speaker 1 And the reason why is because she gets to hang out with famous people. And she's like, oh, wait.
Oh.

Speaker 1 And I'm going to read a quote now from the People Profile's biography of Oprah. This, she told herself, is heaven.

Speaker 1 She recalled, I interviewed Benny from All My Children and the Carvell Ice Cream Man and thought, heaven, because you get to say whatever you feel, you truly get to be yourself.

Speaker 1 Within a year, People Are Talking, which is the morning show, was beating Donahue in Baltimore, the only show in America to do so. Winfrey would never never read another headline.

Speaker 1 The minute that first show was over, she told Good Housekeeping, I thought, thank God, I found what I was meant to do. It was like breathing for me.

Speaker 1 And that's like

Speaker 1 very interesting to me because

Speaker 1 it's hard to get across. Like, Donahue is, he's like the Mr.
Beast of his era, if you'll forgive me for trying to like make, he is like the biggest guy. on on daytime TV.

Speaker 1 And Oprah is the, like, this is the only local show that beats Donahue anywhere in the United States. And it's due to the fact that Oprah is on it, right?

Speaker 1 And she has this absolutely unique electric connection with her audience.

Speaker 1 This is recognized by people with money in television, and things start to move very fast for Oprah after this point, as Pell scholar Amanda Colin writes in her thesis paper on Oprah's role in American culture.

Speaker 1 In 1984, Oprah moved to Chicago, Illinois, to host WLS-TV's morning talk show, A.M.

Speaker 1 Chicago, which became the number one local talk show, surpassing ratings for the most popular show at the time, Donahue, just one month after she began.

Speaker 1 The show earned national syndication in 1986, becoming the highest-rated talk show in television history.

Speaker 1 In 1988, Oprah established Harpo, Oprah Backwards Studios, a production facility in Chicago, making her the third woman in the American entertainment industry after Mary Pickford and Lucille Ball to own her own studio.

Speaker 1 A.M. Chicago became the Oprah Winfrey Show and remained the number one talk show for 20 consecutive seasons.
So this is like a very rapid explosion in popularity.

Speaker 1 She goes from getting the show to it becoming number one to it being entirely reframed to being just around Oprah.

Speaker 1 And she establishes a production company and gets like a significant degree of ownership in her own show, which is like this is one of the things that's most interesting about Oprah is, especially for somebody who was raised.

Speaker 1 without any access to money, the sheer degree of like business savvy that she has. The fact that she owns a large piece of everything she's involved in and eventually owns all of it, right?

Speaker 1 Like she is not like she, she, she kind of has this, probably because of how she got fucked over with that first job, this understanding that like, if I don't own it, it's not worth shit to me, right?

Speaker 1 Anyway, Oprah. So

Speaker 1 I just realized something crazy, which is that Oprah, the character that Oprah plays in the color purple, she's married to a character named Harpo.

Speaker 1 Really? Like, isn't that crazy? I had no idea. Wait a sec.
Because I started re-watching it, but I'm going to be honest, I didn't finish it

Speaker 1 because I was tired. Harpo is his name? Yeah, she's married to a character named Harpo in the movie.

Speaker 1 That's why I just realized that. That's also the name of her.
It's also her name backward. Yeah.
Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 Crazy.

Speaker 1 I wonder that has to have been because she already had Harpo the studio at that point. We're going to talk a little bit about the color purple.
And Steven Spielberg comes in.

Speaker 1 I don't know if he's a hero. Well, he's not a hero.
He's a weird kind of villain in this story, but we'll get to that in a sec. I can't wait.

Speaker 1 So for about a full generation after 1984, Oprah's fame is a rocket ship. It just keeps going up and up and up.
But what made her show so special?

Speaker 1 Colin's argument is that she offered, quote, despair disguised as entertainment. In other words, she sensationalized and repackaged human suffering for an audience.

Speaker 1 Quote, when Oprah came on the scene, she mirrored this Donahue formula, but with a unique twist of her own. She, unlike Donahue, revealed her own personal struggles and stressed a self-help mantra.

Speaker 1 The audience loved it, and the Oprah Winfrey show quickly surpassed her predecessors' ratings. Commonly referred to as trash TV, Oprah transformed the talk show genre by turning trash into treasure.

Speaker 1 And that's kind of, she starts out and she is viewed as like trash, she's viewed as Jerry Springer, right, for a while because she's doing that stuff.

Speaker 1 She's bringing on like, I'm going to bring on a bunch of single unred mothers who are fighting with their dads.

Speaker 1 I'm going to bring on like some Klansmen to have an argument with, like, you know, whoever on stage and like hope that there's a fist fight or some shit.

Speaker 1 She's doing pieces of that, but kind of what shifts the meaning of what she's doing is that, unlike a Springer or a Donahue kind of character, she's not standing back and being like, Look at this zoo I've brought to you.

Speaker 1 She's like opening up her own difficult, troubled past, which kind of adds this

Speaker 1 like shot of vulnerability into the whole mixture that makes it unique. And you can see an immediate, that's why it stands out, right? That's why she rises above these other figures so quickly.
Right.

Speaker 1 The most

Speaker 1 like Springer and Donahue, you never got the impression their point of view was like, look at this shit. Look at this crazy shit.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 As opposed to like, I have an opinion on this crazy shit.

Speaker 1 I have an opinion and also like, like you people, like all you troubled people that I bring on the show, I also have had had my like troubles and I'm not too big to like admit them.

Speaker 1 Whereas like Jerry Springer would never like break down and cry in front of his audience.

Speaker 1 Even though remember Jerry's final thought?

Speaker 1 Oh, God. Yeah,

Speaker 1 sure.

Speaker 1 Of course.

Speaker 1 The one thing I remember from that show is when Geraldo got his nose broken by a chair. I think that was on Jerry.
Was that on Geraldo or Jerry? I thought it was. I think it was.

Speaker 1 That might have been Geraldo. Is that just on Geraldo? Whatever the case.
Heraldo Rivera got his nose broken by a chair, everybody.

Speaker 1 Never forget.

Speaker 1 But I think your point about like this setting Oprah apart, I think it really is a testament to how her troubled background really is something that she draws from and is able to like, like, that's, I think that is the secret sauce of what made this connect in a different way.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because it's like, we're taught, it's the same kind of like, quote-unquote, trash, but there's less of a voyeuristic attitude because, like, anytime it starts to lean too much, Oprah will drop some sort of anecdote about her own own background.

Speaker 1 And you're like, oh, okay, so she's really, she's on the same level as us, right?

Speaker 1 Which she's not, but that's how it feels to the viewer, at least.

Speaker 1 The most significant moment for her career in this period came right after she moved to Chicago to start the Oprah Winfrey Show.

Speaker 1 On Thursday, December 5th, 1985, at 9 a.m., Oprah started her morning show by bringing on a young white abuse victim named Lori.

Speaker 1 She opened up by reading some statistics about sexual abuse, namely that one in three women in the United States had experienced it, and then asked Lori, your father started out fondling you.

Speaker 1 When did it lead to something other than fondling? She pressed with more and more detailed questions, asking, what did he say to you? How did he tell you? What did he tell you?

Speaker 1 And this is all very uncomfortable to see on TV, right? And even especially like reading the transcript,

Speaker 1 there's an element of it that seems a little bit exploitative, kind of constantly pushing for those details in front of an audience.

Speaker 1 That said, it also, this is kind of how interviews work. It's just usually when journalists interview people about these kinds of experiences, you don't get the direct interview transcript.

Speaker 1 You get an article where they've kind of taken out the details, but also kind of softened aspects of it so that it doesn't feel that uncomfortable. Oprah's kind of giving you the raw feed.

Speaker 1 And seeing something like this, which is normally a private process rendered as public entertainment, is kind of a new thing.

Speaker 1 And particularly what's new about it is that because of the way Oprah does this, rather than people feeling like, oh, she's kind of exploding this woman, people from the audience start to join in, spontaneously sharing their own stories of sexual abuse as children.

Speaker 1 People in the audience start breaking down into tears.

Speaker 1 And then Oprah starts talking about her own sexual abuse, telling everyone, the fact that I had all these unfortunate experiences permeates my life.

Speaker 1 And I'm going to quote from Kitty Kelly's book here.

Speaker 1 For the next few seconds, Oprah appeared to be discovering for the first time that what she had experienced as a nine-year-old child was indeed rape, a defilement so unspeakable that she had never been able to put it into words until that very moment.

Speaker 1 Her audience felt as if they were watching the fissures of a soul split open as she admitted her shameful secret. And nothing like this had ever happened on daytime TV.

Speaker 1 There had certainly been like people talking about sexual abuse, but the fact that an episode interviewing a survivor would lead to both members of the audience breaking down and sharing their own stories, and then the host doing it.

Speaker 1 That's a totally novel thing, right? Like that has never happened before on television. And it creates a firestorm.
The fact that Oprah does this on air becomes national and then international news.

Speaker 1 And it is people, like the people running the station are not happy. Like the actual executives at the station are like, this is supposed to be a happy morning show.

Speaker 1 This is like, this is like for people to like watch while they're drinking. What the hell is going on here, right? Like, why are we doing, why are we having stories of child sexual abuse?

Speaker 1 But the ratings are off the charts. It's one of those things where she both gets in trouble with the people running the station and also this makes her too big to fail.

Speaker 1 Like, this is this, this is, it's impossible to overstate what a massive moment this is for both television as a medium and also for Oprah's career.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's, I mean, it's, there's also just that, yeah, like, what a,

Speaker 1 I guess, risk, or like, thank God the ratings worked out. It's a huge risk because, like, if the ratings had, like, her, her, the people running the station are not happy.

Speaker 1 If the ratings had not been there, like, she could have gotten fired for this. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it's also, there's, it's such a complicated thing to parse out because one thing she's doing is this is one of the very first times in a public space with this much exposure that you have victims of rape talking about it, not in a way that's mediated by psychiatrists or law enforcement or anything like that, but is just like survivors talking about it, right?

Speaker 1 And at the same time, Oprah very sees the reaction to this, sees how well it does, and her immediate takeaway is like, sex sells.

Speaker 1 We need all of the sex episodes, every kind of sex, not just like this, where people are talking about, you know, their trauma, but like whatever we can get.

Speaker 1 that involves sex, that's what's going to make this show keep it on top, right?

Speaker 1 So like, after this episode, she starts inviting, she invites a bunch of female porn stars on to talk about the penises of her co-stars, of their co-stars.

Speaker 1 That episode gets a 30% share of the Chicago audience and provokes even more news articles about Oprah because people are now like, is this smut? Like, how do we talk about what she's doing?

Speaker 1 Nobody's done anything like this before.

Speaker 1 And a lot of the coverage is super critical, super like, this is incredibly irresponsible. People shouldn't be doing this.
But it all just drives viewers, right?

Speaker 1 More and the more stuff that she puts out there that gets people shocked and like angry or, you know, titillated, the more people watch her show.

Speaker 1 When reporters interview her about this, Oprah tells them, my mandate is to win, admitting that her overriding purpose and bringing victims of sexual violence and sex workers onto her show is to draw eyeballs.

Speaker 1 Kitty Kelly quotes her former producer, Deborah DeMayo, paraphrasing the way Oprah pitched show ideas to her team. I'd love to get a priest to talk about sex.

Speaker 1 I'd love to get one to say, yes, I have a lover. I worship Jesus and her.
Yes, I love her. And her name is Carolyn.

Speaker 1 I love how, like, that's a life's like pretty twisted. Oprah was like, I want the like free, I want some freaky deekies in here.
Find me a priest who's fucking some lady named Carolyn and get her on.

Speaker 1 Get him on.

Speaker 1 Oh, man. So, yeah, that's like, I don't,

Speaker 1 you can, I guess, moralize that however you want.

Speaker 1 It's so fascinating that it goes from, I have like shared my own horrible experience and people connected with that to like, so we got to get some priest who's fucking a lady on this show, right?

Speaker 1 Like, that's, that's where, that's where this guy has to continue going, you know?

Speaker 1 It is also weird to conclude, not weird, but like, I mean, I guess like more media savvy than I am to conclude from that first show that sex sells rather than like vulnerability cells or authenticity cells or whatever.

Speaker 1 But also, all of them sell because her vulnerability and authenticity keeps her pot. It's a huge part of her ongoing popularity, but so is the sex.
So is the really sleazy stuff.

Speaker 1 They never stop doing that, right?

Speaker 1 I guess the answer is all of it sells, and Oprah has very good instincts. You know, wherever we want to land morally on what she's doing here,

Speaker 1 this shit works.

Speaker 1 Now, it it is worth noting that she is depicted in the media. This is very hard for, like, I had trouble grasping this because by the time I was aware of Oprah, she had such a different like

Speaker 1 reputation. In the 80s,

Speaker 1 in late 70s and 80s, she's Jerry Springer, right? She is not a respectable media figure to a lot of people. That is not how she's talked about to a lot of people.

Speaker 1 Around this time, an article in McCall's magazine on the Oprah Winfrey Show described what it did best as, quote, get-em-in-the-gut show topics.

Speaker 1 Sexual disorders, battered wives, self-mutilation, overweight people and the people who hate them, you know, all that kind of stuff. Oprah often would say nothing is taboo, and she meant it.

Speaker 1 Winfrey's own struggles with weight loss and gain quickly became a central part of the show as well. We opened this series with the infamous wagon of fat incident from 1980 or 98.

Speaker 1 That was gross and bad, but it's also worth noting if you want to put that into the context, like how we could get to something that gross, it comes after a decade of constant public obsession with every pound Oprah lost or gained.

Speaker 1 And this is where we're going to talk about the color purple again.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 as I've noted, Oprah struggles with, you know, binge eating, with her body self-image from adolescence on, like a lot of us, like maybe everybody.

Speaker 1 She has a habit of stress eating and was noted by co-workers to binge to really uncomfortable levels during parties and the like.

Speaker 1 Once she becomes a TV star in the mid-80s, people start talking about this.

Speaker 1 Like it becomes both in gossip columns and shit like the fucking, you know, National Inquirer and stuff, there's like articles about, you know, stories of Oprah and eating and whatnot.

Speaker 1 And she kind of pivots on this to become radically open to her audience about her dieting and her struggles with weight gain.

Speaker 1 Now, this helps drive her popularity, but it's also, it both is in part a reaction to and also helps lead to to shit like this 1985 appearance on The Tonight Show with Joan Rivers, which I'm going to play for you now.

Speaker 1 This is one of the most uncomfortable things I've seen on television. Oh my God, Joan was such a bitch.
I can't wait to see how she is so bad. I mean, I like,

Speaker 1 Loki love her, but like, but let's be real. Oh, yeah, yeah, this is not great.

Speaker 20 But you went into beauty contests. They told me you're a beauty contest winner.
Young 50 pounds ago or so. Yeah, but so, what'd you win? Well, I won the Miss Fire Prevention Contest.
Was that a who?

Speaker 20 What? Fire prevention. So, how'd you gain the weight? I ate a lot.

Speaker 20 No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You said 50 pounds.
You shouldn't let that happen to you. You're very daughty.
You know what? No, I don't want to hear. Let me tell you this.
Let me tell you this.

Speaker 20 If you're pretty tall and you're single, you must lose the weight. I'm going to.
You know what?

Speaker 20 We are now, A.M. Chicago.
In Chicago, we're starting a diet with Oprah. Grace, yes.

Speaker 20 In conjunction with the Tribune, so that I have been put under pressure to finally do it.

Speaker 20 I am trying to lose five pounds. Would you like to pay for it? Because we need to pay you.
Would you come back with me in March when I'm back? And you lose 15, I'll lose five.

Speaker 20 Listen, that's the only way I'll do it. I'll keep the younger.
I'll lose

Speaker 20 lazy, and I'm not. I'm furious.
I'll do it if you do it. You will? Yeah.

Speaker 20 It's a deal. It's a deal.
It's a deal. Five pounds to me.
Yes!

Speaker 20 Be grace! Yes, that's great. That's great.
That's great. I'm excited about it, though, because I've gone up and down and up and down.
I've been on every diet.

Speaker 20 Have you tried the banana, weenie, and egg diet?

Speaker 20 Does anybody know a banana, weenie, and egg where you eat a banana, a weenie, an egg? And I've done the pickles and peanut butter diet.

Speaker 20 Oh, I just eat cookies, but I only eat like 800 calories worth of cookies. See, I figured you do it that way.
Oh, yeah. I just saw Nell Carter on here last night who'd lost.

Speaker 20 Yes, but you couldn't tell. She's still very chubby.
She'll just lose more.

Speaker 1 Lose more? Well, I think

Speaker 20 people go, oh, are not people that help friends at diet. You must tell a friend the truth.
You must say you are still a pig. Lose more weight.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Wow, why are eating disorders so rampant? Is it because these are our parrots?

Speaker 1 Effectively. Come on.
Although, I got to say, though, like, that was not as vicious, this,

Speaker 1 that was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. It's bad.
That's so much worse. How people talk to bigger people.

Speaker 1 Like, people feel totally comfortable saying shit like this to people's faces, and they don't even think twice about it. This is like totally how people talk.

Speaker 1 Part of what you're seeing there is like Oprah being a professional, because when she describes this moment, she's like, yeah, like, I was not happy.

Speaker 1 Like, this was that, like, the laughing and stuff was all all faked. I was very unhappy that we were having this conversation, right? Like obviously.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, it's like, I can't believe the kind of shit that Joan's saying there.

Speaker 1 It was made like this whole situation was made worse at the time because like not long after this, while she is like doing this very famous publicized diet that gets announced on the Joan Rivers show, like the first big thing she does after this is she's sent to Ethiopia to report on Chicago's efforts to help the famine.

Speaker 1 So the story is simultaneously Oprah trying to lose 30 pounds and Oprah reporting on a famine in Ethiopia. Not great vibes.
One of her colleagues asks, like, hey, is this kind of gross?

Speaker 1 And Oprah replies, you're right, it's sick, isn't it?

Speaker 1 It is sick. It is kind of sick.

Speaker 1 Now, one fair critique of these episodes is that we're not going to go into super clinical detail about all of the different fad diets and dangerous weight loss misinformation that comes out of the Oprah Winfrey Show.

Speaker 1 Part of why is because the podcast maintenance face has done a ton of that. So you can check all of that out.
I think part of it is just that, like, you get the idea here, right?

Speaker 1 It's both important to note that, like, Oprah, like that, that clip there, there's a lot of pushing on everyone listening to that. Feel bad about your body.
Be ashamed if you've gained weight.

Speaker 1 Embrace dangerous strategies to lose it. Oprah has a lot, and Oprah will admit it today, a lot of guilt in spreading that.

Speaker 1 But also, she is in such a unique position where, like, I don't know if there's ever been a single person that so many Americans have been so obsessed with their body size. Like,

Speaker 1 it's kind of hard not to

Speaker 1 for that to affect you in a bad way. Like,

Speaker 1 we really were

Speaker 1 insane about Oprah.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 I don't know what else to say about that.

Speaker 1 I will say, in order to kind of point out the way in which people talked about her, one of the most prominent TV critics of the day, Richard Blackwell, described Oprah as bumpy, frumpy, and downright lumpy on the cover of TV Guide.

Speaker 1 Jesus.

Speaker 1 So, right around the time this is all happening, Oprah is on the tonight show, like right around when she's on the tonight show, she is auditioning for a role in the color purple.

Speaker 1 After the episode, where again, this is not as friendly a situation as it appears on the air, she's very unhappy about this.

Speaker 1 She stress each, she gains more weight, and then she checks herself into a fat farm, an emergency weight loss boot camp type program to lose the weight.

Speaker 1 Steven Spielberg, who had directed the movie, finds out and he calls Oprah. And Spielberg says, I hear you're at a fat farm.
You lose a pound. You could lose this part.

Speaker 1 So she's like, she's fucked no matter what. I don't love anybody like micromanaging somebody else's weight, but the color purple is based on a novel by Alice Walker.

Speaker 1 And the character she was portraying, like, I get, it's not something I think he should have said, but I get where he's coming from. it's it's yeah I I don't know

Speaker 1 I don't know

Speaker 1 I don't know where I should yeah yeah

Speaker 1 it's uncomfortable does Oprah talk about like

Speaker 1 like not not like to

Speaker 1 well yeah I mean I guess what I'm about to say is gonna sound victim blaming but I'm just curious because part of the like this

Speaker 1 like like attention to her weight, she even if it was like going to happen anyway, she did profit from like it was like a part of the like editorial strategy of her show, right? Like,

Speaker 1 does she talk about leaning in on that?

Speaker 1 She she hugely leans in, right? Like she, she does, she does, she in part. She makes the specifics of like how much she's gaining or how much she is losing and what diet she is doing part of the show.

Speaker 1 A lot of the money that comes in is as a result of diet advice. She has deals and gets millions and millions from groups like Weight Watchers, right? Pushing a lot of different diets.

Speaker 1 She gets paid and also just like fills airtime and makes money that way, putting on different diet experts and diet books. And a lot of that stuff is extremely dangerous.
It is both she is being.

Speaker 1 victimized by the whole media environment and also profiting on that by pushing the same kind poison on everyone else, right? that, that's what's happening here, right?

Speaker 1 Like it is a story of both victimization and profiting

Speaker 1 off of putting some pretty toxic and Oprah, you know, the thing she's doing right now is at least copying to some of that, right? Right.

Speaker 1 Now, copying to some of that while also getting money from Weight Watchers. So I don't know.
I don't know where we want to put that out.

Speaker 1 The one thing I am curious about is when we, as a culture, made the transition from saying weenies to hot dogs.

Speaker 1 You wouldn't get a hot dog-based diet today,

Speaker 1 You should never have had a hot dog-based diet. Yeah.
Ask Jamie. I guess, I guess not.

Speaker 1 She would know. Jamie would know.
She would know. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Anyway,

Speaker 1 so she gives up after, or at least the way that Oprah tells the story, after Spielberg's like, if you lose a pound, you could lose this part.

Speaker 1 Oprah decides, like, fuck it and gives up on getting the role and keeps the role.

Speaker 1 And yeah, she winds up doing very well. She gets like massively, you know, like one of the interesting things about Oprah is she could have had just a whole career as a major Hollywood star.

Speaker 1 Like, she just decides to keep being Oprah Winfrey because that turns out to be much better for her than being like a movie star.

Speaker 1 But she's very, like, has a very successful acting career starting out. Oh, I mean, Color Purple is like, it is a, it is a classic.
It's probably the movie I have seen the most times in my life.

Speaker 1 Like, it is like a, like, the way that she was in that movie, it was a revelation.

Speaker 1 Like, even thinking about it now, as good as like Whoopi Goldberg is in that movie and Danny Glover is in that movie, Oprah is the standout character.

Speaker 1 Even so, probably her big scene in the color purple is when she gives the speech to Seeley, All My Life I Had to Fight.

Speaker 1 If you've heard that Kendrick Lamar song, All right, that's where the beginning of that song comes from, is Oprah's big scene in that movie.

Speaker 1 Like, that movie, the way it shifted the culture, we like really cannot be overstated. Yeah, yeah.
And

Speaker 1 it's so fascinating to me that like that would be for very for most people like, oh shit, I've made it. I've like been in this highly praised Hollywood, you know, that's the rest of my life.

Speaker 1 Is I'm going to be in movies? Oprah's like, no, no, I know a better way to get really famous.

Speaker 1 So while this is going on, her movie career is starting. Oprah is continuing to, you know, be trash TV, right? That's really this era.
And sex is not the only thing that she finds out that sells.

Speaker 1 Racism gets people to tune in, so during Black History Month in the 80s, Oprah started booking KKK members to show up wearing sheets and hoods.

Speaker 1 Intermittently, she would book guests with something important to say, too, like when she did the Women with Sexual Disorders episode and talked to a woman who had never orgasmed.

Speaker 1 Oprah brought in a sex surrogate to coach her on air, which elicited a flood of complaints as Kitty Kelly documents. Yesterday's show was gross, said one woman.
I don't know how else to describe it.

Speaker 1 Absolutely degrading. There are millions of women who never experience sexual pleasure, said Oprah.
We had 660 and 33 calls from women yesterday after the show on the computer.

Speaker 1 We made lots of women feel they are not alone. And this is what makes, especially in this era, it's always back and forth, right?

Speaker 1 Because there's this mix of like, oh, that's some of the grossest TV I've heard about. And like, oh, you're really pushing out some very unhealthy attitudes towards dieting into society.

Speaker 1 And also, it's incredibly important for people to know about stuff like sexual dysfunction and that there's like coaching for that and to not feel ashamed.

Speaker 1 Like this is a thing that we can talk about in public. And Oprah's always so much of both of those things.

Speaker 1 That said, when for every episode like this, you'd get where it's like, yeah, I'm glad someone in the fucking 80s was talking about like sexual dysfunction and the fact that there are treatments available that you can and should seek, you go right from that to Oprah being like, also, the devil is coming for your children.

Speaker 1 And this is going to get us on to one of my favorite subjects: how Oprah Winfrey helped start the satanic panic. But first,

Speaker 1 yes, but first, you know who else is the devil?

Speaker 1 But like the sexy devil, like the devil, when he's played by that guy who also played the president in the Command and Conquer Red Alert 2, you know, that guy. I'm just nodding.
I'm just nodding.

Speaker 1 Everyone's just nodding. Nobody else remembers that guy.
He played the devil once. Look him up.

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Speaker 3 This is Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

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Speaker 14 Honestly, honestly, honestly, no one wants to think about HIV, but there are things that everyone can do to help prevent it. Things like PrEP.

Speaker 16 PrEP stands for Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, and it means routinely taking prescription medicine before you're exposed to HIV to help reduce your chances of getting it.

Speaker 16 PrEP can be about 99% effective when taken as prescribed.

Speaker 18 It doesn't protect against other STIs, though, so be sure to use condoms and other healthy sex practices.

Speaker 1 Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead.

Speaker 6 It's the gaming event of the year featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming.

Speaker 7 It's a 4v4 matchup featuring Call of Duty, Tetris, Track Mania, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 Plus 4, and Tekken 8.

Speaker 10 Season Zero of the Global Gaming League is live streaming on YouTube and Twitch.

Speaker 12 Head over to GlobalGamingLeague.com.

Speaker 1 We're back. Four people are so happy I just made that reference.
Everyone else has stopped listening forever.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 satanic panic.

Speaker 1 In 1989, a Canadian psychiatrist and con man named Lawrence Pasder wrote a book about his patient, who he later married, Michelle Smith, claiming he'd recovered her memories of participating in elaborate, impossible satanic rituals while being abused for the devil's gain.

Speaker 1 This book, Michelle Remembers, helped launch the satanic panic, a religious moral panic that ruined hundreds of lives and laid much of the groundwork for QAnon to take off today.

Speaker 1 We maybe don't get the Trump presidency without the Satanic Panic. That was some necessary groundwork, right? You got to put in those load-bearing pillars.
And this is where that's coming from.

Speaker 1 And Oprah helps get it off the ground. She brings Lawrence and Michelle on to her show, along with several other prominent.

Speaker 1 If you are a satanic panic con person, right, who is like, I worship the devil, I sacrificed babies, Oprah will let you say whatever.

Speaker 1 At this point, literally tens of millions of people are tuning into her show.

Speaker 1 I want to start with a clip of a 1986 episode, which wasn't about the satanic panic, but contained a sting for their upcoming episode on devil worshipers.

Speaker 1 And I want to play this just because, you know, we talk, I throw to ads in a lot of, you know, different ways here, but I got to bow to the master class here.

Speaker 21 All right, we'll come back and we're going to talk about sex some more. Back in a moment.

Speaker 1 The devil.

Speaker 1 The screen after she says that is just a picture of the devil on a TV screen holding his own tail with a

Speaker 1 Thursday, victims of satanic worship. I love that.

Speaker 1 Iconic. Coming next, the devil.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 Also, we're going to talk about sex some more. We should have thrown the ads now, Sophie.

Speaker 2 Sorry.

Speaker 1 That would have been the way to do it.

Speaker 1 Next time, bud. You got to learn from the masters here.
Now, I'm going to play, or I'm going to have Sophie play another clip. I think from closer to 1989 or 1990.

Speaker 1 Most of Oprah's early shows are not preserved in a convenient way, so I did my best here.

Speaker 21 My next guest was used also in worshiping the devil, participated in human sacrifice,

Speaker 21 rituals, and cannibalism. She says her family has been involved in rituals for generations.

Speaker 21 She is currently in extensive therapy, suffers from multiple personality disorder, meaning she's locked out many of the terrifying and painful memories of her childhood.

Speaker 21 Meet Rachel, who is also in disguise to protect her identity. You come from generations of ritualistic abuse?

Speaker 21 Um, yes, my family has an extensive family tree, and they keep track of who's been involved and who hasn't.

Speaker 1 She's in disguise.

Speaker 1 I did

Speaker 1 really, yes, yeah, okay, okay. What's the disguise? She just looks like a lady.
I mean,

Speaker 1 I thought we were going to find out. Is it the boot and air? She's wearing a wig and glasses.
Disguise. Oh, okay.
Okay. Yeah.
They clark kinted her. Yeah.

Speaker 1 She put on the, if she takes those glasses off, her family's not going to recognize her. The devil can't catch her.

Speaker 2 Sorry.

Speaker 1 Presuming. Just was very thrown off by them being like that.
That is funny. This lady's in disguise.
It's impossible to tell.

Speaker 1 Zoom in on her.

Speaker 1 And I don't say this to shame her. I'm shaming the 90s.
You can't tell a bad wig from normal hair in like 1990s. No, you can't.
There's no way to do it. But that brooch is long.

Speaker 1 That brooch is something, yes.

Speaker 21 Who hasn't been involved?

Speaker 21 And it's gone back to like 1700.

Speaker 21 And so you were.

Speaker 21 Right. I was going into a family that believes in this.

Speaker 21 And this is a this is does everyone else think it's a nice Jewish family? From the outside, you appear to be a nice Jewish girl, definitely. And you all are worshiping the devil inside the home?

Speaker 21 Right. There is other Jewish families across the country.

Speaker 1 Not just married families. Really?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I don't think I have to tell you. Boy, this is dangerous.

Speaker 1 That's a real bad thing to have 20 million people watching, like, ooh!

Speaker 1 all the Jews are secretly worshiping the devil.

Speaker 1 And they might appear as like wholesome, normal family, but behind closed doors.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, Oprah is literally just doing the blood libel on daytime TV on the most popular talk show in the country. And we're going to continue here because it just gets,

Speaker 1 I am shocked that this was allowed.

Speaker 21 What kinds of things went on in the family?

Speaker 21 Well, there would be rituals in which babies would be sacrificed, and you would have to, you know.

Speaker 21 Babies.

Speaker 21 There were people who bred babies in our family. No one would know about it.
A lot of people were overweight, so you couldn't tell if they were pregnant or not.

Speaker 1 Or they would supposedly go away for a while and then come back.

Speaker 21 The other thing I want to point out: not all Jewish people sacrifice babies.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 it's not a very

Speaker 21 Jewish people sacrificing babies. But anyway, so

Speaker 21 you witnessed the sacrifice, right? When I was very young, I was forced to participate in that, in which I had to sacrifice an infant.

Speaker 21 And the purpose of sacrifices to what? Is to bring you what? What are you sacrificing for?

Speaker 1 For power.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I have a lot of questions. So many.
First off,

Speaker 1 do we think it makes it better for Oprah to offhandedly be like, I've never heard of Jewish people sacrificing babies before. Anyway, tell me about these Jewish baby sacrifices.

Speaker 1 Oh, God.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 this does get closer to her future crimes of like

Speaker 1 clearly if even if you want to remove like the any sort of like willful malice from Oprah, like a pretty shameful credulity is on display here. Yes.

Speaker 1 Like, yeah, like my, as a middling journalist, my first question would be: Are you not worried you're going to get arrested? Because you just admitted to murdering a baby on television? Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, that's a crime, right?

Speaker 1 There's no statute of limitations on killing a baby.

Speaker 1 So I have a question. Like,

Speaker 1 like, what is the production of this like behind the scenes? Like, where do they find this lady? Did they, is it just like, oh, you've got a story about killing babies and sacrifice?

Speaker 1 Come on on the air. Tell us about it.
You know, you get pieces of this. Nobody will directly say like, we just were full of shit, right? We just lied.

Speaker 1 You know, but, but you, you can tell that what's happening, you get this, like that previous clip where it was like, I want a priest who did this and this and this, right?

Speaker 1 Because it'll, it'll sell an episode. She's like, I want someone talking about sacrificing babies.
And you know what is exists in the world? And you don't have to coach people on this.

Speaker 1 If you let enough people know you can get on TV in front of 20 million people, if you talk about sacrificing a baby, there will be someone whose desperation for attention is so high that they will come on television and claim to have sacrificed a baby.

Speaker 1 That's the way people are. That's the person you should give a platform for sure.
That's a healthy person, well-adjusted. Help them spread their message.
Yes.

Speaker 1 We love Oprah Winfrey doing things that are, again, as a guy who's read a lot of Nazi propaganda, almost indistinguishable from Nazi propaganda. Like,

Speaker 1 this is specifically one of the major justifications of the Holocaust. Jews are abducting Christian babies and sacrificing them to the devil.
Like, that is

Speaker 1 really bad to do. I really can't emphasize enough how dangerous this thing is.

Speaker 1 And if you look at shit like in QAnon, right, where there's a, like a third of the country believes that the Democratic Party are literally eating babies to gain everlasting youth, which, like, just look at Nancy Pelosi, guys.

Speaker 1 She's not, she's not getting everlasting youth. Like, her hip just broke.
this is unequivocal bastardism right like this is a bad thing to be doing um

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 and and you know i mean it presumably the thing was like wink we're not going to ask you any hard questions right let's just get the rating just tell me give me some detail and it's it's so up that like on one hand when you're doing this about like you are talking to someone about their their difficulty you know i've never experienced an orgasm you're asking these kind of questions to get them to say more.

Speaker 1 That is making other people with the problem, of whom there are many, feel less alone. Same thing with like sexual assault survivors.

Speaker 1 And then the fact that you have, you're, you have absolutely no compunction with, like, I'll do the same thing for lies about Jews sacrificing babies. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Fascinating stuff.

Speaker 1 I'm so curious if she, because it sounds like at one point in her career, she really thought of herself as like a news person, a journalism person. What does she think about her career now?

Speaker 1 I, you know, here's the thing. Because Oprah never really trained in journalism very much.
I don't know

Speaker 1 if she maybe believes this, if she thinks these are the same.

Speaker 1 Like, that's kind of the thing to me. But also, I want to be like, you are clearly brilliant.
You are a

Speaker 1 once-in-a-lifetime genius, at least at some things. But also, as we've all seen,

Speaker 1 we've all become increasingly aware of people who are like, well, you're clearly brilliant at one thing. And now

Speaker 1 your access to Twitter has made us all aware that you don't understand anything else. So, I mean, the evidence

Speaker 1 seems to be that people who are brilliant at one thing may actually be terrible at everything else. Standard at most other things.

Speaker 1 It may just be that Oprah is a once-in-a-lifetime mind when it comes to the business of entertainment and also honestly believed this woman was sacrificing babies with her family.

Speaker 1 I don't know. Now, that said,

Speaker 1 fact that we have quotes from her being like, hey, get me a priest who said this makes me kind of lean more in the direction of, no, Oprah, Oprah knew, right?

Speaker 1 Some of this, a lot of this is bullshit. And it was just trying to get eyeballs on the TV.
I don't, I can't, I think it's all in a mix. Like, I don't know how much she's able to parse it herself.

Speaker 1 I want to talk about another incident that.

Speaker 1 kind of really makes me go back and forth, which is the McMartin preschool satanic abuse scandal.

Speaker 1 Now, we cover this in our episodes on the satanic panic, but the gist of the case is that a bunch of parents became convinced that their children, more than 300 of them in all, had been systematically abused by a satanic cult headed by the McMartin family, who ran a private preschool.

Speaker 1 The initial allegations, which included claims that one of the alleged molesters could fly, were made by Judy Johnson, who suffered from schizophrenia and was a hardcore alcoholic.

Speaker 1 From her allegations, a community hysteria developed, which was stoked by an abuse therapy clinic run by Key McFarlane, who provided investigations that pushed children with leading questions towards generating allegations.

Speaker 1 A whole lot of people had their lives ruined by this.

Speaker 1 And despite the fact that the investigation literally dug up the ground around the school to try to find secret satanic torture tunnels, no one was ever convicted of molesting any kids. And people,

Speaker 1 I don't, I hate relitigating this because people are always like, well, but they did find tunnels. No, they didn't.

Speaker 1 They found trash buried underneath the school because a farm had been there, and people bury trash.

Speaker 1 All of the shit that was buried in there was stuff from the era at which there was a farm there where people were burying trash. The dead animal bones, that's just what happens in the ground, guys.

Speaker 1 That's just how things are.

Speaker 1 It's not, they weren't running tunnels to molest toddlers for the devil.

Speaker 1 It's also just like the logistics of like running a fucking satanic cult, like, what the fuck are you talking about?

Speaker 1 Again, it's one of those, and like, I'm not saying no kid ever got molested at this or other preschools.

Speaker 1 Like, that a lot of times, the satanic abuse does come from there's a real sexual abuse problem, and then it gets turned into something that absolutely isn't happening.

Speaker 1 And again, shitloads of innocent people get wrapped into it, too. Yeah, I don't think I'm not saying that was happening at McMartin because, again, nobody got convicted of anything.

Speaker 1 Um, so it's not highly correlated with Satan, no, in fact, it might be higher correlated with Satan's old friend. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And in fact, church leaders, Southern Baptist leaders, Catholic priests, police officers, these are the people who are molesting kids.

Speaker 1 And honestly, more than any of those, their own parents and relatives. That's who does it.
That's who molests kids. But it's so much more satisfying to believe it's some like big conspiracy.

Speaker 1 And Andrew, to your point,

Speaker 1 a cousin and an uncle, huh?

Speaker 1 Sorry, what? They can fucking fly. What do they need tunnels for? Yeah.
Yeah. What do they need?

Speaker 1 Why are they doing this in tunnels?

Speaker 1 Like, why does that make more sense? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, as this, in this case, winds on for like a couple of years, Oprah, it is constantly on the show. They are following, this is like the OJ Simpson trial, you know, before the O.J.

Speaker 1 Simpson trial for Winfrey and her. Like, they are following every twist and turn in this case breathlessly.
And when these people don't get convicted, Oprah and her audience are outraged.

Speaker 1 She refuses to accept this. She brings a bunch of the children and parents and even some of the jurors onto the show to relitigate the case.
And she's not the only person doing this.

Speaker 1 She's part of a trend in daytime TV. Geraldo Rivera does the same thing.
So does Sally Jesse Raphael.

Speaker 1 But as LA Times columnist Howard Rosenberg noted, compared to them, Geraldo was as judicious as the Supreme Court.

Speaker 1 In other words, he's saying, Geraldo's coverage of this was responsible next to Oprah's. And Geraldo Rivera is

Speaker 1 not a responsible man. I don't know how else to describe him.
Again, when he got hit in the nose with that chair, it was the best thing that ever happened to this country. Quote, and here's Rosenberg.

Speaker 1 The level of fairness here was typified by Winfrey's admission that she would have made a poor McMartin juror because I would say the children said it. All right, you're right.

Speaker 1 The studio audience applauded.

Speaker 1 You see pieces of this too, that like, if the children say it, it's true. If a mom says it, it's true.

Speaker 1 It's like, no, no, you have to have an evidentiary standard when you are accusing huge numbers of people of hideous crimes. You can't just say,

Speaker 1 we put a bunch of kids in a room and wouldn't let them leave until they told stories of satanic molestation tunnels and then lock people up forever. That's a bad way to run a society.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 I don't know. It's good stuff.

Speaker 1 So while she's doing this, she like has all these people on. She tells like a former McMartin student like to tell the audience what she told the jury like over 16 days of testimony.

Speaker 1 And while this is happening, like you're getting these frequent shots of the audience like shaking their heads and like listening to these horrible stories.

Speaker 1 One of the moms tells Winfrey, I'm outraged at this verdict. And yeah, it's, it's just, it's very irresponsible.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 I think it's probably bad for there to be a case where all of these people are rung through the mud on television, then acquitted, and then have a whole show where you're like, but actually they were still guilty.

Speaker 1 These people molest, these innocent people molested a shitload of kids are running a satisfaction. Like their lives are already ruined, Oprah.
What are you doing? I don't know. I don't like that.

Speaker 1 I don't like that. Has she ever spoken about any of that? No.
No, no, no. Yeah.

Speaker 1 No. And I'd have to imagine if she did, the answer would be like, well, everybody was doing it.
Like, this is what people did on TV. But you were the most popular of them.
right right right yeah

Speaker 1 it is this thing with I mean even the most popular shows though it's like you are still following trends like you may have a hand on the scale for sure but there is a point to where you know the

Speaker 1 yeah as we've seen multiple times like the snowball gets out of control and you are simply

Speaker 1 regardless of your size you are along for the ride Yep

Speaker 1 well how's everyone feeling so far oh

Speaker 1 Finally got bad. It did.
It did. We got pretty bad before, but finally Oprah's doing some evident bad.

Speaker 1 The worm has turned, you would say.

Speaker 1 Anyway, plugs?

Speaker 1 Now that everybody's been bummed, way to go. Yeah.
I know that was like a tough spot to end at, I guess.

Speaker 1 Although I will say I'm still thinking about that headline or that title of her review, MLK Shot Twice. I'm going to be thinking about that one for a long time.

Speaker 1 That is a level of petty that is very beautiful. Yeah.
Very nice.

Speaker 1 I don't know. I got a podcast called Yo's This Racist.
It's fine.

Speaker 1 Check out Yo is This Racist. Check out There Are No Girls on the Internet

Speaker 1 and find

Speaker 1 our hosts online and let them know your favorite moment from the Oprah Winfrey Show. Bombard us all on Blue Sky with your favorite Oprah clips.
Don't do that. Oh, do it to me.

Speaker 1 I mean, I had to bite my tongue because I have so much to say. Go ahead and spam me

Speaker 1 on Blue Sky. I want to hear your favorite Oprah takes.
I will tell you mine. Don't bite your tongue.
Oh, it would just be me talking about at another time on Oprah, she did this.

Speaker 1 And then another episode, she did that. Like,

Speaker 1 it would be so unfun to listen to. Well, part four, we're going to.
Yeah, we'll find out. We'll find out.

Speaker 1 We're gonna supercharge Bridget. Just let you loose.

Speaker 1 Until next time, folks, don't put people up in front of the country and tell them that you sacrificed babies for the devil. Avoid that.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 2 For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday.
Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at behind the bastards.

Speaker 3 Hey guys, it's Aaron Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa. So as a sideline reporter, game day is extra busy for me, but I know it can be busy for parents everywhere.

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Speaker 16 PrEP can be about 99% effective when taken as prescribed.

Speaker 18 It doesn't protect against other STIs though, so be sure to use condoms and other healthy sex practices.

Speaker 1 Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead.

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Speaker 6 It's the gaming event of the year featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming.

Speaker 7 It's a 4v4 matchup featuring Call of Duty, Tetris, Track Mania, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 Plus 4, and Tekken 8.

Speaker 10 Season Zero of the Global Gaming League is live streaming on YouTube and Twitch.

Speaker 12 Head over to globalgaming league.com.

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Speaker 2 This is an iHeart podcast.