Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?

Call Zone Media. who are both health nuts and extremely responsible people, the wonderful Bridget Todd and the also wonderful Andrew T.
Sorry for giving you the also there, Andrew, but one of you had to get it. I can't remember another nice word.
Just wonderful today. I thought you were going to apologize for the health nut business.
I'm barely hanging on, dog. I'm kidding.
How are you doing, everybody? I mean, I'm mean i'm alive but try to try to help folks out on still in your home still in my home um trying to yeah trying to trying to we're at the where the fires are still raging as we record in um los angeles but i am lucky enough to be able to try to fucking

help some folks concentrating

on Skid Row right now.

I will just

say, for all you right-wing

lunatics are scared

of the Antifa

super soldiers and the

upcoming war against socialism,

it's going to be really hard

for us to make sure all our super soldiers are showing up on time to the battle. Yeah.
That's never been our strong side, being able to show up in a timely manner. But the scheduling has been a real thing these last couple days.
Bridget, are you feeling better about your decision to stay on the East Coast now? Well sort of I mean I'm in DC where they just put up all of the like safety scaffolding for the inauguration oh well shit I guess there's no safe place I went for a walk and I was like damn it's happening we're the city is like getting ready so like like there's plywood over windows being put up.

So, you know, there's no wildfires,

which I'm grateful for,

but I wouldn't say I'm feeling pumped.

It's not the chillest vibe here on the East Coast.

God.

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Listen to Beardless, Dickless Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your kid. Could be a family show.
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Coming soon to Gilroy. Well, are we all ready? Are we ready to get back into the story of Oprah Winfrey? Yeah, tell us all the things.
Okay, okay. Let's do it.
Back to the story of Oprah Winfrey. Yeah.
Tell us the things. Okay.

Okay.

Let's,

let's,

let's,

let's do it back,

back to the story.

Yeah.

I think this is probably the most time we've ever spent on the early

childhood and adolescence of one of our people.

It's,

it's just Oprah and Joseph Stalin who have gotten two episodes devoted to

their childhood.

Yeah.

We went through Jay Stahl's early upbringing.

Yep.

Yep.

Yep.

Yeah.

And a prize to the listeners for figuring out the third in that series. Stalin, Oprah, question mark.
Yeah, yeah. It's still being decided.
I mean... But when we left off Oprah, she'd just been taken to Milwaukee by her mother, who lived downtown off of North 9th Street.
So Oprah and Vernita lived in a single room in a boarding house owned by Vernita's boyfriend's godmother, which is not an ideal living situation at best. Oprah later said, I don't know why my mother ever decided she wanted me.
She wasn't equipped to take care of me. I was just an extra burden on her.
And, you know, I think it's just this is probably what she was aware of as a kid, because her mom was there the first four and a half years, but she probably just doesn't really remember that. So it's got to be this uncomfortable situation where from her mom's perspective, I was just gone 18 months trying to like set up a life for you.
From Oprah's perspective, it's like you you were gone from as long as i can remember and then you moved me into this terrible situation in the city right it's so it's a bummer so weird to be able to perceive i don't think i would have realized that was a bad situation when i was five maybe i was just an oblivious kid yeah i don't know i i I have some pretty like my dad was gone right around the same time when i was like five to seven my dad was gone because he had to move to like new york and you know earn money for us because oklahoma is not a great place to earn a living um rural oklahoma not always a great place to earn a living um and i remember being pissed about it for a while and not really getting as a kid that

like, oh, yeah, it's really hard actually to be an adult and take care of kids.

And sometimes you have to do shit that sucks.

Yeah.

And it reminds me of what Andrew was talking about in our last episode of how much do you

really truly remember as a kid versus how you're remembering how it felt.

Right. Like, what do you I mean, I think like and also like the idea that we are talking a lot about these very very early years in her life in this way of like well is she a liar or not based on what she remembered slash felt when she was four yeah yeah i went through this process when writing it and read it when doing particularly the research where I was like, ah, okay, all of her families say that she's lying about this.
This is just Oprah being a bad person trying to myth make and make herself sound like she suffered more than she did. And then I went through this process of like, well, wait, what if her family's lying and they're just angry about the money? And then I think I've come back around to like, nobody has to be lying here.
It's just a completely different experience for her and them. And neither of them really understand each other.
And maybe communication isn't the family strong suit, which is ironic given Oprah's living. But like, I think that's where I've probably landed.
I don't know. There's some like weird similarities.
So I've been thinking a lot about like my own situation, kind of some of the stuff I was angry for years with my parents over in terms of like, why did you put us in this situation that was so clearly shitty? And, you know, now as an adult, I better understand that like, well, shit just happens, you know, and when you've got a kid, you have to figure out how to like make your life work.

It's, it's actually quite difficult to exist.

Yeah.

This is why we call you,

this isn't why we call you the white Oprah,

but this is, you know, help.

It's again, because of all the GeoMetros I give out, right?

You get kind of a car.

You get kind of a car.

Sort of a car. Not kind of a car.
You get kind of a car. Sort of a car.
Not kind of a car. So upon moving in with her mom, this is one of the things where I do understand why Oprah's not thrilled.
So she comes into this situation. It's not, they've got like one room.
You know, it's very cramped. She's not used to the city.
And she also learns upon arriving that she has a half sister named Patricia and a half brother on the way who's going to be named Jeffrey. And that is that is a lot to spring on a little kid.
Right. Your mom goes away.
And the first time you remember seeing her again, she's like, you're about to have two new siblings, by the way. She and Patricia are never close.
And yeah, that's a difficult situation. In Oprah's telling of things, she and her half-sister were immediately harsh competitors.
Oprah's interpretation is that she is the smart sister, whereas Patricia is the hot sister. Although, again, they're both like seven at this point.
So I don't know if this is Oprah later kind of thinking back on more shit that cropped up when they were like teenagers and young adults or if she was thinking that way from the beginning my guess is that this is a little like colored from later experience right hopefully God one would hope yeah now most of her insecurity here seems to have come down to the fact and and this is something that she talks about quite openly. She, as a little kid, was kind of obsessed with the fact that Patricia was lighter skinned than Oprah.
Quote, I felt really ugly. The lighter your complexion, the prettier you were.
And she complained that even though she was the smartest in the family, no one praised me for being smart. Oh, well, that is so that is like tale as old as time.
I mean, yeah, even when you're really young, you definitely get the sense when there's somebody in your family who has a lighter complexion. You definitely are aware of that.
And in a lot of families and a lot of dynamics, there's like a very clear difference in how someone is treated and the things that you might think of as your gifts that should be very obvious. Like I'm smart.
I'm well-spoken. I had the gift of gab, whatever.
You might not feel like those things are being praised comparatively to someone who's being praised for their complexion, a thing they can't even really control about themselves. I definitely, that really rings true to me.
Yeah me yeah and one of the things i do because that's a tough thing to talk about um and one of the things i do appreciate about oprah's conception and how she talks about her childhood is she is does not at all like hide that aspect of things like she she has strong opinions on it this clearly had a massive impact on her psyche growing up and again i could see how her family would be invested in that like oh we were never colorist against our own in this family how dare she say that that's a lie yeah yeah and they probably i'm sure wasn't conscious right like or at least not usually you know that's the way these kind of things tend to work um i would guess but you, you know, like, again, it's it's I don't think Oprah's I'm certain Oprah's not making this up. It's just far too consistent in her story.
And like you said, it makes total sense. Like this is definitely a massive has a massive impact on the way she perceives herself and the way she perceives her family.
she told one story to life from when she was about nine years old where she was reading in a back hallway

and her mother ran up, threw the door open, grabbed the book in her hand, and shouted, you're nothing but a bookworm. Get your butt outside.
You think you're better than the other kids. Oprah later remarked of all this, I was treated as though something was wrong with me because I wanted to read all the time.

And again, you get some denials from the family on this point.

Whoever's kind of more accurate there, Oprah isn't stopped from reading in like a major way.

Like she remains an excellent student and a voracious reader into adulthood.

Like, I mean, we could talk about the book club stuff.

But yeah, this is one of like the big discrepancies between her and her mom. But she's like, yeah, I got punished for being smart and for reading.
Yeah. Yeah.
Because it also is like, that's exactly what you remember as a twin and teen is these conflicts that don't probably resonate as much with the adult. Yeah.
Like maybe for the adult, it's this, well, one time I was frustrated at her cause she was spending all her time indoors. And I told her she was a bookworm to get outside.
And, you know, the rest of the time she was fine reading. I got her books, but you know, as a kid, you remember the one traumatizing mom, the time your mom yelled at you for reading.
Yeah. Well, or, you know i was always trying to help you know make this kid in my image or whatever image i thought and you know you hang on to different things yeah child memories um so given some of the other context clues of the way that people who were near the situation uh talk i think that oprah's recoll of events, obviously, like there's a lot that's true there, but there are some inconsistencies.
Because one of the things that Oprah's doing in this time, she continues from when she was living with her grandma, is she keeps traveling around all of these churches in Milwaukee, all these like black churches and social clubs, where she'll read poems and stories from the Bible and stories from literature. And so she's, you know, if her mom was like so ardently against her reading, her mom wouldn't have been driving her around to do all this stuff, like taking her to all of these different events.
So there clearly is like a good deal of support. And like people in her, like her mom recognizes, okay, my daughter has this kind of gift for like public speaking and talking, and I need to do something to nurture that, right? And that's definitely a part of the story too.
In People Profile's book, Oprah, Merrill Noden wrote, quote, Oprah gave recitations at black churches and social clubs. A particular favorite was Invictus, a stirring declaration of courage by the 19th century English poet William Ernst Henley, which closes with the couplet, I am the master of my fate.
I am the captain of my soul. And this is a great poem.
It's like the first poem I ever memorized. Oprah loves it.
And the third famous person who loves this poem is friend of the pod, Timothy McVeigh, who recited it as his last words before being executed by the state. So this is yet another thing that Oprah and cousin Timmy have in common.

There's so many of them now.

I mean, we don't even need to go back and list.

Could you say that Oprah is the black Timothy McVeigh?

Just asking.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

I mean, I'm not the first.

I think Regis was the first guy to say that, to point that out.

Anyway, still a good poem.

It's not the poem's fault that timothy mcvay liked it um anyway uh describing the reception of her first performances noden writes although the audiences were impressed with her skill as a speaker it seemed to annoy her mother and her peers teased her mercilessly calling her the preacher which i also believe that how shitty little kids are. Yeah.
Yeah. Listen, going around and being like, I want to recite this poem when, how old was she? She's like, she's like eight.
Yeah. If you're the kid, you're getting a nickname.
Yeah. It feels honestly not in the grand scheme of things as bad as it could have been.
I mean, I don't know. I mean, that kind of stuff's pretty traumatic as a kid.
Like I got, yeah, you remember stuff like that. Like little kids give you a shitty nickname.
And yeah, that sticks with you. Robert, I feel like you're about to say something about a nickname that you had as a youth.
And then you stopped yourself. No, no, no, we're not bringing any of that up.
But it is like, it's very sympathetic, very, it's very sympathetic, right? She's this, she's this bookworm kid who likes to like read poems to audiences of adults. And she, that is, I can't imagine much that's going to isolate you more than that, especially in like this period of time, right? Like it's even, even harder back then.
And like harder to find kids, there's no internet. Oprah would have, thank God, gotten on like 4chan or something today and then she'd be fine.
But yeah, you're just a lonely poem loving little girl at this period of time. That's gotta be difficult.
The preacher. Yeah.
So as an adult in interviews, Oprah would claim that their landlady, who is again, she described her as a lighter skinned black woman, didn't like Oprah for being darker than everyone else in the house. And so Oprah was forced to sleep on a porch in the back of the house while her sister was allowed to sleep with their mom.
As she claimed, white people never made me feel less. Black people made me feel less.
I felt less in pretty major discrepancy between Oprah's recollections and recollections of the other people in that house. And so I'll quote this passage of Oprah, a biography by Kitty Kelly next.
Catherine Esters, and remember that's Oprah's aunt and like the family historian, responded sternly to Oprah's poignant memory. This bothers me more than her corncob doll lies and her cockroach lies because it plays into the damaging discrimination practiced by our own people.
I'm a dark-skinned woman. Oprah's grandfather, Earless, was black enough to be painted by a brush, and Oprah is as dark as a preacher's prayer book.
But when she says things like that, she reminds me of my cousin Frank, who did not wish to be what he was and discriminated among his kin, preferring the lighter skin to the darker skin folks. Oprah slept on a porch in the back of the room of the house, but only because Vernita had to take care of her baby and there was just one bedroom.
That's it. Period.
If Oprah was discriminated against because of her skin color, I'd tell you, says Miss Esters, a civil rights activist who worked for the Urban League in Milwaukee. And I can't really like cast that aside either.
So, I mean, I don't really know what to do there other than kind of read both of those very much conflicting stories and things to you. I will say the tone of that passage.
See, I was initially going to indicate that the, she was going to say that the sleeping on the porch was not factual. So to land on, well, she definitely was on the porch is still a little like, I don't know.
That's not in dispute. That's not in dispute.
She was in fact sleeping on the on the porch. Yes.
I'm just like, oh, boy. It's just, was it, you know, racism or just we have no space because we're very poor.
Yeah. I will say there's something about this conversation.
I don't know if it totally fits, but, you know, I think that a lot of black folks and folks of color, when you get older and you think about the way that you showed up amongst your own people growing up, like I definitely went through a thing where, you know, I don't even know how to put it. Like you definitely can internalize like they don't.
My own people are rejecting me because I like anime or because I'm nerdy and too smart. And then you get a little older and it's like, wait, am I a pain in the ass? And that's why they're rejecting me.
And like, it's very easy to like internalize some very self-serving reasons for why you feel the way you feel. And then you get a little more mature and you're like, well, was that really what was going on? Yeah, is that actually the thing? Yeah.
Yeah. And there's also like, I feel like with this type of thing too, It's like whatever the thing? Yeah.
And there's also like,

like a,

I feel like with this type of thing too,

it's like whatever the real story is,

it's like the kernel of truth,

even if just to the,

like the phenomenon makes it really hard to push back.

We were like,

she was still sleeping on the porch.

Yeah.

And I'm just like,

but,

but maybe, but you know, and I'm like, even the it's in the middle of it is just like, probably just let this go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I felt like I had to present both of these things.
But yeah, I don't actually know where the truth lies here. Now, for her sake, Catherine Esters thinks that the explanation for why Oprah felt the way she did is more benign, which is that once she moved to Milwaukee, she was for the first time and very suddenly not an only child and the center of attention in her household.
She was suddenly the oldest of three kids and her two baby siblings got more attention than her.

And this made her very unhappy.

And I'm sure that's not a non-factor, right?

Like, that's such a thing.

Like, I don't have any trouble believing that that had a massive impact on her as a kid. Right.
Now, as I've noted, Kitty's book is quite aggressive. And she is a woman who has built a career off of puncturing the reputations of beloved famous people.
Her work is catty as hell. But she does make a decent point here.
Quote, The only photo I have of my grandmother, she's holding a white child, Oprah said at the age of 51. Yet a published picture of Oprah's desk shows a photo of her grandmother with her arm draped lovingly around Oprah as a little girl with no white child in sight.
And it's stuff like that where it's like, well, okay, that's not a, there's a discrepancy, but maybe no, that's just obvious myth-making. You've got a photo of your grandmother on your desk.
All right. You just said that because, you know, it made a case to an interviewer or something like you've got pictures of your grandmother with her with you.
That was just like not a not a not a true statement. So there's some there's some myth making going on here as well, like that we can kind of clearly lay out there.
So, again, it's complicated. Most of this, I'm still on the whole, like as a childhood, this is a very it's hard not to be on Oprah's side at this point.
And I believe Oprah, when she says of her grandmother, every time she would ever talk about those white children, there would be this sort of glow insider. No one ever glowed when they saw me.
And, you know, that also sounds true. Like that sounds like the kind of thing that that would stick with you as a kid into adulthood.
But it also is like the exact thing that kids say all the time. You know, like, I mean, I believe it.
Yeah. Well well but but as in like every kid feels that way that like there's a light in someone's eyes and until they're talking about me it's like yeah i know but everyone feels that way does everyone feel that way or did we just get fucked up too well sure many people feel that way someone listening is like what are you talking about and about, Andrew? What are you talking about? My parents glow whenever they see me.
That was the apple of my parents' eye. Yeah.
They walk out the door to live their emotionally healthy life, have their good relationships with loved ones. I'm just saying there's certainly, we're right in the phase of like adolescence where it's just like everybody hates me.
Like that's such a common idea kids sure like of all that's that's also one of the like uh the key facts about becoming incredibly rich and famous is that all of these like weird little idiosyncrasies and like uh anger at you know petty injustices or even some serious injustices that most people just have to get over. You have the ability to make other people care about it and the ability to also sometimes

make it other people's problems, as we're seeing with a much worse billionaire who's

in the public eye right now.

Because at least Oprah, what I'll say for her is how much of this is accurate or not

and how much of this is myth-making.

She has spent a lot of her time as a philanthropist putting money towards like child abuse causes um so you know you can't really uh uh i guess that's that's like in terms of billionaire coping strategies she's definitely in like the upper 10 percent oh my god yeah yeah it's that that is the thing that ultimately this entire series is going to hinge on is like, however much you might want to, you know, or one would categorize Oprah as some kind of bastard. There is a grading on the curve element of it, which might just put her at not a bastard, given her peers.
I kind of think, again, as we'll talk about the actual harmful, toxic stuff she was involved with once her media career got going, it's still more than anything a case of, well, we probably shouldn't make any individual person that famous. Because your own flaws and blindsights are going to cause you to do things that because of your platform and the level of your fame will be harmful.
But yeah, I really do think overall, my opinion of her is like, yeah, this is about the best case scenario for someone who gets this rich and famous, right? Right, right, right. That is kind of what I have been coming back to, because I definitely started my reading more hostile towards her, because I had been thinking of oprah purely in terms of like

well now i gotta think about dr oz because you put this on tv oprah why did you do that um yeah but

yeah i have a lot more sympathy with her now uh which doesn't happen often when we're doing these

usually you're like oh this person sucked ass from the jump i feel like it's gotta be more

interesting when the bastards are a little bit complex no like? Oh, yeah. Like, where it's like, ooh, I kind of have sympathy or empathy for them in some ways, but they did it.
Like, it's got to be a little meatier. Yeah, this is meaty.
And I also, there's also like a sick joy in reading a book like Kitty Kelly's where it's like, well, I would never write something that's this mean about a traumatized child, but you can.

It's kind of nice to see someone who doesn't give a fuck.

Oh, man.

So Vernita obviously needed a lot of help watching the kids, which meant family came

over to visit and babysit a lot.

And this is where the story gets very dark, because one of the family members who helped watch Oprah was a 19 year old cousin. I think they initially go over to the house where the cousin is, but then he starts coming over there.
And at some point in this process, Oprah is made to sleep with him, I think initially, just because there's not enough beds, right? Like they're literally just sharing beds because there's only so many. And then he starts molesting her.
After the first night that he rapes her, he takes her to the zoo afterwards. And in her words, buys her silence with ice cream.
Yeah, that's that's that's not great. No one else in the family obviously was aware at the time.
Aunt Catherine, the family historian, was aware that something is off. And what's interesting is that the family pretty much always denies what Oprah says about the sexual abuse that she suffered.

I think because they don't want to admit that they were missing some very problematic stuff.

But one of the things that's interesting here is that Aunt Catherine clearly knows something is wrong.

Because around this time, she writes to Vernon Winfrey, who's the guy everyone thinks is Oprah's father, and begs him to take his daughter in, right? So she doesn't – she's never – I don't think she still has accepted that this happened to Oprah, but she's aware enough at the time that something is unhealthy about this living situation that she's like, hey, Vernon, you should maybe think about taking your daughter and she's not doing well here. And that's interesting to me, too.
So Vernon lived in Nashville. He and his wife, Zelma, were both sterile, I guess, and they had no kids.
Right. And I think they had tried to have kids.
So one or both of them was like not biologically able to have kids. Vernon clearly had at one point, although actually that's not a guarantee because it's come out since that he might not have been the dad biologically.
In any case, he agrees to take he and Zelma agree to take Oprah in. And this is a vastly different environment for her.
For one thing, he is a

small business owner. He runs at this point a barber shop.
He was a military man and the Winfrey's ran their home like a military operation, which was pretty much entirely geared towards producing the best possible educational outcome for Oprah. So she goes right away from the situation where she's in a very chaotic environment with not much resources to the situation where, again, two adults are entirely focused on making her do as well in school as possible.
Oprah continued to be an outgoing child. She's a natural performer.
Adults who are around her will say that she would kind of automatically make herself the boss of any group of kids that she was in. Her favorite game to play with the neighbor kids was school.
Like she would play teacher and she would make them all play students. And I'm going to read a quote from her dad Vernon here because this is pretty funny.
From what I observed then, Lily and Betty Jean didn't enjoy playing school as much as Oprah did. I think that's because she was always the teacher, always scolding her little playmates as she scrawled invisible lessons on a make-believe chalkboard.
Lily and Betty Jean would sit attentively at imaginary desks,

hoping against hope that Oprah didn't call their names during spelling bees.

Can't say how much blamed them because if they misspelled a word, there was trouble.

Oprah would get her little switch, which was not at all imaginary,

and spank the palms of their hands.

That's a little unhinged, right?

I mean, where do you think she learned that behavior yeah absolutely absolutely but it's still pretty funny it's such a fine line between how is that even playing school for the other two really it is it does give you some insight into vernon where it's like can you just let her do that oh my god i have to say though i used to play school and it only now hearing this am i like oh was it like not fun for the others that i did perhaps it was not fun for all parties oh yeah the other kids might not have liked that at all maybe i just scared them in line um he did claim that eventually after a while he like confronted to Oprah and was like, hey, you should let the other kids play teacher sometime. They don't seem to be enjoying this.
Quote, she looked at me with the sweetest expression, all cute and bewildered about how I could ask such a silly thing. Why daddy? She informed me.
Lily and Betty Jean can't teach till they learn how to read. Yeah.
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hey kids it's me kevin smith and it's me harley quinn smith that's my daughter man who my wife has always said is just a beardless version of me and that's the name of our podcast beardless

me i'm the old one i'm the young one and every week we try to make each other laugh really hard

sounds innocent doesn't it a lot of cussing a lot of bad language it's for adults only

or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show.
We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out.
It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless S**t with Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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But when the perfect man walks into his life... Well, I guess I'm saying I like you.
You like me? He actually is too good to be true. This is a con.
I'm conning you. To get the Dilato painting, we could do this together.
To pull off this heist, they'll have to get close and jump into the deep end together. That's a huge lead, Fernando, don't you think? After you, Chulito.
But love is the biggest risk they'll ever take. Fernando's never going to love you as much as he loves this job.
Judito, that painting is ours. Listen to The Setup as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia. I'm excited to introduce a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
I'm having conversations with some interesting folks across a wide range of industries to hear how they reach the top of their fields and the lessons they learned along the way that everyone can use. I'll be joined by innovative leaders like chairman and CEO of Health Beauty, Tarang Amin.
The way I approach risk is constantly try things and actually make it okay to fail. I'm sitting down with legendary singer-songwriter and philanthropist, Jewel.
I wanted a way to do something that I loved for the rest of my life. We're also hearing how leaders brought their businesses out of unprecedented times, like Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna.
It becomes a human decision to decide to throw by the window your business strategy and to do what you think is the right thing for the world. Join me as we uncover innovations in data and analytics, the math, and the ever-important creative spark, the magic.
Listen to Math & Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back.
Ah, we're talking Oprah, talking prah. Talking prah? Talking prah.
We probably won't use that anywhere. Jesus Christ.
That's not very good. I don't like it.

OK, so Oprah thrives. She spends a year with with Vernon and and his wife and very stable.
You know, she has a lot of attention devoted to her education. She's doing very, very well.
She's also away from this 19 year old cousin who was molesting her. So that's a huge pluses to plus two.
Unfortunately, the situation does not last because Vernita still harbors dreams of raising all of her children together as quote, a real family. For whatever reason, not that she needs one, Oprah always saw Vernon as her father, but doesn't seem to have felt the same way, at least initially about his wife.
She was dead desperate for a normal home with two parents and claims other kids teased her over this, which I'm certain is true. That summer at age 10, she went to visit and her mom was like, hey, I'm about to marry this guy I've been seeing for a while.
You are finally going to get your dream. You know, why don't you move back to Milwaukee? And this marriage never happens.
This guy eventually dies. And so like, this is just the situation just collapses as badly as it possibly can.
But Oprah still makes the choice to leave the stable home with her dad because of how taunted she is by this possibility of like being part of a full and stable family. And this is one of those things where like, again, I'm not there,'s very hard to at least read oprah's recollection of events and not think wow vernita not doing a great job here um because when oprah decides to stay with her mom vernita breaks the news to vernon in the most devastating way imaginable she doesn't like call him and like tell him hey you know there's been a change.
She waits for him to drive to Milwaukee to like show up to take Oprah back home and says, oh, actually, no, I'm keeping her. You should leave, which is a rough move.
And this is more or less how Vernon recalls things. He remembers weeping as he left the house because he could tell that he was leaving Oprah in an environment where she would not receive adequate care.
He told Kitty Kelly, I never saw that sweet little girl again. And he actually is going to raise Oprah again.
He's saying that she was a different kid when he returned. Yeah.
When Oprah returned to her mother's home, nothing had changed for the better. The same cousin continued to come over to babysit, and he picked right up where he had left off.
She's molested off and on from ages 10 to 14. The times being what they were, and her educational career being somewhat erratic and interrupted, young Oprah did not initially have a great grasp on the physical consequences of sex and how they worked.
And I'm going to quote from Oprah Winfrey by Meryl Noden here. Winfrey understood so little about sex that she went through the fifth grade convinced she was pregnant.
Every time I had a stomach ache, she has said, I thought I was pregnant and asked to go to the bathroom. So if I had it, nobody could see.
That for me was the terror. Was I going to have it? How could I hide it? All the people would be mad at me.
How could I keep it in my room without my mother knowing? And boy, we really, really need better sex ed. it's kind of depressing how many kids today probably are not benefiting from better knowledge than oprah had access to at that point like real bleak yeah it's only gonna get worse just yeah so yeah i mean that really brought it home to me like what a lot of these people want to change the system back to is like kids being in exactly the situation Oprah was like hiding in the bathroom because you don't know, like you just want to be in a safe place in case you have a kid because you don't understand any of this stuff.
Well, and also you think worried about getting in trouble for after being even though the sex was forced on you. Yeah.
Like it's, it's, it's, it's fucked up. Oprah grows into a teenager who is very bright, very sexually confused and who is not at all being watched by her guardian.
She starts seeing lots of older boys and some men, some of whom are 18, 19 years old in both of the books books I've read and in the recollections of Oprah and the people who knew her, the people around her tended to see it

as she is incredibly promiscuous in this period of time, right? Obviously, what is happening here

is that this is a reaction to the sexual violence that she experienced from a young age. But that

is how she is treated by the adults in her life as a result of like what's going on. Right.
Right. One line from her that stuck with me was that she saw her behavior as revenge to the adults around her.
They didn't care about what was being done to her. So she was going to behave in a way that forced them to pay attention to her.
Even if that meant like really.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So.

I mean,

not to continue to like make Oprah's story about the traumas and historical

baggage of like some black communities,

but like,

again,

this idea that I think is really foisted upon black girls and young women

about being quote fast, where when you are clearly having a response to like a sexual trauma or something that has happened, you know, it's used to sort of marginalize you and other you and like say something is wrong with you as opposed to like, oh, are the adults around you somehow failing you?

The fact that like her 19-year-old, you know, adult cousin was, it seems like not reprimanded

and still welcome back into the home.

Meanwhile, Oprah, young Oprah, her response to the sexual trauma is for her to be criticized

by her own family is really telling.

Like who gets demonized and who gets, like, welcomed back with no accountability?

Right, right, right.

I think that's a really, really good point.

And it's probably not surprising

that Kitty writes so much better

about this very messy chapter

of Oprah's life than Meryl,

who is a male journalist.

But, you know, it's...

There's some bad lines

in Meryl's book about this.

This book that was written in 1999,

probably the worst of which is

Thank you. but you know it's there's some bad lines in Meryl's book about this this book that was written in 1999

probably the worst of which is

quote when Oprah was 13

her figure was 36 23

36 certain to attract

male attention

and I don't know man I feel like there's a better way to write about a

13 year old girl than that

Jesus

every time

that's just like, that's, that's, uh, yeah. Oh, man.
Like, I mean like my own, my own mother who bought most of my clothes at 13 didn't know my figure sizes to the number. That's so disturbing.
And I didn't know my figure size to the number. The reason Meryl does is that when Oprah talks about this, she will give the numbers for her figure.
But also, like, that's her. That's her also.
I don't know, man, Meryl. Like, quote her if you're going to do that.
Like, just writing it out that makes me very distrustful of you. Yeah.
And the conclusion drawn is that should, the conclusion alone should put you on a watch list. Yeah.
Yeah. He basically is like, can you blame him, though? Yeah.
I don't know if it's certain, because, like, I don't think most men look at 13 year old girls that way. But yeah, I would hope not.
So following what her abuser had done to her, she started using ice cream to get her younger sister to leave the house so she could have boys over. One of whom was her cousin's boyfriend, who she claimed treated her as a pet.
She expressed a feeling of frustration that none of the adults seemed to catch on about what she was doing and what was being done to her. And to an extent, again, she's like putting herself out there doing this in part to provoke a reaction from an adult in her life.
And no one reacts. Nobody draws a line.
Nobody intervenes. Now, throughout all of this, Oprah's grades remain excellent.
She is still a pretty good student while she's dealing with all of this. In the seventh grade, she's transferred to a better school via Upward Bound.
This is a federal affirmative action program to help poor kids who wanted to be first-generation college students by providing them with more support and better educational opportunities. In Oprah's case, this meant being bussed with a handful of other black kids to a very white school that had just been desegregated.
And one interesting thing to me is Oprah talks a lot about affirmative action and getting into schools and getting jobs only because of affirmative action. And very consistently, when you talk to the people who like hired her, they're like, no, she was like actually the best candidate.
Obviously, she's Oprah. She was a very good candidate to work for a TV station or whatever.
Right. But you can kind of see some of that, like, it's interesting to me

that that's the attitude

that she has towards it,

even though like everyone around her

is like, no, that really was not the situation.

I will say a little bit that,

I can't imagine getting the counterfactual,

even if it were the case at the time,

in a direct interview.

You can ask someone, hey, did you hire Oprah despite her not being the best candidate? Right, right, that's the case at the time, in a direct interview. You can ask someone,

hey, did you hire Oprah despite her not being the best candidate? Right, right. That's the other part of it too.
Yeah. And they're going to say, well, yes.
I find that hard to believe. Either way, it's like, I mean, what you can say is all these programs did exactly what they were supposed to because she wound up creating a media empire worth many billions of dollars as a result of getting these opportunities.

So they were known on campus as the bus kids operating at the University of California. They were supposed to because she wound up creating a media empire worth many billions of dollars as a result of getting these opportunities.

So they were known on campus as the bus kids.

Oprah and these other kids were being bused to this more affluent white school.

The whole situation, it's a very weird one where she once she starts going here, she starts being like taken, like invited into homes largely so that these kind of like affluent liberal white families can have a black kid over for dinner and like showcase how cool they are. Like that's one of her early and it's like a pretty, I think a good experience as she takes it just because like some adults are giving me positive attention, right? Like that's a thing for her.
She continues to engage in extreme behavior in a desperate attempt to make her mom or somebody parent her. And this eventually includes a fake robbery and an assault.
So here's the situation. Oprah had started wearing glasses, bifocals, and the first pair that she got were ugly and made her look, in her words, like a librarian.
It became clear that she was only going to get a new pair if the old ones broke. So she threw them away.
And then she like messed up her room and like cut herself in the cheek and called the police, claiming that there had been a smash and grab. Now, because she's a kid at this point, she like is pretending to be concussed.
But when the police look around, they're like, so what else did they take? And she's like, just my glasses. So not the smoothest crime anyone's ever faked.
You got to take something. You got to take like the hi-fi or something out of there, you know? Classic glasses criminals.
Now, events like this probably contributed to her family not believing her when she finally worked up the courage to tell them that she'd been molested, which happens around this period of time. So, you know, from her family's perspective, she's this kid who, you know, lied about getting robbed.
They've seen her out with a bunch of guys. They think she's just promiscuous.
And that's how her aunt Catherine feels decades later. I don't believe a bit of it.
Oprah was a wild child running the streets of Milwaukee in those days and not accepting discipline from her mother. And when you get to like that aspect of it, it's like, oh, I get why Oprah does not have a good relationship with a lot of these people.
Like that is not at all surprising to me now. Yeah.
And this is the woman who still denies Oprah's sexual abuse. Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah, I wouldn't want this person in my life either. No, not hard to see why she doesn't.
Now, obviously, we can't know precisely what happened. But it's going to be interesting.
Some of the part of, I think, why Aunt Catherine has this attitude and why some of the family members that are maybe jealous of Oprah have this attitude is that later on in her career, Oprah is going to make the sexual violence she experienced a very central, that's actually central to why she got so famous is the way in which she reveals this to her audience, the context in which she does that has a massive impact on her career and on, it's like one of the things that gets people to pay attention to her because women in prominent places in the media really didn't talk about stuff like this, the way that she did. And so there's this attitude from some in her family that she's again, just doing it all for attention.
I'm not saying that because I think that's accurate. I'm saying like that you have to understand if you want to know, like, why is her family saying all of this? This is part of the story, right? Like she has an incentive so they can point to that.
Right. Oh, God.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's it's it's when you really dig into the family drama, it's very unpleasant. In the summer of 1968, Oprah goes back to Nashville to visit her father and Zelma.
His brother, her uncle Trenton drove her. Now, up to this point, Oprah considered Trenton her favorite uncle.
Then, while they're driving, he asks her if she'd started dating yet. Thinking that she was having a safe conversation with her uncle, she said yes, but that it was hard because all the boys that her age wanted to do was French kiss.
According to Oprah, her uncle immediately pulled over to the side of the road and molested her. She does not tell anyone immediately, but after visiting with her dad, she returns to Milwaukee furious and she runs away from home.
This time she's gone for a full week. Her mother is panicking.
Oprah claims that during this time she was hustling for money on the street and she meets Aretha Franklin, literally running up to Aretha Franklin's limo and crying, saying that she'd been abandoned and she needed $100 to get back to her family in Ohio. She says Aretha gave her the money, which she then took to a hotel and spent several days drunk on wine, eating room service food.
I don't know if this happened. Aretha, I don't think anyone ever asked Aretha when they were both, like when she was still alive.
I haven't found any evidence of that.

And I'm kind of surprised because we've had this info for a while. And it's like, well, I would kind of want to know if Aretha remembers this.
Right. But yeah.
So I don't know. You have to you'll have to take Oprah's word on that one.
It would be kind of a weird thing to lie about. But I don't know.
Maybe it's just like you would assume potentially that this would not register on Aretha Franklin's radar? Yeah, I mean, she had a lot going on. I guess.
Yeah, I don't know. I'm just kind of surprised no one ever asked her about it as far as I can find out.
Because there was plenty of time after which Oprah was very famous and Aretha was still alive I'm just kind of nobody nobody thought to do that huh and Aretha was giving interviews and stuff like for even in like right before she died right like she was like 2011 12 yeah I kind of think this is the kind of thing that's just on someone's comms team is like we're not talking about this we're not talking about this. We don't want to talk about Aretha giving wine money to young Oprah Winfrey.
Yeah, I could see that being. Now, after this incident, Vernita tried to drop her daughter when Oprah finally comes home.
Vernita tried to put her daughter in a school for delinquent girls. She was told the processing time would take two weeks, which was too long.
And in a movie that really tells you a lot about Vernita, Vernita's like, well, fuck that then. She calls Vernon and she says, hey, actually, you should take her back.
Now, this is kind of a cheeky move because by this point, Vernon had sat down and done the math and he had counted back from Oprah's birth date in January of 1954. And he'd realized that he was away with the army during the period of time in which she was most likely conceived.
So he's got pretty good evidence that he is not, in fact, the biological father of this kid. But instead of being like, you know, you're on your own, Vernita, or she's on your own.
This is a kid he's still bonded with that he's thought of most of her life as his daughter. He says he'll take her back if Fernita gives up all claim to the girl.
And that's what happens. Oprah moves back to Nashville.
And unbeknownst to everyone at this point, the 14 year old girl was now pregnant with a baby she believed was the result of her uncle Trenton molesting her. So that's a lot to deal with.
Yeah. Put lightly.
But, you know, big ups for Vernon there. That's like a pretty.
And this is like he's it's very interesting. He's like gotten basically nothing from Oprah, like asked for basically nothing from her.
Like he's he takes a lot of pride in the fact that like his barber shop put her through school and supported her, which is,

you know,

he's right to do so obviously.

But yeah,

this is probably the luckiest single break of her life.

I think Oprah would say this was the luckiest single break of her life that

Vernon,

even when he got this kind of excuse to not be a father,

decided to continue being her father.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How do you talk about him now? Very positively. Yeah.
I think you get the feeling there's some stuff they don't quite agree on but like she's very open about the fact that she owes a lot to him obviously and Vernon's clearly very proud of her success even though again you get the feeling like oh he doesn't really understand like what she's been doing most of her career in a lot of ways. So once she started high school in Nashville, Vernon again became a strict disciplinarian, imposing a dress code on her and demanding excellent academic performance.
Oprah was always a great student, but she had stopped by this point enjoying school. And part of why was that in the winter of 1968, she was now heavily pregnant, hiding it under layers of jackets.
Eventually, she could not hide it from her father any longer. And she told him what happened and that his brother had been the likely rapist.
The short of it is Vernon didn't believe her about his brother. And I still don't think he does.
He doesn't say she's lying. He kind of like deflects the question.
Like the most recent interview I've read was him saying something like, well, it's very hard to accept something like that, you know, with somebody that you're close to. I'm not privy to the full details there, but you get the, obviously it's a significant pain point in the relationship.

The way Oprah describes it, her earlier promiscuity was used as an excuse by the most stable adults in her life to be like, no, my beloved brother didn't do this. Right.
This is, you know, there's some other explanation here, you know? And yeah, that's even the most supportive family member in her life is doing this to her. So that's not great.
Um, Oprah grave birth two months prematurely in the later winter of 1968, uh, for whatever it's worth, Vernon and his wife had pulled together in the 11th hour in that point and agreed to raise the child so that she could start her life.

Like that was their plan. We'll raise her.
This child is like another of our kids and you can go off and go to college and stuff. But none of them ever get that chance.
The baby is very ill. It never leaves the hospital and it dies after less than a month.
Oprah describes this as the most emotional, confusing, and traumatic experience of her life, which, yep, that it would be. From what I can glean via reading, this is the kind of moment that basically ended her childhood.
And it seems like everyone is aware of that at the time. Everyone decides to lock down and bury what had happened as a family secret.
they never talk about this again right and so oprah has to process everything that's happened without being able to talk about it to her family all vernon would say to her was that he thought that god had given her a second chance uh which is maybe not the best thing to say about your baby dying I don't know I don't know I mean without like

a whole maybe not the best thing to say about your baby dying. I don't know.
I don't know. I mean, without like wholly extrapolating a lot or like putting my, I mean, you know, my parents are not of that generation, but that is the type of shit they would do.
Like, yeah, there, there are types of parents that would think this is, you know, and would think not talking about it is the best way because we mostly just have negative things to say. So let's just pretend it didn't happen.
Yeah. I mean, it's it's yeah.
Fucking dark. But yes.
Yeah. Not a lot of light levity in this part of the Oprah story, guys.
I got to tell you, that's sort of the nature of this show. Yeah.
And it'll get more fun when we're playing some clips of tv from the 1980s but first here's ads so oprah returns to school the following year uh with a terrible secret but also like this is kind this is kind of, she changes, right?

She kind of takes, this is like a new lease on life almost is how it's described.

She gets heavily into speech and debate.

She starts doing competitive, like, drama contests.

She starts winning championships.

She starts telling her teachers that she's going to be a movie star.

According to her drama teacher, Andrea Haynes, Oprah insisted she wanted to change her name from Oprah to Gail because she thought it would help her in Hollywood. And Haynes advised her to keep going as Oprah because it was a unique name and Oprah had a unique voice.
So probably good advice given what happens later. The new Oprah gets invited to speak as part of a church event in Los Angeles in 1969.
She gets to see Hollywood for the first time, and she came back telling her dad about the stars in front of Man's Chinese Theater and promising to earn one of her own one day. As a junior, when filling out yearbook questionnaires that asked, where will I be in 20 years? She checked famous.
So she has made a pretty clear decision about where she wants to go at this point. In 1970, she wins a contest sponsored by the Black Elks Club of Nashville, and she gets invited to deliver a speech in Philadelphia.
This was her first big crowd. There's like a 10,000 person audience.
And she recalled later only that she felt totally comfortable addressing this massive group of strangers.

The remainder of her high school career is basically an endless parade of tournament victories and a surprising amount of jet setting for a high school girl.

She's flown to Palo Alto in 1971 for a contest at Stanford.

She's the only black student at the national forensics competition that year.

She gets into student government, winning election as vice president with a campaign slogan, put a little color in your life. Vote for the grand old Oprah.
Well, she's at like a majority white school, you know, like, yeah, I appreciate the humor. Yeah, yeah.
The grand old Oprah too. Now, one thing that's interesting, because I haven't read as many as I should have, of like stories of the first kind of generation of black kids to get integrated into like majority white schools.
But Oprah is in that that demographic. And at her high school, the black students as a minority decided that they had to work together as a block if they were going to win any school elections.
So they all agreed, decided to like agree ahead of time as to which candidates to put forward. And so they'd only nominate a single black student for each category, and then they would all vote for them.
Since the white kids, all white students all inevitably had like several white students for each role, and there's one black student for each role, and all of the black students are voting as a block, you actually have a chance of doing pretty well. So that's part of how Oprah wins election as school vice president that year.
But she has to get a lot of white votes, and she's very good at this. She's been hanging out at the homes of a lot of white classmates as a way for them to make their parents look good.
And yeah, Oprah is able to meet a lot of people and get a lot of votes this way she shows this like very clear talent for politicking and talent for like charming people by this point this is not lost on some of her black peers who claimed that she who she claimed to take into calling her an Oreo the first time this happened she crossed the first time this, she claims she crossed the invisible lines in the cafeteria to sit with the white kids. Quote, in high school, I was the teacher's pet, which created other problems.
I never spoke in dialect. I'm not sure why, perhaps I was ashamed.
And I was attacked for talking proper like white folks for selling out. And yeah, it's interesting because like, I don't have any reason to doubt that.
But it's also evident, like, she gets these nominations that everyone has to agree on beforehand. So she clearly, like, it's not like she doesn't have, you know, any of that support from her peers either, because she's able to, like, you know, convince them she's the best person to be the school vice president, too.
Well, unless it's a calculated bid for electability when we all know how that goes yeah yeah i was gonna say i see some echoes of some of our you know we're talking about a school election but i see some echoes of our our current situation yeah yeah it's hard not to read some parallels i mean no no the thing about her i mean like first of all if you are a black listening, every black person has been called an Oreo at one point in their life. That is not a unique experience at all.
Take it from me. But it goes back to what I was saying of like, is it possible that it wasn't that the other black kids didn't like her or like, because they clearly liked her because she was the person that they picked.
Is it possible that it wasn't about the way that she spoke? maybe she was being an asshole at times and didn't notice it and like that's why they were picking on her in this way like it's very easy to internalize this as oh they were picking on me because I was smart and ambitious and I was I spoke proper and got good grades and it's like well is that really what was going on yeah there's some of it that like you wanted to be a star you would talk constantly about being famous and you're you're probably like i mean anyone who goes into tv there's a little bit of that narcissism cooking in the background that may have been some of what people were recognizing yes yeah i say that with love for all of my friends in tv you know but like talking about talking about how you're going to go to Hollywood and be famous is annoying. If you like, that's an annoying thing to do.
No one likes hearing that, you know? Yeah. Like speaking as somebody who went to Hollywood to get into the entertainment industry, right? Nobody wants to hear about that journey.
Which is why we only have four to six Oscar winning movies every year about doing that. There's also like, I mean, obviously not okay to call someone an Oreo or attack their blackness for quote acting white, but also every kid was called something.
I'm just like... There's a little bit of like, you know, history is written by the winners and the winner is definitely Oprah as far as narrative goes.
So like, yeah, like I'm not saying it's good at high school, but everyone, it's just it is also high school. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So she is selected to be delegate at the 1971 White House Conference on Children and Youth. the organizer of this delegation was committed to making sure that it was not just a bunch of middle class white kids.
And so the resultant group that he sends to D.C. is like extremely diverse.
And they wind up voting on a series of recommendations to the Nixon government, which include legalize marijuana, denounce the invasion of Cambodia, launch a guaranteed income program for all Americans.

Didn't work if you haven't been keeping track of U.S. politics.

But hey, we appreciate the effort, kids, who are now in their 70s.

Yeah.

We don't really know how Oprah felt about any of these super progressive goals.

She was not very political.

As one classmate noted, she's not an activist, and the only march she ever took part in was the March of Dimes, which is like a way of fundraising for, I think, cancer research that she primarily uses as a way to get her leg in the door for a show business career. She walks several miles on foot to the studios of WVOL, a black radio station in the Nashville area, and she basically tells the DJ, hey, you're going to sponsor me for this march.
The DJ is so surprised by this that he's like, well, all right, I'll do it. And when she comes by to get the donation from him, he tells her, hey, you've got a good voice.
We should see what it sounds like on tape. And this guy, this DJ is John Heidelberg.
He would later declare himself the man who discovered Oprahrah and it's one of those i really hate that shit i really fucking hate that shit i really like that is like every fucking like famous or powerful woman ever it's the man who discovered her just like that's all i need to know he sucks right i thought there'd be a little more producer solidarity here sophie here's the. I hadn't thought about that at all, Sophie, and I'm not saying you're wrong to be annoyed by that.
I was so in this guy's corner because when I hear, oh, young 17-year-old girl meets a DJ who says that maybe she has a future in entertainment. All bad.
I was ready for this to be a hideous story. She's never claimed it was.
All she says about it and all we know about it is that, like, John actually gets her her first job. And that is, like, where the whole rest of her career comes from.
So it's entirely possible. Once again, hate that narrative.
She got herself a first job. She made the relationship.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I hate the phrasing.
I'm just saying when I started reading this story, I was like white knuckling it, waiting for like the crimes, you know, having just done the P-Ditty episodes. I was like, oh God, this can't possibly end well.
Robert, I'm the woman behind Robert Evans. See, it's disgusting.
That's what I'm saying. You definitely are.
Wait, no, we like that disagree. Yeah, we like this.
Are you? Did not enjoy that, everyone. It was gross.
I mean, the reality of the situation is that like... I physically need to give myself a hug.
It felt so uncomfortable. It's so weird.
Every successful person in media has a whole shitload of people who were like big parts of why they got successful. And, you know, John Heidelberg isn't the only guy.
But John Heidelberg certainly knows how to market. That said, I'm just so happy this didn't turn into another story about horrible crimes.
Yeah, yeah. I kind of gave him a pass.
DJ 17 year old, you know, not usually a good narrative. This is the most surprised I've been since we found out that L.
Ron Hubbard was never a sex criminal. I was like, really? Huh? Really? Okay.
Then why did he do all that stuff? Weirder reasons. Very weird reasons.
He wanted young people to dig for gold in the ocean. That's not a sexual metaphor? Nope.
He's like a Starcraft guy, basically. He by which you mean a hero right yes anyway that's part 2 of the Oprah story with surprise not a villain John Heidelberg as far as I know if horrible stories come out about John Heidelberg after this look I'm not defending the band I was just shocked that this didn't go into the dark place.
Yeah. What a weird twist.
Yeah. One DJ who is not a creep that we can prove.
Yeah. Right now.
Yeah. Honestly, you are in the top one cent of morality of moral DJs.
If you don't commit a sex crime like that, so rare for the DJ community. And I would like to formally apologize to our editor, DJ Danil, for that comment.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, apologize to John Heidelberg too, who I think is dead.
I'm not going to. Okay.
But- Ouch, poor John. I don't need to apologize to men.
I'm good. I'm good.
Anyway, that's our episode, everybody. How are we feeling about Oprah so far? Don't worry, next week.
Next week is where the questionable choices start. Yeah, this shoe hasn't dropped yet.
I didn't feel good. I don't know.
Should I have summarized all of the bad things as bullet points? I felt like the whole story needed to be told. Yeah.
I remain curious to see how they connect. Because if the bad stuff is kind of what I imagine it is, this would be the least connective tissue between Acts 1 and 2 and the B side, basically.
The connective tissue, and this is to an extent stuff that Oprah will even admit is that she grows up desperate to please. And that that is partly responsible for like her number one stuff, like some of her contributions to toxic diet culture.
But also maybe part of why she does not vet some of these, you know, Dr. Oz types the way that she ought to have.
Right. Like, I think you can draw some lines there between like some of the aspects of her career that are not ideal.
But yeah, I got to say, reading through this, this she it is definitely the most sympathetic person whose childhood we've talked about here. Yeah.
When you were talking about her like heyday when she was going to Hollywood and winning

speeches and elections, it was hard for me to not feel.

I was kind of like beaming thinking about this time in her life.

Like I was like, yeah, like good.

Like I'm imagining like a montage of her really moving up.

And I guess I'm waiting to see how when the other shoe drops.

I guess from that point of view, the good news is things don't ever go bad for Oprah. Yeah.
Some things that go well for Oprah go bad for the rest of us. I wonder.
But yeah. Anyway, you got some pluggables? I could go.
I think I went first last time. Oh, all right.
Well, you could check out my podcast on iHeartRadio called There Are No Girls on the Internet or my other podcast with the Mozilla Foundation, Makers of Firefox, all about power and people and ethics in AI called IRL. New season coming soon.
Follow me on Instagram at BridgetMarie in DC. Yeah.
Excellent. That's the week, everybody.
Go home and... Are you going to let Andrew do his plugs? Yo, is this racist? Oh, shit.
I'm sorry, Andrew. I haven't slept in three days.
Yeah, don't worry about it. Andrew T.
Fucking, who cares? Yo, is this racist? That's fine. Check out Yo, is this racist? And remember, everybody, don't worry about it.
Andrew T. Fucking who cares? Yo is this racist.
That's fine. Check out Yo is this racist.

And remember, everybody, don't hang out with DJs.

It usually doesn't go this well.

Except DJ Daniel.

DJ Daniel's the best.

And shout out to Andrew.

I love your DJ Screw shirt.

Oh, thank you.

This is a bootleg.

Bye. I mean, probably don't hang out with DJ Screw either Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media for more from Cool Zone Media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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