Part One: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?

Speaker 1 I watched a man vomit in a casino pit last night. It was beautiful.
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that's this week hosted from sunny Las Vegas, Nevada.

Speaker 1 We've got a real special one for you this week. We've got

Speaker 1 an episode about somebody who embodies everything

Speaker 1 that is meaningful about where we are in America today, like both our complete divorce as a culture from any sort of shared truth, our acceptance of all sorts of like weird, unhinged metaphysical realities, the guy who's probably going to be running Medicaid in the near future.

Speaker 1 We all owe them to

Speaker 1 our topic this week, our subject this week. Someone you all have heard of, Oprah Winfrey.

Speaker 1 And because Oprah is such a big topic, and honestly, kind of a scary person to go after, this might be the most powerful bastard we've talked about.

Speaker 1 I've brought in some very special guests. First off, let's say a warm welcome to the great Bridget Todd.
Bridget, welcome to the show.

Speaker 2 I want to say it like Oprah does.

Speaker 1 Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 I know how she has that thing.

Speaker 1 I just knew you were the right person for the straw.

Speaker 1 I'm so excited.

Speaker 2 Y'all don't even know.

Speaker 1 Bridget, I do.

Speaker 3 I was going to say, Bridget is the host of There Are No Girls on the Internet. That's right.
And also, just one of my favorite people in the entire world.

Speaker 1 That's right. That's right.

Speaker 3 She is here, and we are so lucky.

Speaker 4 Who is our second guest today? Because we couldn't have just one for Oprah.

Speaker 1 No, no, no. For Oprah, you got to bring out the, you got to have a double barrel, you know, if you're going, if you're going for a grizzly bear.

Speaker 1 And, and our second round of buckshot this week is Andrew T.

Speaker 1 Thanks for being here, Andrew.

Speaker 4 Andrew is the host of Yo Is This Racist?

Speaker 1 That's right. What's up? How's it going? We're going to need to ask that a lot in these episodes.
And the answer is always going to be, yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, boy. It is.
There's a lot of stuff to discuss there.

Speaker 3 Robert and I have been talking about doing the Oprah episodes for what feels like a year. And the subject of like, who do we have on for this?

Speaker 4 Like, how, like, guests, who do we have on?

Speaker 1 What do we do?

Speaker 3 Because, like, no matter what, like, I, I mean, I, I, I read Oprah's bio in like

Speaker 3 middle school and like she comes off with her like origin story as like heroic.

Speaker 1 She's deeply sympathetic in many ways. And these first two episodes are going, you're going to be sympathetic to her more often than not because we are covering a lot of her childhood in these.

Speaker 1 The things that she does that are awful and the reason why she deserves to be on this show is not because she's personally odious, right?

Speaker 1 And like her personal interactions usually, like I've run into a bunch of like Reddits where people who worked on the show talk and more often than not, people who worked on the Oprah Winfrey show say, like, it was, we were paid well, it was a reasonably good gig.

Speaker 1 Um, you know, you can certainly find people being like, Yeah, she was a dick to me when I was like a barista or whatever. There's there's stories like that, but I wouldn't hang an episode on it.

Speaker 1 It's more her level of influence is so titanic, and the things that she has chosen, she's chosen to push a number of people who are we have done two-part episodes on in the past. Dr.
Oz, Dr.

Speaker 1 Phil both owe owe their careers and the intense amounts of damage that they've done to society to Oprah Winfrey. Neither of those guys are on anyone's radar if it's not for Oprah Winfrey.

Speaker 1 John of God, that Brazilian mystic who raped and molested thousands of people,

Speaker 1 owes a huge amount of her career and prominence to Oprah Winfrey. There's a number of cases like that.
She's tied in massively with the satanic panic.

Speaker 1 She's tied in massively with a number of different like myths. Like we're going to talk about like rainbow parties and the like.
So we've got a lot of fun stuff today.

Speaker 1 I do want to start by asking Bridget, Andrew, what are y'all's histories with Oprah?

Speaker 3 Oh, that's a good question.

Speaker 2 Oh, I mean, I have to say, I'm really glad that you framed the Oprah conversation the way that you did, because I almost have like a love-hate with Oprah.

Speaker 2 You can't, first of all, you can't be a black woman and not have some deep admiration for Oprah.

Speaker 2 And I would say it's only been recently that I have really had to have my come to Jesus moment of some of the bad actors, charlatans, hucksters, and just like bastards that she has made famous and now we're sort of stuck with.

Speaker 2 So it's sort of a love-hate Oprah thing. I did a report on her when I was in fifth grade where I had to dress like her.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You're weirdly enough, not the only friend of mine who did a report on Oprah when they were in school.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well,

Speaker 1 I think there's like an element of like, it's a little bit like Obama, where where you're like,

Speaker 1 it's good that there's a different type of,

Speaker 1 like, like a black person being able to achieve the highest ranks of whatever. The wealthiest, she's the wealthiest person in media, period.
Like wealthiest, purely, purely media star.

Speaker 1 2 billion, something like that.

Speaker 1 But there's also like some version of like having to, so you're like kind of grading on a curve. It's like for a billionaire, she's probably pretty good, you know, relatively speaking.

Speaker 1 I mean, but she has, you know, she has all the trap. It's the same with Obama, where you're like, every president has committed crimes against humanity.
That's just the job.

Speaker 1 But like, so for a while, you're like, it's sort of nice that he's like, you know, he is who he is. But then you're like,

Speaker 1 I just wish he weren't doing all these terrible things. As we'll talk about, one of the complicated things about Oprah, there's a bunch of stuff that really is very sinister about her impact.

Speaker 1 And then then whenever you're reading the books and stuff, the critical bios of her, the things they choose to go after her for are always like, well, actually, I don't think she did anything wrong there.

Speaker 1 Like, there's a lot of very weird,

Speaker 1 she has also had to, you can't talk about the things she's done bad without also defending her because she has come under fire for so many insanely unreasonable things as well.

Speaker 1 I also did an Oprah book report probably in the fifth grade.

Speaker 3 And, you know, she was on on my television for my my my mom watched a lot of oprah there was a lot of oprah in my household growing up and then like a few years ago i was working on a project with jamie loftus and we went back and we were looking for like a specific oprah episode to reference in something and just the show episode titles were so triggering Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 And then, and it's, and then Robert and Bridget, you were both at, you were both at the DNC in Chicago, but I don't think you guys were both there for Oprah speech, were you?

Speaker 1 Oh, I was at one of them. Oh, you were there for Oprah speech?

Speaker 2 I was in the audience. I remember it very well.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I was there for that. And it was like the most

Speaker 3 detached I felt from an audience in my life. I was like, I was like, oh, no.

Speaker 2 Also, Sophie, do you remember?

Speaker 1 I feel like she got...

Speaker 2 I completely agree with you about the tenor and the vibe of the speech. However, maybe it was just my section.
I feel like people were losing their fucking minds when she came out and started talking.

Speaker 1 Like, yeah, I was like, are we hearing the same speech? Like, it truly, I had a very like what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 That's why, that's why I was like, I was, I was like, I was like, really?

Speaker 3 We're still, we're still, but then again, there were several people that I was like, oh, these are known horrible humans, and people are going Pharaoh for them as well.

Speaker 3 But yeah, Oprah, Oprah cheers were she's, I mean,

Speaker 1 it's hard to get across because there's really no one on earth like this, how cross

Speaker 1 for at least for a a certain kind of, for a certain like category of person, particularly like middle-aged moms from the 90s through the, through the aughts, it's amazing the degree to which Oprah completely cut across like political and cultural boundaries.

Speaker 1 You know, like my mom was a very conservative white lady in Texas, loved Oprah. Oprah was always on.
And like that was the case with every mom that I knew as a kid.

Speaker 1 Like Oprah was just like an institution, you know, like it, it, it's, it's, it's really, and I don't think she's even quite like that today, just because, like, things have, have gotten considerably more fragmented in the media ecosystem.

Speaker 1 And so, one of the things that's interesting about her is like, when we talk about her influence, there probably won't ever be a single person that influential again in the same way. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Bridget, at the DNC, when she came out, were you sitting or standing?

Speaker 2 I wish I could say that I like turned my back. You know, I gave her a standing ovation, even after all my like big talk.

Speaker 1 But it's exactly what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 But were you in the standing section or seated section?

Speaker 2 I was in the seated section. So here's my question.

Speaker 1 When she came out, did you immediately look under your chair? Like, yes. I'm like, Oprah, did you leave me in a car?

Speaker 1 You get a car. I wish.

Speaker 2 Oprah came out and instinctively was like, is there a gift?

Speaker 1 There was not.

Speaker 2 Honestly, though, if anybody could arrange that, it would be Oprah.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 I should let you know, I've bought you both cars. They're not, they're not, they're geoprisms.
They are not.

Speaker 1 These are really like burdens for both of you.

Speaker 1 Come

Speaker 1 Robert's clearing his books. It's really just like a tax deferral.
I got a lot of geos to offload. I'm underwater on a deal.

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Speaker 1 In the spring of 2024, Oprah Winfrey participated in a three-hour special sponsored by Weight Watchers called Making the Shift.

Speaker 1 Alongside several other celebrity panelists, she talked about the failures and shortcomings of America's toxic diet culture and took some degree of ownership for her role in perpetuating it, calling herself a major contributor and saying, I've been a major contributor to it.

Speaker 1 I cannot tell you how many weight loss shows and and makeovers I've done, and they have been a staple since I've been working in television.

Speaker 1 And even this statement, which is fairly unequivocal, underplays the reality of the situation because it's probably accurate to say that no one human being alive has had more of an impact on how Americans talk about dieting and weight loss than Oprah Winfrey.

Speaker 1 For the entirety of the time that everyone on this call has been alive, she has been the most public face of diet culture, and tens of thousands of Americans followed along as she gained and lost weight in the public eye.

Speaker 1 One of the biggest regrets of her career came in 1998 as a result of this. And I'm talking about the famous wagon of fat incident, which was precisely what it sounds like.

Speaker 1 Winfrey launched a new season of her hit daytime talk show by pulling out a red wagon filled with 67 pounds of fat, which is how much she lost on her most recent diet.

Speaker 1 And because this is kind of what Oprah says is, in her view, the lowest moment of her career, I do want to start with playing a clip from this,

Speaker 1 because it represents the intersection of a couple of very complicated things we're going to have to dissect in these episodes.

Speaker 23 I have lost as of this morning, as of this morning, 67 pounds since July 7th. 67 pounds and 30 inches from my bust, my waist, and my hips.

Speaker 23 7, 12, 11, I think it is. And this, let me tell you, those of you who are starting dieting or dieting a little bit, this is what 67 pounds of fat looks like.

Speaker 23 I can't lift it. Now, when you talk about, Jimmy, is this gross or what?

Speaker 23 It is amazing to me that I can't lift it, but I used to carry it around. I had to

Speaker 23 go.

Speaker 1 She's definitely lifting it. She's wagging.
That's so funny.

Speaker 1 The Radio Flyer people, do you think they were like, gotta get in there?

Speaker 2 Oh, God. I remember that clip like it was yesterday.
When you, as soon as you set it up, I closed my eyes and I can like, I remember it crystal clear, like what a moment in culture.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And she does look great in that video.
No one can deny that.

Speaker 1 And it's interesting to me, first off, that this is, this is such like a,

Speaker 1 especially in like the critical reading on Oprah, this is such like an epocal moment, right? Like how, how toxic this was, what a bad, you know, moment this was in terms of like

Speaker 1 inculcating toxic attitudes in American culture vis-a-vis weight loss and how like tame it seems, honestly, in a lot of ways, considering like where we are now, just in general with like the TV, how much like worse shit there is every single day.

Speaker 1 But it's also interesting because like this is an easy moment to hang on as toxic.

Speaker 1 I actually don't, I have trouble blaming Oprah for this, even though she's definitely contributing to some really ugly aspects of diet culture.

Speaker 1 As we'll talk about, the way she gets attacked and like focused on in the media over her weight is probably unique. Like, I don't know that anyone else has been kind of

Speaker 1 anyone else's personal weight has been obsessed over to the same degree that Oprah's has. It certainly was in the late 90s.
So, yeah,

Speaker 1 as we'll talk about, I don't see this as like a low point for her, but this is probably what she would name as like the absolute worst thing in her career. Wait, and

Speaker 1 maybe I'm missing something.

Speaker 1 So, and she would she would say that, or she has said that because it's just like a crass stunt, it's crass, and she has started to say, talk about the degree to which she thinks that diet culture and the our obsession with fat and weight loss is unhealthy, and that she was a big part of that, right?

Speaker 1 Like, she started talking about that now. She started talking about that in participation with Weight Watchers, so I don't know, I don't know how much credit you want to give her, right?

Speaker 1 Like, clearly done in good faith. Yeah.
Maybe not totally done in good faith, maybe more of just a pivot.

Speaker 1 I will just say, as someone who is like a little more outside of the Oprah sphere,

Speaker 1 I think compared to everyone else here,

Speaker 1 I feel like I didn't particularly perceive.

Speaker 1 Like, I hear what you're saying about like, she was like one of the faces of, but it was so pervasive everywhere.

Speaker 1 Not to like completely let her off the hook, but it is a little just like, that's what you did when you were like, especially marketing to middle-aged women.

Speaker 1 I feel like it's partly what you did because Oprah was so successful at it. Like she, like, it's a, it's a road that was there because she bushwhacked it.

Speaker 1 Right, right, right.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I actually have a similar take.
I think that why she regrets this is not because of like participating in this harmful, toxic diet culture, yada, yada, yada, which she was.

Speaker 2 I think it was sort of throwing red meat to the people, Robert, that you were just describing who obsess about her weight personally.

Speaker 2 I think that it's probably a low point because she was engaging in this like highly personal public conversation about her weight and like playing into that.

Speaker 2 I don't, I, I would probably, I don't know that she was, would say like, oh, I shouldn't have been participating in diet culture writ large.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Right.
Yeah. Yeah.
I think that that's, that, that might be a fair critique, but we'll talk about it.

Speaker 1 But first, for these, for these couple of episodes, we're going to really be getting into like the parts of Oprah's career that are mostly, or life, that are mostly like a lot more empathetic.

Speaker 1 Although, you know,

Speaker 1 there's some darkness there too, mainly in like the way in which she has kind of lied and judged up some aspects of her background because it makes a better story.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this will all be interesting to talk about.

Speaker 1 So in 2021, one of my sources for this is a book that Oprah released about trauma, much of which she discussed through the lens of her own childhood trauma.

Speaker 1 She co-authored What Happened to You with Dr.

Speaker 1 Bruce Perry, an American psychiatrist who specializes in child trauma, and from what I can tell, is like one of the less toxic doctors that Oprah is famous for launching to stardom.

Speaker 1 Although, again, that doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot.

Speaker 1 In an interview about that book for Today.com, Oprah posited that her childhood trauma was responsible for her low moments like the wagon of fat incident.

Speaker 1 I think that certainly all of the feelings of not fitting in, of my disease to please, or feeling like if I don't do what everyone wants me to do, I'm going to be rejected somehow, what I was afraid of in every instance.

Speaker 1 I'm going to get a whipping. I'm afraid I'm going to get that whipping.

Speaker 1 Thankfully, she adds, the decades of time she spent processing her pain has given her a sort of what she calls post-traumatic wisdom that she thinks makes her a good spokesperson for every kind of suffering in America, or for a lot, many kinds of suffering in American society today, right?

Speaker 1 Like, because of my trauma, that's why I've done some of the things that I regret. It's my disease to please.
It's like my fear of not fitting in.

Speaker 1 But because I have that trauma, I'm also a perfect spokesperson for many of these kinds of like traumas in American society.

Speaker 1 And the fact that she thinks that way is a really important prism to understand what she does.

Speaker 1 Because Oprah, in a lot of ways, if you look at especially the first 10 or 15 years of her show, It's a mirror in some ways of like the Jerry Springer show.

Speaker 1 Like they're literally doing some of the same episodes, bringing like Klansmen out, you know, to have like big arguments and fights on stage.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of like, you know, bringing out people in relationships who are having conflicts. It is that kind of like trash TV.
And then in the late 90s, she starts to pivot.

Speaker 1 And largely the thing that she pivots around is her taking her own childhood trauma, her own experiences of like physical and sexual abuse and whatnot, and using that as sort of a lens through which to explore those things in American society.

Speaker 1 And there's both a degree to which there are some really important issues that started getting attention because Oprah used herself as a lens to kind of like highlight them.

Speaker 1 And also there's this sense of like

Speaker 1 almost profiteering from the same things, which makes this very complicated to discuss.

Speaker 1 I feel like it's so weird too, because it's like, at the time, as you're describing it, I probably wouldn't have perceived it as such but like we're also in an era where like influencer and just like you like that is the product that everyone you know the children today are very casually selling yeah it's almost like the the concept of like selling out for like between the 90s and the todays of it it's like you know it's it's not something that you would bat an eye at everything you're describing right now no no no but it it was really unique at the time right

Speaker 2 it does seem like she was like very ahead of the game on this. Like, oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 I think it's like the influencer bread and butter today, but back then, I mean, I do think that it set her apart from like your Jerry Springers, your Jenny Joneses to really put these kind of trauma off, like it was like authenticity before that was a thing we expected from TV show hosts.

Speaker 1 Yep, that's exactly, I think that's exactly it, Bridget.

Speaker 1 And what's kind of undeniable is that she was able to kind of get access to a lot of stories of people's hurting from her own background of suffering.

Speaker 1 Her old executive producer, Diane Hudson, once told People Profiles, quote, vulnerability is the key to Oprah's success.

Speaker 1 People appreciate when you can be honest. It lets them feel more comfortable about themselves.
She's got this special kind of connective ability. I see it happen over and over again.

Speaker 1 Everyone who meets her feels like, oh, now I know her. And that's what you're talking about, that kind of authenticity being the buzzword that it is today.
It all really starts with Oprah.

Speaker 1 And yeah, it is one,

Speaker 1 it's both, I think there is a lot of vulnerability that she's been willing to put out there, but at the same time, Oprah's not like Oprah is a conscious crafter of her own image and her own story, right?

Speaker 1 She knows what she's doing. She's not like a naïve in this kind of situation, in this kind of scenario.

Speaker 1 And that muddles the waters too, because some of this authenticity is very carefully sculpted rather than

Speaker 1 something that's kind of come out purely just as a natural reaction, you know?

Speaker 1 And that's going to make talking about some of this very hard because we do have, like, especially when we talk about the traumas of her childhood, you have different sources who disagree and who disagree with like some of the things Oprah says about what happens to her.

Speaker 1 And as a spoiler, like, we're not going to know like who's actually right here because

Speaker 1 I certainly wasn't there when Oprah was a little kid. I'm going to guess neither of you were either.

Speaker 1 The two of the biggest sources for this episode are first that book that Oprah wrote with a doctor about her own trauma.

Speaker 1 And then there's two biographies. One was written kind of early on in Oprah's time as a world famous talk show host, 1999's Oprah Winfrey

Speaker 1 written by Meryl Noden for People Profiles. And if you want even like, you know, that's kind of actually a surprisingly good for being a pop biography.

Speaker 1 Look at Oprah's backstory and kind of the different

Speaker 1 takes on what happened to her as a kid. A more recent biography is Kitty Kelly's Oprah, which is another major source for this episode.

Speaker 1 Now, I'm going to warn you, Kitty's 2010 book is a mean biography.

Speaker 1 It's the best kind. It's the best kind.

Speaker 1 But Kitty is like, she is recognized as a lover of gossip. And like, you know, there's a tabloid feel to this.

Speaker 1 She's also someone who does put in the work to dig up dirt on her subjects, but it tends to be like real dirt, you know?

Speaker 1 but this is a mean book you know like don't don't mistake this for a work of like objective biography like so like all great media figures um including you know me uh oprah's hometown was a destitute little slice of hell in the middle of nowhere this is something i really identify with her with right she comes up in kosciuszco kosciusco mississippi uh which is 70 or so miles above jackson she once said of her hometown that place is so small you can spit and be out of town before your spit hits the ground.

Speaker 1 Which I both, I get that feeling, right? That like this isn't even, there's nothing here, right? Like this isn't even a town, which I

Speaker 1 like empathize with. That's how I felt as a kid about fucking Idabelle.
It's a little bit of an exaggeration.

Speaker 1 There were about 6,700 people in town when she grew up, which like isn't huge, but it's not quite that tiny.

Speaker 1 Now, she was born in the home of her maternal grandparents, Hattie Mae and Earlist Lee, who was known as Earless by the family because he was super old and also deaf as hell.

Speaker 1 The town has that weird Polish name because it's named after a Polish Revolutionary War general who was also an ardent abolitionist.

Speaker 1 And as a result, it had a fairly large, or not as a result, but like that. It having that name is a result of the fact that it had a very large black population.

Speaker 1 It was extremely segregated and extremely poor. So, yeah, that's the town that she grows up in.
And it's one of those places that had largely been built around a cotton mill, which went bust in 1948.

Speaker 1 And that's kind of when things start to fall apart in her hometown because people start fleeing for northern cities that might still have work.

Speaker 1 You know, this is

Speaker 1 what's happening in Kosusko is kind of a

Speaker 1 microcosm of like a much larger national trend at the time, right? Like this is a thing that's happening. elsewhere to a lot of places.

Speaker 1 Meryl Noden writes, quote, Oprah's parents were among those who left. Military service had already given 20-year-old Vernon Winfrey a ticket out.

Speaker 1 He was at home on a furlough from Fort Rucker, Alabama, on the spring day he met Vernita Lee, an 18-year-old high school student and part-time domestic worker.

Speaker 1 The two barely knew each other when they had what their daughter has described as a one-day fling under an oak tree.

Speaker 1 The encounter seems to have been a source of shame for the ambitious young man who would go on to become a deacon in his church and a Nashville city councilman.

Speaker 1 I'm not proud of what happened with Oprah's mother and me, Winfrey has said. I tell people today that if something like that happens, the boy should help take care of the child.

Speaker 1 So that's the...

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's not his, he's not told until she's born. Right, right.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And he does like send financial aid as soon as he's told, but like they don't, they don't really let him know until there's already a kid.

Speaker 1 And as another spoiler, he might not actually be her biological father. I don't know that that doesn't really make a huge deal in this story because they all think he is during this period of time.

Speaker 1 And he's like going to be very much a responsible dad to the extent that he is like allowed to be.

Speaker 1 Um, but it is kind of like a little unclear as to what actually uh, like who her actual like biological dad is. Um, I don't think that there's like a solid answer on that.

Speaker 1 Every biography will give you a little bit of a different answer, but Vernon is the one that they think is the biological father, you know, for most of this period of time.

Speaker 1 And Oprah Gail Winfrey is born on January 29th, 1954. And the story behind her name is a fun one.
So, does anyone know what Oprah's original name was supposed to be?

Speaker 1 This is the one thing I think I know. Oh, yeah.
Isn't it supposed to, wasn't it supposed to be Orpa? It was supposed to be Orpa, yeah, which was

Speaker 1 a biblical name. Ruth's, like, if you know, I think Ruth was like Moses's sister or because she was pretty, she was like tight with Moses, if I'm remembering the Bible right.

Speaker 1 Um, and Orpa was one of her friends. And this is, like, it really says a lot about the people here.
Orpa is a Bible deep cut.

Speaker 1 This is the biblical equivalent of like a Star Wars fan who names his kid after Kitster Benai, who's one of Anakin Skywalker's little friends from Tatooine.

Speaker 1 Sophie's going to pull up a picture of Kitster here. Not for any real reason.
I don't know why I thought this joke deserved to be presented.

Speaker 1 Because we're filming. This is the Razzle Dazzle.

Speaker 1 There he is. There's Kitster.
Look at him. He looks like a little bit.
He's him. Gas dyer doing

Speaker 1 something on SNL.

Speaker 1 I'm sure someone out there

Speaker 1 has the original model from when the Phantom Menace came out of this little child. Look at this kid.

Speaker 3 I love that haircut with the built-in bangs.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I know. He's looking great.
He's looking great. Anyway, I'm no more a Bible scholar than I am a fan of the Phantom Menace.
I did have to look up that kid's name, although I remembered his face.

Speaker 1 It's one of those things that's burnt into my head from my childhood.

Speaker 1 Um, I gotta say, though, from what I can read, and maybe I'm missing something here, not being a Bible scholar, it feels like her aunt picking Orpa as a name might have been her throwing shade at the baby.

Speaker 1 Because in the book of Ruth, Orpa,

Speaker 1 the person Orpa, has a chance to go with Ruth and someone named Naomi,

Speaker 1 who are like going down this more godly path, or return to her old pagan gods and like her, her, you know, her village or and whatever and orpa turns back and goes back to like being a pagan right in rabbinic literature according to wikipedia so again i'm i'm not a rabbinic literature ever orpa is identified with harappa the mother of goliath and three other philistine giants um also harappa had a lively social life uh by which i mean like got around right the babylonian talmud describes her as being threshed by as many men as a man would thresh wheat.

Speaker 2 Not threshed?

Speaker 1 Threshed? That's in the fucking Bible? Yeah.

Speaker 1 The Bible loves doing shit like that. Who got threshed and how much?

Speaker 2 Her body count was crazy.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I'm saying threshed from now on.
I'm saying threshed too.

Speaker 1 So I'll tell, yeah, it seems like they're kind of shit talking this baby by naming it Orpa. I don't know why else you would go with Orpa.
Like,

Speaker 1 it's not a super nice name to give a little kid just based on how the Bible talks about this person. Maybe she just thought it sounded pretty.

Speaker 1 In any way, it's just that someone else in the congregation just named a kid Nebuchadnezzar, and you just had to like one up. Now, that's a name.

Speaker 1 That's a name, and it's also a size of wine bottle that's now legal in Florida. Wow.

Speaker 1 That just happened. Wow.

Speaker 1 That's like the three liter? Oh, you're sorry.

Speaker 1 It's massive. Sophie can pull up a picture of a Nebuchadnezzar of wine.

Speaker 1 I'm not.

Speaker 3 Just imagine a really big bottle of wine.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure. It's very big.
It's like most of your height of wine.

Speaker 1 So this is the first time where Oprah gets really lucky. Obviously, she's born into a difficult situation, but she gets an early solid in the fact that somebody fucks up on her birth certificate.

Speaker 1 And the name, the midwife misspells her name as Oprah. And everyone just kind of decides, eh, good enough, right?

Speaker 1 And this little error might be one of the luckiest breaks that Oprah ever received because I have trouble imagining Orpa working as well as a star's name. The Orpa Winfrey Show? The Orpa Winfrey Show.

Speaker 1 I just have trouble imagining it, you know?

Speaker 1 Oprah just seems to flow a lot better. I don't know.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we would all be saying that if she had been named Orpa and they'd been like, we almost called her Oprah.

Speaker 1 God, can you imagine? I don't know. But yeah.
Anyway, you know what doesn't have a name is

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Speaker 1 And we're back.

Speaker 1 So, we're talking Oprah, who has now come into the world.

Speaker 1 So, once she is born, the job of caring for this new baby is almost immediately made the work of Hattie Mae Presley, her grandmother.

Speaker 1 And that Presley there is going to be the reason why Oprah will, for years, for a big chunk of her life, claim that she is related to Elvis.

Speaker 1 This does not seem to be the case. I don't think anyone in her family ever believed that, but she will make statements like that for quite some time.

Speaker 1 And it's one of the things that members of her family will be like, I don't know why she does that. We're not related to Elvis in any way.

Speaker 2 Does she still do that today, you think?

Speaker 1 I don't think she still does it, but maybe I'm wrong about that. All of the times I found, like all of the quotes of her claiming that I found are from earlier in her career.
Oh, man.

Speaker 2 That's a truly a wild thing to claim.

Speaker 1 Like, truly. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I could see it if it was like a widespread family myth that we have, you know, Elvis is kin, but like it doesn't seem to be because it's always in these books, it's always her family being like, yeah, we got nothing to do with Elvis.

Speaker 1 I don't know why she's doing that. Without being too wildly cynical, the value of being related to Elvis has also diminished greatly in the last probably 20 years.
So

Speaker 1 there's like no reason to keep it up. Yeah, yeah.
It's certainly like there's less, yeah, you get less cred from being related to Elvis. Oh, cool.

Speaker 2 Like, just having the same last, the same common last, it's like me saying, like, my last name is Todd. It's like me saying, oh, Chuck Todd and I are related.

Speaker 1 It's like, y'all have a very common last name.

Speaker 2 And what cachet would you be trying to get from that?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Or it's like me bragging about my relationship to Rick Santorum.

Speaker 1 I mean, but also like without getting too gross about American history, the obvious thing is when a black person and a white person have the same last name, the antecedent tends to be a different thing than direct.

Speaker 1 Well, or whatever. I mean, there's lots of awful ways, but.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 1 one way. But in this case, there doesn't seem to be any like evidence of that, right? Like that it's because like Presley's not an uncommon last name, right?

Speaker 1 There's a shitload of fucking Presleys out there.

Speaker 1 So Hattie Mae was the granddaughter of slaves. So that is like how kind of, you know,

Speaker 1 we're talking about like the 50s here, right?

Speaker 1 And she worked as the cook for the sheriff of Kosiusko and managed the household of a rich white family, the Leonards.

Speaker 1 And at this point, we've got two pretty different, we start to get two very different stories of Oprah's first six years alive.

Speaker 1 She once told reporters, quote, I never had a store-bought dress or a pair of shoes until I was six years old. The only toy I had was a corncob doll with toothpicks.

Speaker 1 This is like pretty consistent in terms of how Oprah talks about her life.

Speaker 1 Kitty Kelly writes, quote, She recalled her early years as lonely, with no one to play with except the pigs that she rode bareback around her grandmother's yard.

Speaker 1 I only had barnyard animals to talk to. I read them Bible stories.

Speaker 1 She regaled her audiences with stories of having to carry water from the well, milk cows, and empty the slop jar, a childhood of cinders and ashes that was the stuff of fairy tales.

Speaker 1 Oprah morphed into Oparella as she spun her tales about the switch-wielding grandmother and cane-thumping grandfather who raised her until she was six years old. Oh, the whoopins I got, she said.

Speaker 1 And the degree to which this is myth-making is up for debate. It is worth noting that

Speaker 1 a number of her family members and friends of the family who knew Oprah during this period very much don't agree with this take on her childhood.

Speaker 1 And I want want to read a quote from that People Profiles biography here.

Speaker 1 Among Oprah's many assets may be a gift for self-dramatization. As Vernita once put it, Oprah toots it up a little.

Speaker 1 In one tale, Oprah has often told, she has cast herself as a lonely child whose main comfort was talking to the farm animals. The nearest

Speaker 1 neighbor was a blind man up the road, she once said. There weren't other kids, no playmates, no toys, except for one corncob doll.
I played with the animals and I made speeches to the cows.

Speaker 1 Esther's, which is her aunt, has a different explanation for the loneliness Oprah remembers. Right across the road were Oprah's cousins, the Presley twins, who were her age.

Speaker 1 They played together when Oprah was allowed to come outside because Aunt Hat was very protective of her.

Speaker 1 And it seems that there's at least a good amount of evidence that the real Oprah story, or at least the story of her childhood, that the majority of the people who were there for it tell, is not that she was like locked, you know, is that she was isolated because this was some like middle-of-the-world, nowhere dirt farm.

Speaker 1 It's because she had a grandmother who was something of a helicopter parent, right?

Speaker 1 And while the family certainly wasn't rich, they weren't dirt poor. And in fact, everyone seems to agree that Oprah had a lot of toys.
The whole I only had a corncob doll thing is definitely not true.

Speaker 1 But the reason she had a lot of nice toys is that they were all hand-me-downs from the rich white family that Hattie Mae worked for, which is a complicated thing, right?

Speaker 1 When you're thinking about like, why would somebody kind of exaggerate the lack of stuff that they had as a kid when it's like, well, but also the stuff that you have comes to you as a result of this relationship that's kind of very fundamentally unequal and that you were probably somewhat aware of at the time.

Speaker 1 And Oprah, in fact, talks a lot about how she was aware of the fact that like white girls were treated very differently in her town and wanted to be white as a little kid. So like,

Speaker 1 this is all very messy.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it goes back to what you were saying, Robert, about how a lot of her early story is quite sympathetic and it's very easy.

Speaker 2 Like, it's on the one hand, it's easy to say, oh, well, she was doing some myth-making and saying she didn't have any toys, but it's also like more complicated and sort of truer to be like, well, she had toys, but they came from the white kids and she didn't maybe, maybe was aware of the dynamic there.

Speaker 2 Like, it's less satisfying and more complex, but it doesn't make it any less true.

Speaker 1 Right, right. And it's, it's, it's, it's also one of those things where,

Speaker 1 like, she talks a lot about being whipped and switched and how, like, she didn't feel like the same thing happened to the white kids.

Speaker 1 Now, does that mean, like, I'm, I'm, white kids in Alabama, I'm sure plenty of them got beat by their parents too. But what, what kind of matters more there is her feeling on it, right?

Speaker 1 That there were these kids that my grandma's job is to serve, and they clearly get these much nicer things than I am. And it's not surprising to me that that would color her, her,

Speaker 1 like, concept of her childhood much more than like what her older aunts would have picked up on, which is like, well, she always had the nice things, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, like neither of them can be lying and there can still be a discrepancy between what they remember, if that makes sense. But it feels like myth-making is sort of a fair way to say it.

Speaker 1 Like this is just kind of part of it.

Speaker 1 The exact shorthand, especially in a like

Speaker 1 entertainment capacity.

Speaker 1 The whole

Speaker 1 I only had the cows to talk to thing is definitely a bit of myth-making because like everyone does agree like, no, she had more family around her than that.

Speaker 1 That's a little bit playing it up, right? That's like straight out of the movie Pearl. Like, oh, yeah.
Put it on speeches for the pigs.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, Oprah, one of the stories she

Speaker 1 tells is that she was like forced to make friends with cockroaches,

Speaker 1 which is actually like a reoccurrent bit of hers in her early years. Quote, we were so poor we couldn't afford a cat or a dog.
So I made pets out of two cockroaches.

Speaker 1 I put them in a jar and named them Melinda and Sandy. And Oprah's sister, Patricia Lloyd, does not entirely agree with this take.

Speaker 1 Oprah exaggerated how bad we had it, I guess to get sympathy from her viewers and widen her audience. She never had cockroaches for pets, she always had a dog.

Speaker 1 She also had a white cat, an eel in an aquarium, and a parakeet called Bo Peep that she tried to teach to talk. And she had an eel, she had a parakeet.
Come on, I'm sorry, it's harder.

Speaker 1 You really blasted past the eel part.

Speaker 1 Mary is landing on that one a point. Well, here's the thing, though, because, like, Patricia Lloyd is telling the truth, I think.

Speaker 1 I'm sure that Oprah had those pets, but Patricia is younger than Oprah and doesn't meet Oprah until Oprah is not living with her grandmother anymore. Patricia and Oprah never get along.

Speaker 1 And a big chunk of this is, I'm not going to throw out stories like this from family members who are like, yeah, it wasn't as bad as she says it was, because there's definitely a good amount of myth-making going on here.

Speaker 1 But also, there's a lot of people who are angry that Oprah got rich and that they didn't get as much of that money as they wanted to get.

Speaker 1 And so, that's also a factor in some of these, like, like Patricia doesn't know what was going on in that farmhouse because she wasn't alive then.

Speaker 2 And she's probably just a hair.

Speaker 1 That's not 0% of why she's saying this, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Now, that said, there's also some evidence that, like, Oprah really pushes aside how doting her family was to her because that's not kind of the conception.

Speaker 1 She always has this sort of like, I've always been alone attitude. And maybe that's how she felt.
But her maternal aunt Susie said this to Kitty Kelly. We all just adored her.

Speaker 1 We just worshipped her and everything. My mother Hattie gave Oprah everything she wanted her to have and everything Oprah wanted.
And so we were poor people, but we got it for her.

Speaker 1 She claimed she had no dolls, but she had lots of dolls, all kinds of dolls.

Speaker 1 And I, you know, I don't think that's lying either. I don't think it's uncommon for a kid to be like, well, I felt alone.
And for the people around that kid to be like, but you weren't, you know?

Speaker 1 And again, neither of those people are necessarily lying. That just gets down to people taking very different things.
And like childhood,

Speaker 1 you're not aware of the stuff that maybe adults see.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
How old? Wait, how, how old is she in this time period?

Speaker 1 One to six. Oh my God.
Yeah. Or birth to six, I should say, right?

Speaker 1 I feel like that. That's exactly the type of disagreement that you always have with your, you don't really remember how nice everyone was to you when you were six.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because I have a lot of like complaints about my own childhood, like one to seven or eight. And I'm sure my mom would say, like, well, we were all working our asses off to take care of you.

Speaker 1 And it's like, well, yeah, but also you weren't around a lot of the time, you know, like that's just a

Speaker 1 nobody's wrong there. As the parent, you're like, but you understand that what I was doing was trying to take care of you.

Speaker 1 And as the kid, you're like, yeah, but I was still really unhappy, you know, like that's just childhood you know yeah yeah

Speaker 1 anyway uh kitty makes an interesting note here pulling from a 2009 interview oprah did with barbara streisand in which barbara who grew up in poverty talked about the fact that her only doll was a hot water bottle uh oprah who had previously claimed to only have a doll she made from a corn cob said replied wow you were poorer than i was so again Myth-making is going on here.

Speaker 1 She's not ever totally consistent. You know, how poor she was depends on who she's talking to.

Speaker 1 When she's talking to someone who was like really growing up, also very poor, Oprah maybe like, you know, eases up on the throttle a little bit.

Speaker 1 She's an entertainer. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I remember that Barbara Walters Oprah crossover very well because it ends with a very good performance where

Speaker 1 Barbara Walters painted

Speaker 1 Oprah's microphone white because she was not Barbara Walters, Barbara Streisan

Speaker 2 painted her microphone white because her thing is like, wait, are you talking about Streisan or Walters?

Speaker 1 I think I'm talking about Streisand. Let me double-check in this

Speaker 1 so I don't have fucked this up.

Speaker 2 If it's Streisan, that was like

Speaker 2 a very big moment in Oprah lore.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think it's I'm pretty sure it's Streisand. It's just that she also talked, she talked to everyone.

Speaker 1 There's, there's, because we, we just talked about Barbara Walters in here, who she, she mentioned like, uh, wishing that she had been white as a little girl to Barbara Walters.

Speaker 1 Barbara Streisand, I think, is the interview about how poor they were. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 All the Barbaras. All the Barbaras.
Too many barbaras in this story. If they were famous in the 90s or early 2000s, Oprah had a tearful conversation with them.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, Kitty Kelly quotes from a life article in 1997, which includes this line: Oprah was the least powerful of girls, born poor and illegitimate on the segregated South on a town in Kosusco, Mississippi.

Speaker 1 She spent her first six years there, abandoned to her maternal grandmother.

Speaker 1 And so you can see that, like,

Speaker 1 this spin on the story, which is parts of it, it, I'm sure, are emotionally true.

Speaker 1 Some of it is certainly literally true, but also the idea that she was abandoned, I think it's more, I think that doesn't quite get at the truth, which is that her grandmother took her over because her mother was not a reliable parent.

Speaker 1 And this was,

Speaker 1 she benefited a lot from the fact that she had her grandmother during this, very similar actually to Clarence Thomas's story, right?

Speaker 1 Where you had this kid who was growing up in a very impoverished background, but wound up being taken care of their grandparent, who was the absolute most responsible person to raise them in that period of time.

Speaker 1 And so it is this situation where that's both, I'm sure, very difficult for the child who's not being raised by their parents, but it's also not this situation of like, like, this is an example of there being a strong safety net in her childhood that a number of kids, a lot of other kids in the same situation wouldn't necessarily have benefited from.

Speaker 1 And both of those things are, I think, critical to talk about, whether we're talking about Thomas or we're talking about Winfrey.

Speaker 1 And this is where you get kind of a lot of the discrepancies, because the Winfrey family historian, Catherine Esters, who is, I think, technically a cousin, but one of those cousins who Oprah grew up seeing as an aunt, has really taken a lot of issues with Oprah's description of her childhood.

Speaker 1 And she told Kitty Kelly this. All things considered, those years with Hattie Mae were the best thing that could have happened to a baby girl born to poor kin.

Speaker 1 Oprah grew up as an only child with the full and undivided attention of every one of us, her grandparents, her aunts, uncles, and cousins, as well as her mother, who Oprah never mentions was with her every day for the first four and a half years of Oprah's life until she went north to Milwaukee to find a better job.

Speaker 1 And when I read this, I was very surprised because all of the other things I'd read about her childhood said that her mom had left immediately.

Speaker 1 But Esther's claims, like, no, her mom was there for four and a half years and then just bounced for like 18 months to try and set up a life and does eventually bring her up to Milwaukee, which is a different version of her story, right?

Speaker 1 Like, again, there's, there's a lot, there's less abandonment here than at least certain versions of the story. And obviously, I wasn't there to tell you who was lying or not, but yeah.

Speaker 1 I don't know. That feels like exactly like perception, though.
Like, if between zero and four, if your mom leaves,

Speaker 1 how would you materially know the difference between four and one, you know, really? You're, you're, you're barely there. Right.

Speaker 1 Right. And that is kind of the difficulty of how formative that period is and then how like shitty our memory is of it.

Speaker 1 Cause like, I, I always would, like, especially when I do stuff like this and I read about like, well, if I were to write my own recollection of like my early childhood out and then talk to my relatives about it, how many of them would be like, no, that's not what happened.

Speaker 1 No, right? You're a kid.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you're, you're a small child.

Speaker 1 So again, I don't even know how much of this is myth-making and just that was her, she felt abandoned.

Speaker 1 And so maybe then it is like, is that even more accurate than the truth that her mom was actually there most of the time, if that's what she took out of that period of time?

Speaker 2 I don't know if you know the answer to this, but

Speaker 2 are the family members that are speaking on this sort of correcting the record, are they alleging that Oprah is sort of outright falsifying what her childhood was like?

Speaker 1 Aunt Catherine definitely is.

Speaker 1 She is very much, she's talking a lot of shade about Oprah.

Speaker 1 I think she takes it very personally because she was one of the people helping to raise her that she talks about her childhood this way.

Speaker 1 And there's always the question of like, how much does money and people being unhappy about money play into some of this? I can't answer that. There's been allegations of that too.

Speaker 1 You know, nobody's like coming into this without an angle, but

Speaker 1 Aunt Catherine is definitely alleging Oprah lies a lot. about her childhood.
That is her, that is precisely how she frames it, is that like she's, she's telling a lot of tall tales, you know

Speaker 1 yeah complicated um so it's just like when the successful person in your family is the most like the richest person in media that's that's when it becomes a thing i know that's a complicated

Speaker 1 sounds so standard to any shit talking family i have to say right i would be such a hater if my sibling became oprah famous anybody

Speaker 1 yeah put a microphone in my face and i'll say whatever i would be such a hater

Speaker 1 no just buy me a vineyard and I'll shut up. You'll never hear from me again.

Speaker 1 Go date Steadman. We're good.

Speaker 1 So there's also another aspect of this that didn't really come out until more recently. Oprah was open a lot about physical abuse that she endured.

Speaker 1 Although I should say, when I say physical abuse, it is accurate to call it abuse. It is also totally normal corporal punishment for the time, right?

Speaker 1 Like the stuff she is talking about, my grandma would make me go get a switch and then would beat me if I did things that were bad. That is extremely normal for this place and time.

Speaker 2 I mean, I have to say, like, that is how I was raised. I grew up in the South.
That's, I mean, that's just like, I know a lot of people who are.

Speaker 1 I was in my public school.

Speaker 2 Same. Like, I know a lot of people today for whom that is like a normal vibe, even though it is abuse.

Speaker 1 And it's one of those things people will critique her for like, and be like, ah, she wasn't really, she wasn't beat more than anybody else.

Speaker 1 Like, you know, Hattie was not particularly violent for a parent in that era. But also, I don't think Oprah's wrong for being like, this is really fucked up and you shouldn't hit kids with switches.

Speaker 1 So I think I give that point to Oprah on the whole. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And especially making the kid go out and get their own switch.

Speaker 1 If you've ever had to do that, that's like a special kind of psychological torture. A lot of it does sound very familiar.
Yeah, just growing up in the South.

Speaker 1 Like I got smacked, you know, I don't think more than my fair share.

Speaker 1 And it's the kind of thing where like there's a part of me that wants to be, if I were to hear someone else complaining about the kind of stuff that was done to me as a kid, I'd be like, well, man, that was just growing up as a kid in rural Oklahoma in the 90s, but it's also bad.

Speaker 1 You shouldn't do that to kids. So maybe, maybe I'll just shut up about that.

Speaker 1 You know, it's that kind of like, it's that attitude where like, if you went through something and you never really thought of it as that bad, then you get kind of offended when other people speak up, even if they should be.

Speaker 1 You know, it's, that's probably just a thing we have to get over as people.

Speaker 1 I don't know. Yeah.
Well, see, I, I went through it. I paid off my student loans.
I did XOI bullshit. And it's like, well,

Speaker 1 why should everyone have been hitting me as a kid, I guess?

Speaker 1 Earlier, I mentioned that 2021 book with Dr. Bruce Perry, who by Oprah's standards is a pretty good doctor, but also seems to think ADHD isn't real.

Speaker 1 So again, by Oprah standards does a lot of heavy lifting there. Like I was reading through this guy's bio and I was like, okay, he seems like a real, oh, he doesn't think ADHD is a thing, huh? Okay

Speaker 1 Cool. We got some RFK vibes coming off of this fella

Speaker 1 In that book What Happened to You Conversations on Trauma Resilience and Healing each chapter opens up with a brief vignette or essay by either Oprah or Dr.

Speaker 1 Perry and the rest of each chapter is literally just like a conversation transcript between the two written out in Q ⁇ A format. It is a very lazy book, in my opinion, right?

Speaker 1 This is the easiest way to write a fucking book. Everyone does like 10 pages of essays and then you just fucking record a conversation.
Man, how do I get that job, right? Like that's

Speaker 1 beautiful grift. Beautiful grift.

Speaker 1 That said, there's also some like pretty poignant vignettes from Oprah here, which I think maybe fills it out a little bit more that include some stark claims from her childhood.

Speaker 1 Now, we should remember, this book came out just a couple of years ago. So this is a senior citizen reflecting half a century later on things that would have happened when she was six at the oldest.

Speaker 1 So the best case scenario here, there's no way, you know, even if we discount like some myth-making, you're never going to be perfectly accurate in your recollections of stuff that happened in this time.

Speaker 1 But here's how Oprah writes about, you know, the way in which discipline was done when she was a child.

Speaker 1 At the time, it was accepted practice for caregivers to use corporal punishment to discipline a child.

Speaker 1 My grandmother, Hattie Mae, embraced it, but even at three years old, I knew what I was experiencing was wrong. One of the worst beatings I can recall happened on a Sunday morning.

Speaker 1 Going to church played a major role in our lives. Just before we were to leave for service, I was sent to the well behind our house to pump water.

Speaker 1 The farmhouse where I lived with my grandparents did not have indoor plumbing. From the window, my grandmother caught a glimpse of me twirling my fingers in the water and became enraged.

Speaker 1 Though I was only daydreaming innocently, as any child might, she was angry because this was our drinking water and I had put my fingers in it.

Speaker 1 She then asked me if I had been playing in the water and I said no. She bent me over and whipped me so violently my flesh welted.
Afterward, I managed to put on my white Sunday best dress.

Speaker 1 Blood began to seep through and stain the crisp fabric a deep crimson. Livid at the sight, she chastised me for getting blood on my dress, then sent me to Sunday school.

Speaker 1 In the rural South, this is how black children were raised.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And it's one of those Esther's, Aunt Catherine takes a lot of issue with this.
She was like, Aunt Hattie made it not beat Oprah every day of her life.

Speaker 1 And like, I'm sure it wasn't every day, but I don't think Oprah's probably, it's a very specific story to have lied about.

Speaker 2 And it's like so visceral that if you, if that happened to you while you were a little kid, no shit it's going to be memorable.

Speaker 1 No shit, it's going to be something you can recall. That'll stick with you.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, of course that would stick with you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and I think this might be, again, when we talk about, because it'd be very easy, especially since this is a bastards episode, to just lean on Esther's being like, she lied about this, she lied about that.

Speaker 1 But like, well, she was one of the people who was taking care of Oprah when Oprah was getting smacked around as a kid and maybe did some of the smacking and maybe doesn't want to think about that as having been a problem, right?

Speaker 1 Cool stuff.

Speaker 1 I think Oprah does genuinely care about child abuse. It's something she has devoted a lot of her life to trying to fight, although

Speaker 1 in ways that have been unperfect. They're imperfect.

Speaker 1 There's like criticisms of some of the stuff that she's tried to do for this, but it is something that she's like put a lot of time and effort into.

Speaker 1 And that kind of does make me think she's probably telling the truth, all in all, about like what she experienced as a kid.

Speaker 1 And what's interesting to me is that Oprah, while she's all, you know, been mostly seems to have negative things to say about her grandma, she's also very clear that like Hattie Mae is the first person who inculcated

Speaker 1 within her the behavior that made her a success later on. Quote, I developed a keen sense of when trouble was brewing.

Speaker 1 I recognized the shift in my grandmother's voice or the look that meant I had displeased her. She was not a mean person.
I believe she cared for me and wanted me to be a good girl.

Speaker 1 And I I understood that hushing my mouth or silence was the only way to ensure a quick end to punishment and pain.

Speaker 1 For the next 40 years, that pattern of conditioned compliance, the result of deeply rooted trauma, would define every relationship, interaction, and decision in my life.

Speaker 1 The long-term impact of being whooped, then forced to hush and even smile about it, turned me into a world-class people-pleaser for most of my life. Oof.
And I think there's a...

Speaker 1 Oprah would suggest that like part of why she got to be so good at what we call myth-making, at entertaining people because what is entertainment but people pleasing is that she spends so much of her early childhood trying to keep her grandmother happy right

Speaker 2 yeah i i mean i not to be sympathizing with our bastard but i

Speaker 2 yeah i mean like that is my that is my childhood right like i think that is like classic kid who grew up getting that kind of punishment in a household where even as an adult, you become so perceptive to like the tiniest little changes in someone's demeanor.

Speaker 2 And you kind of had to be to survive in households like that.

Speaker 1 Like that is like, that rings true to me.

Speaker 1 Yeah, my, my childhood, I wouldn't say it was as extreme as what Oprah has related, but I definitely vibe with the feeling of like, there is someone in my house who gets angry at me easily.

Speaker 1 And I'm going to get very good at like people pleasing and at lying in order to avoid pissing them off.

Speaker 2 And I have to ask Robert, like as a like podcaster to podcaster, do you kind of feel like this is why you are good at storytelling and entertaining and keeping people happy and laughing and smiling with you, right?

Speaker 1 Like, she's not wrong.

Speaker 1 I don't think she's wrong at all. And, like, it's all of that.

Speaker 1 And it's also why I've always been really good at talking to the cops, at like lying to the cops, at getting out of trouble with the police, is that I know when somebody has

Speaker 1 alleged rights, I know that it is a lot of it. Like, allegedly lying.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like, you learn to protect

Speaker 1 crime.

Speaker 1 Allegedly, allegedly, allegedly. Allegedly.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 A lot of successful entertainers have something like this in their background, right?

Speaker 1 I actually had this written out. Like, you learn to please people, and that teaches you how to please crowds, right?

Speaker 3 Speaking of pleasing crowds.

Speaker 1 Fuck the crowds. Let's please our advertisers.

Speaker 1 The only crowd that matters. Yeah.

Speaker 7 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Speaker 9 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight.

Speaker 11 So, why did it take so long to catch him?

Speaker 6 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster: Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer: The Investigation into the Most Notorious Killer in New York since the son of Sam.

Speaker 10 Available now.

Speaker 11 Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie.

Speaker 5 For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

Speaker 1 I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed it. We know.

Speaker 5 A story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national TV.

Speaker 26 Through sheer persistence persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.

Speaker 5 My name is Maggie Freeling.

Speaker 21 I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

Speaker 1 I did not know her, and I did not kill her, or rape, or burn, or any of that other stuff that y'all said.

Speaker 27 They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her.

Speaker 17 From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

Speaker 1 America, y'all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns.

Speaker 19 Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 20 And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 12 In 1997, in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like The Path of Worry, Dump Road, and Fear Creek.

Speaker 28 Investigators believe it is the work of a serial killer.

Speaker 12 Despite a sprawling investigation, including assistance from the American FBI, the murders have never been solved. Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence and new suspects.

Speaker 1 We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with nightmarish secrets.

Speaker 12 From Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts, this is Le Mansre Season 2, The Butcher of Moss, available now.

Speaker 14 Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of Heavyweight, I help a centenarian mend a broken heart. How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again?

Speaker 1 And I help a man atone for an armed robbery he committed at 14 years old. And so I

Speaker 1 pointed the gun at him and said, This isn't a joke. And he got down.
And I remember feeling kind of a surge of like, okay, this is power.

Speaker 1 Plus, my old friend Gregor and his brother try to solve my problems through hypnotism.

Speaker 30 We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're like super charming all the time.

Speaker 1 Being more able to look people in the eye.

Speaker 30 Not always hide behind a microphone.

Speaker 1 Listen to Heavyweight on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 So, on the whole, you know, I think Oprah lies a lot about the specifics.

Speaker 1 I think there are specifics that get exaggerated, just specifics that are misremembered about her past, but I don't think that means her, we should discount what she says, right?

Speaker 1 And I think particularly we should pay attention when she says, quote, the most pervasive feeling I remember from my own childhood is loneliness.

Speaker 1 And I can believe that at the same time as I believe her aunt Catherine, when she tells Kitty Kelly, quote, Oprah makes her first six years sound like the worst thing that ever befell a child born to folks just trying to survive.

Speaker 1 I was there for most of the time, and I can tell you she was spoiled and petted and indulged better than any little girl in these parts.

Speaker 1 Every parent knows that a child's first six years lays the foundation of her life.

Speaker 1 And those first six years down here with Hattie Mae gave Oprah the foundation for her self-confidence, her speaking ability, and her desire to succeed.

Speaker 1 I don't actually think both of those things are in conflict the way that they both think it does. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think that's exactly like as we've been saying, like, these are all the skills you gain.

Speaker 1 I do feel it's worth saying that though sometimes you gain these skills, also the majority of the time, people are crushed and hurt by this type of

Speaker 1 it can be both.

Speaker 2 You can be crushed, but also like an entertainer.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you can be, you can be. But it's not like a magic spell.
No, no, I would not recommend.

Speaker 1 This is not how I would recommend raising a ton of entertainers, but in more cases, like if you're an entertainer, like this story still ends in a place like the fucking floor in front of the Viper room as opposed to having $2 billion, you know?

Speaker 1 R.I.P. River Phoenix.

Speaker 1 So there's another story Oprah tells in this book, which again, I don't like this book overall, but this passage struck me.

Speaker 1 And if it is accurate, I think it's something that may hint of some darkness buried in the family history that its historian Aunt Catherine may not be willing to see.

Speaker 1 Quote, Growing up in Mississippi, I always slept with my grandmother. My grandfather, who had dementia, slept in a side room.

Speaker 1 One night I was suddenly awakened to see my grandfather standing over the bed. Even before I opened my eyes, I could sense my grandmother's fear.

Speaker 1 I could feel her heightened awareness as she slowly repeated, Erlist, get back to bed. Erlist, get back to bed.
He wouldn't go. He was trying to choke her, fighting to get his hands around her neck.

Speaker 1 When she finally managed to push him off of her and run to the door, she cried out for one of our neighbors called Cousin Henry, who lived down the road. Henry, Henry, Henry!

Speaker 1 Henry was blind, but without hesitation, he came in the middle of the night to help my grandmother put my grandfather back in his bedroom.

Speaker 1 My grandmother then wedged a chair under the doorknob to her bedroom door and found some cans to put around the door.

Speaker 1 The next morning she tied those cans together and hung them from the door, and every night for the rest of my days living with my grandmother, the cans were on the door and the chair was up under the knob.

Speaker 1 I would try to sleep while listening to make sure that the cans didn't move.

Speaker 1 Fuck. Yeah.
That's so dark.

Speaker 1 That's so scary. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's interesting.

Speaker 1 She tells this anecdote in the book

Speaker 1 because it goes along with another story she's telling, which is that she's talking about like this school shooting, right? In 1988,

Speaker 1 when a girl, a woman named Lori Dan entered a second-grade

Speaker 1 classroom in Winnetka and started shooting, killing an eight-year-old and wounding five other kids.

Speaker 1 And Oprah tells her own story because, like, in the aftermath of this shooting, there had been like a discussion about whether or not to like chain and lock the school doors and have them manned by security guards.

Speaker 1 And the principal refused to implement these changes because he was like, if there's a chain on the door, it sends a message to the kids that they're unsafe.

Speaker 1 And kind of Oprah brings up the story to be like, I really feel that because of this, these cans hung from the door that were supposed to make us safer, that just reminded me that there was this constant danger, you know, from my grandfather.

Speaker 1 So, yeah. Anyway, interesting.
I don't have children, but it is so fucked up to me that's like, I mean, we're not going to make them safe, but we don't want to make them feel unsafe.

Speaker 2 Which they are.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it's, you know,

Speaker 1 Aunt Catherine, I think, would probably say, again, would doubt that that had happened.

Speaker 1 One of the statements she made to Kitty Kelly was, I've talked to her about this over the years. I've confronted her and asked, Why do you tell such lies?

Speaker 1 Oprah told me that's what people want to hear. The truth is boring, Aunt Catherine.
People don't want to be bored. They want stories with drama.

Speaker 1 And so it is like, you can't help think to a little bit, like, well, did she, did she make that up or add to that in order to have something that was relevant to the story of a shooting from her own life, which is like a thing, you know, being able to like, like, I, and it's, I like, you can't know.

Speaker 1 it is it is kind of worth stating that like a lot of the people who will argue that about oprah and these are arguments coming from members of her family aunt catherine ahead of them are also people who

Speaker 1 probably have a deep emotional interest in remembering you know grandma hattie and her husband as one kind of person.

Speaker 1 And Oprah, the fact that Oprah doesn't remember them that way is probably deeply offensive to these people. And maybe, yeah,

Speaker 1 I don't know. There's like no way to know what actually happened, right?

Speaker 1 None of us were there, but the fact that this conflict is present is as much a part of the story as what actually happened, right?

Speaker 2 I would also say, just growing up in like a southern black family, I do think there might be some aspect of like,

Speaker 2 don't, you're not meant to talk about whatever happens in our house. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And so the, like, like her aunt being offended that she would even be talking about anything that went on, you know, behind closed doors in their house, that I could really see see that.

Speaker 2 And like, again, I don't think it's all one or the other, that she's just like callously making this up because people need a story.

Speaker 2 Probably some of that, but that doesn't mean that her family members would not be invested in these stories that paint them in not so great light, you know, not so great light, be not something that's talked about on a national stage.

Speaker 1 Right, right, right. Yeah.
And I think that's like, that's a pretty important part of it as well.

Speaker 1 I will say another thing that is kind of weird, and partially because I'm I'm relatively not versed in Oprah and the elements of her bastardiness.

Speaker 1 You know, the ones that I know about mostly seem to be about elevating horrible men. Right.
Which

Speaker 1 almost sort of do,

Speaker 1 you know, I could see paths to that. Anyway, I guess what I mean is like none of these like

Speaker 1 traumas, well, not even, not the traumas, but none of these like lies or like questionable stories.

Speaker 1 It's like weird because that doesn't seem like the dimension of which like like the type of bad person that does those things tends to be more of like just a general asshole or a liar in some way.

Speaker 1 And it's just interesting that I'm like, this doesn't seem to be the bad part, I guess. No, no.
Well, also, she's six up to this point in the story. Yeah, like so.
No, no, no.

Speaker 1 But even, even, even in the retellings, sorry, like, even if they are exaggerations, like, it's so weird because it's like, she could do all that stuff and still not promote Dr. Oz.

Speaker 1 Like, she could be a weird, kind of like shady, you know, Hollywood person, which happens.

Speaker 1 Most people who lie about their childhoods don't also start Dr. Oz's career.
I think that's, that's like maybe what I'm saying. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, you know,

Speaker 1 the attitude of her, a number of members of her family, including her mom, Bernita, and her aunt Catherine, is that...

Speaker 1 And this is Aunt Catherine again. She always wanted to have the spotlight.
If adults were talking and she couldn't get their attention, she'd walk over and hit them to make them pay attention to her.

Speaker 1 And I think that that's, you know, that's probably true because I have seen other kids do that. You know, it's a thing you have to like stop when a kid is doing that.

Speaker 1 But like, that's not an uncommon stage of development or like for kids to scream and pout when they don't get attention, you know? Like they're small children.

Speaker 1 They are still learning these sorts of things.

Speaker 1 That said, it's not inconsistent with what Oprah says about being lonely or about wanting to be a people pleaser. This is also a kid that is obsessed with having people pay attention attention to her.

Speaker 1 And as a result, she is from a very early age a performer, which is really interesting to me.

Speaker 1 She, like every black church in her hometown, she's given like speeches at and like read poems at and whatnot by the time she is six or seven,

Speaker 1 which is a continuing thing in her life.

Speaker 1 When she moves, you know, to the big city, she'll be doing the same thing, going at every single church she can find and like doing these kind of live performances.

Speaker 1 She's doing that from the age of like four or five.

Speaker 1 And this appears to be something in which she is entirely self-motivated to do.

Speaker 1 Like she is pushing for her family to take her to these churches so that she can do like live performances, right? Like this is always a thing that she wants in her life,

Speaker 1 which is, you know, interesting to me and something that's going to be a bigger thing in part two of our episodes. But that concludes part one of the Oprah Winfrey story.

Speaker 1 That's wild. I didn't realize that the church circuit was basically like open mic night for being a talk show host.
Oh my gosh, it's a specific kind of open night, mic night. Yeah,

Speaker 2 it's yeah, it definitely is. I have seen the folks who like, if you ever makes sense, yeah, like people who speak at a certain kind of cadence, you're like, ooh, you're a church kid.

Speaker 1 You were like Ray's giving speeches at church. Wow.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And it makes, it's really interesting to me that like she has because like

Speaker 1 this does kind of speak to some of the things

Speaker 1 her aunt was saying about like, you know, we were all really focused on her.

Speaker 1 There was so much attention that went her way because, well, yeah, I mean, it would probably be pretty hard for her to have gotten taken to all of these different like places, right?

Speaker 1 To all of these different like churches and whatnot, if her family wasn't interested in her and like focused on her success.

Speaker 1 That said, it also, that's exactly the kind of thing a kid who was deeply lonely would really want to do, right?

Speaker 1 Like, that's because those are the kind of kids who become entertainers in a lot of ways. It is a pretty unique thing.
I can't imagine.

Speaker 1 I mean, I don't think I got comfortable speaking publicly till I was like 28.

Speaker 1 So, like, the fact was like

Speaker 1 a six-year-old was like,

Speaker 1 Let me, I just need, I just need some stage time this Sunday morning. I loved it.
I was a little attention.

Speaker 1 Church wasn't where I did it, but like, yeah, I was attention.

Speaker 1 A little attention. I mean, I guess I was

Speaker 1 like, truly public speaking is, I think, different. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And what she's doing, the fact that she is like, she is, she has the confidence in her speaking abilities to want to get up at church, which is like a big thing in a lot of ways, especially to a little kid.

Speaker 1 That's really interesting to me. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Anyone surprised about anything so far?

Speaker 3 I think it's surprising to see the like conflicting stories.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I will say, I don't think anyone's scrutiny of any of the tales they tell about being six or younger would hold up to anything that's been put through this.

Speaker 1 So, like, every knock against Oprah in this capacity, I am wildly sympathetic to. I'm just like, I don't know.

Speaker 1 You're talking about when you're six and you're doing it in front of presumably a bunch of like white producers and network executives mostly. So it's like, gotta do what you gotta do sometimes.

Speaker 2 I am surprised that I pretty much uncritically just everything

Speaker 2 that Oprah ever said about her childhood, I believed. I repeated it in my fifth grade report.

Speaker 2 Sophie, I don't know if you did too, but that like that, like the thing about the dolls and her first getting her first pair of shoes at six, I specifically put that in my report.

Speaker 2 And now I'm like, dang, should have fact-checked that

Speaker 3 fifth-grade us.

Speaker 1 I know, terrible journalists.

Speaker 1 oh man yeah it's uh i'm always fascinated by like the vagaries of memory you know like

Speaker 1 the the past is not just a foreign country it's it didn't happen it's a fantasy it's a fiction novel dimension right it's a fiction novel that you've been writing your entire life without even knowing it anyway Go sleep on that, everybody.

Speaker 1 We'll be back in a couple of days.

Speaker 1 Oh, wait. Pluggables.
Yep. From us? Yeah.
Yes. Yes.
Yes. Plug.
I'll just go. Deoza's racist.
That's my podcast.

Speaker 1 We have

Speaker 1 the premium shows at suboptimalpods.com. I'm trying to think.
Mostly just been talking about this amazing celery salad I had made the other day. I've had it three times since I made it.
Well done.

Speaker 1 Celery, lemon, shallot, and dates. Okay, salad.

Speaker 1 It's pretty, it's a crazy ass salad. I put blue cheese in it too, but, you know.
And walnuts. All right, now I'm done.
That's my plug. Bridget.

Speaker 2 Definitely making that salad. Yeah, listen to my podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet, about the exploration of the intersection of identity and social media and technology.

Speaker 2 And listen to my podcast that I do with Mozilla Foundation called IRL that explores who has the power in AI and ethics in AI. New season coming soon.
Check it out.

Speaker 3 I want to plug at the end here just a couple organizations just because of the devastating fires in Los Angeles.

Speaker 3 If you are able to help, just check out Water Drop Ballet and K-Town for All for reliable resources of how to help people with mutual aid.

Speaker 3 Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 3 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 3 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 7 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Speaker 9 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him?

Speaker 10 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer.

Speaker 6 The investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam.

Speaker 10 Available now.

Speaker 11 Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts wherever you get your podcasts

Speaker 12 a new true crime podcast from tenderfoot tv in the city of mons in belgium women began to go missing it was only after their dismembered remains began turning up in various places that residents realized a sadistic serial killer was lurking among them the murders have never been solved three decades later we've unearthed new evidence.

Speaker 12 Le Monstre, Season 2, is available now.

Speaker 14 Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 15 The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

Speaker 1 America, y'all better wake the hell up. Bad things happen to good people in small towns.

Speaker 19 Listen to Graves County on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 20 And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 22 I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded. I felt it rip through me.

Speaker 29 In season two of Rip Current, we ask, who tried to kill Judy Berry and why?

Speaker 31 They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods.

Speaker 1 She received death threats before the bombing. She received more threats after the bombing.

Speaker 20 I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement.

Speaker 29 Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 4 This is an iHeart podcast.