Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [11]
Years later she created Oprah’s Child Predator Watch List at www.oprah.com, to help track down child sex offenders. In December 2005 there were ten men on the list, and fifteen months later five of them had been captured because Oprah had drawn attention to their cases. She offered to give a reward of $100,000 for information leading to the capture of any of the men on the list, and by September 2008 her company announced that nine of the men had been captured. In at least three cases Oprah paid out $100,000 to those who turned the men in.
Throughout the years she continued to do shows on sexual abuse. Some of those shows were gratuitous (“I Want My Abused Kids Back,” “Call Girls and Madams,” “Fathers Dating Their Daughters’ Friends,” “Women Who Turn to Lesbianism”), others were groundbreaking (“Sexual Abuse in Families,” “Rape and Rape Victims,” “How to Protect Yourself from Abduction by a Rapist”), but each show brought her closer to understanding what had happened to her.
Still, it took her a long time to comprehend the real destruction wreaked by child molestation. She learned that sexual abuse is a crime that continues its damage long after the predator is gone, sometimes leaving its survivors suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder many years later—but she did not think she was one of them. Initially, she asserted that she had sailed through her experience of rape completely unscathed. She was strong, sassy, confident. “It was not a horrible thing in my life,” she said of her years of sexual abuse, adding that she let the fondling continue because she liked the attention. “And I think a lot of the confusion and guilt comes to the child because it does feel good. It really does.”
Always more forthcoming with black publications, she admitted to Ebony in 1993, even as she testified before Congress that no child is responsible for being sexually abused, that she still felt in her case she must have done or said something provocative to encourage her molesters. “Only now am I letting go of that shame,” she said.
In the days before she knew better, Oprah dismissed rape as sex, not violence. During her debut week in Chicago, the soap opera star Tony Geary was a guest. A woman in the audience asked about the General Hospital story line in which Geary’s character commits rape. Oprah quipped, “Well, if you’re going to get raped, you might as well be raped by Tony Geary.”
It took many more shows for her to see the connection between the crime that had scarred her as a child and the ravages that followed—adolescent promiscuity, an unwanted pregnancy, abysmal relationships with men, gravitation to women, drug abuse, an obsessive need to control, and the compulsive eating that drove her weight up and down the scale for decades.
Rather than seek psychotherapy to deal with her wounds, she sought the salve of public confession on television, thinking that would be the best solution for herself and for others.
“A lot of me talking about myself has been as cathartic for me as it is for the guests on my