Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [12]
With that particular show she had identified herself as a victim, which gave her a platform of authority to address the issue, but she refused to be defeated by the abuse. As a result, she was rewarded with huge ratings, national attention, and waves of sympathy that inoculated her against criticism. Once she went public with her private shame, she wore it like a new hat, even adding to her official press biography that she was “a childhood victim of sexual abuse.”
She began accepting invitations to speak at rape centers, address victims of incest, and raise money for children who had been molested. She testified before Congress, and got legislation proposed, passed, and signed into law by the president of the United States. Within a few months she felt safe enough to talk about her own rape in further detail.
“The guy was a cousin by marriage. I was nine and he was nineteen. Nobody else was home at the time. I didn’t know what was happening. I’d never seen a man. I may not have even known that boys were different. I knew, though, that it was a bad thing, because it started with him rubbing me and feeling me. I remember it was painful. Afterwards, he took me to the zoo as payment for not telling anyone. I was still hurting and recall bleeding on the way there. That year I found out where babies came from and I lived in absolute horror that at any moment I was going to have a baby. For the entire fifth grade I got these stomach aches during which I would excuse myself to go to the bathroom so I could have the baby there and not tell anyone.”
Many years later she talked about what had happened in her mother’s house. “[T]he boyfriend of my mother’s cousin … was a constant sexual molester of mine. And I just felt like this is what happens to you. I felt like I was marked, somehow. I thought it was my fault.… I thought I was the only person that had ever happened to, and it was very lonely and I knew in my spirit that it would not have been safe for me to tell. I felt instinctively that if I told I would be blamed, you know, because those were the days when people said, ‘Well, you were fast anyway, you know?’ Or else, like Pa says of Celie in Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple, ‘She always did lie.’
“My abuser practically told everybody. He’d say, ‘I’m in love with Oprah. I’m gonna marry her, she’s smarter than all of you.’ He would say it and we’d go off to places together. Everybody knew it. And they just chose to look the other way. They were in denial. And then there was this sick thing going on—my cousin who lived with us was also a battered woman. And I used to bargain with her boyfriend that he could have sex with me if he wouldn’t beat her. I felt protective of her and I’d say, ‘God, okay, I’ll go with you if you promise not to beat Alice. And that’s how it was.… It was just an ongoing, continuous thing. So much so that I started to think, you know, ‘This is the way life is.’ ”
Oprah appeared to be so open with revelations about her intimacies on television that no one suspected she might be hiding secrets. Like comedians who cover their darkness with humor, she had learned to joke away her pain, and keep what hurt the most stuffed deep inside. She knew how to give just enough information to be amusing and to deflect further inquiry, which is one reason she insisted on taking control of her own public relations when her show went national. While she looked like she was telling the world everything about herself, she was actually keeping locked within more than she would share on television. She felt she needed to present herself as open, warm, and cozy on the air, and conceal the part of her that was cold, closed, and calculating. She was afraid she wouldn’t be liked if people saw a more complex dimension to the winning persona she chose to present. “Pleasing