Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [140]
While Stedman was aware of Oprah’s traumatic childhood and the sexual molestation she had endured, her teenage pregnancy, her promiscuity, her disastrous affair with the married man in Baltimore, and even her past drug use, he was not prepared for the jolt of seeing it all laid out so starkly on the page. He objected to her naming the men in her family who had sexually abused her, and he was especially disturbed by the harsh way she had written about her mother.
For years Oprah had been telling viewers and interviewers that her mother had abandoned her shortly after she was born. “I was not wanted,” she had said. “I was born in shame.” Only after her collaborator, Joan Barthel, did some preliminary research did Oprah realize that her mother had been with her in Kosciusko for the first four and a half years of her life before leaving her in the care of her own mother, Hattie Mae Lee, to go “up North” to find a better-paying job. Yet in her autobiography, Oprah blamed her mother for the sexual molestation that befell her after she moved to Milwaukee, and Stedman objected. “Your mother doesn’t need to read that she was not there for you,” he said.
Oprah had also named all her sexual abusers, including her favorite uncle, Trenton Winfrey, who was still alive. In addition, Oprah felt her father had let her down when she tried to tell him what his brother had done to her during the summer of 1968. “I was in a rage about my abusers,” she said. “I went into complete detail of the whole rape scene. How lonely that feels when you’re ten [sic] years old and you’re somebody’s play thing.… I was not responsible. No child is. Those men abused me, a baby. And there is nothing more despicable.”
She also wrote about her pregnancy at the age of fourteen. “Where I spent half the time in denial and half trying to hurt myself to lose the child.”
Stedman felt that such private matters should be discussed within the family and not on the pages of a book for everyone to read. He later flew to Nashville to talk to Vernon Winfrey, who called his daughter and then came to her Indiana farm to say he was sorry about how he had reacted to her story of rape.
“I know she feels that I didn’t handle it well [when she first told us],” Vernon said. “But Trent [who died in 1997] was my closest brother. We were torn.” Vernon later admitted that Trent was probably the father of Oprah’s baby.
Oprah recalled the conversation with her father at the farm as unsatisfactory. He had said, “ ‘Were you raped? Did he rape you?’ What he was saying was, ‘Were you forced against your will? Did you actively participate?’ That’s when I said, ‘You don’t get it. When you’re 13 [sic] years old and in the car and it’s happening, it is rape.’ ”
Oprah had also written about her drug use and smoking crack with her married lover in Baltimore. “I thought he was more open and more loving with me [when we were doing drugs]. I had heard about Richard Pryor freebasing but when it was offered to me, I didn’t know that that’s what it was.” This was a brave admission on Oprah’s part. She later went public about her drug use because, as she said, “There are some people who knew it was in the book and had been threatening to go to the press. So because I am a public person more and more shame became attached to the secret.”
She admitted her foray into smoking crack in the comfortable setting of her own show in 1995, while tearfully empathizing with two recovering female addicts. “I did your drug,” she told a woman who was addicted to crack cocaine, and those four little words made headlines. The British journalist Ginny Dougary found Oprah’s confession oddly so-what-ish. “Sensational revelation, including the host’s own, is the show