Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [176]
Hardly litigious, she had filed suit only once before, in 1992, when she and Stedman sued a Canadian tabloid that had published an interview purporting to be with Stedman’s male cousin under the headline “I Had Gay Affair with Oprah’s Fiancé.” She and Stedman won that suit by default when the publisher went out of business rather than defend the claim. She instigated one other lawsuit in 1995 by prompting her former decorator Bruce Gregga to sue the National Enquirer after the tabloid published color photos of her Chicago condominium, showing shiny gold-fringed chairs, satin damask couches strewn with velvet pillows, red silk wall coverings, and a marble bathtub with gold-plated faucets. “Her place was awful, so ornate and rococo, she should’ve sued the decorator for bad taste!” said one of the Enquirer’s attorneys from Williams and Connolly in Washington, D.C. Gregga was represented by Oprah’s attorneys from Winston and Strawn, and Shearman and Sterling.
“I remember seeing her minutes after she had seen the pictures,” said Bill Zwecker of the Chicago Sun-Times. “She had just flown back from Rancho La Puerta to attend Stedman’s book party on the top floor of Michael Jordan’s restaurant, and she was livid. ‘I am so furious,’ she said. ‘I just got off the plane and saw a picture of my bathroom in the National Enquirer.’ She fired Bruce, even though she knew he had nothing to do with publishing those pictures. He had a guy working for him who sold the photos for twenty-five thousand dollars to the tabs … but Oprah said they should have been locked in a safe.… She felt totally violated.” In the end, Oprah and Gregga opted not to go to trial and settled with the tabloid.
She would say later that she never considered settling the “Dangerous Foods” lawsuit out of court, but her codefendant, Howard Lyman, claimed otherwise. “If they could have found a way to feed me to the cattlemen and gotten her out of the lawsuit, I would have been down in a heartbeat,” he said. “I have the highest regard in the world for Oprah, but I can’t say the same for her people at Harpo.… After the trial was over they contacted my attorney and told him they wanted me to pay Oprah’s legal costs [approximately $5 million].” Lyman also said there was great fear resulting from the lawsuit. “The toughest thing for me was when my wife looked me in the eye and asked, ‘If we lose, do we lose everything we have?’ I had to tell her yes.”
Oprah, too, was afraid. She told the Amarillo Globe-News that before the trial she sent a security team to the city to make sure she would be safe from a lunatic’s bullet and her dogs would be safe from being poisoned. She later told Diane Sawyer, “I was afraid, physically afraid for myself. Before I went to Amarillo there were … ‘Ban Oprah’ buttons … and bumper stickers.” She said she wasn’t afraid of all the people in Amarillo, just a random fanatic who might get excited by all the controversy. Beyond concerns of bodily harm, Oprah realized that if she lost the case, she would lose more than money: she would forfeit the credibility that was the cornerstone of her career. Consequently, she spared no expense in defending herself.
A close reading of the depositions taken in the lawsuit indicates quite a bit of rancor and staff dissension within Harpo, underscoring what one of Oprah’s former publicists described as “a snake pit.” Employees testified to workplace problems of drugs, sexual addiction, and anger management. An anonymous letter sent to plaintiffs’ attorneys on Harpo stationery was introduced as an exhibit at the deposition of a former employee. The letter directed the plaintiffs’ counsel to look into the drinking problems of one of Oprah’s senior producers, and race and sex discrimination throughout Harpo. The letter was signed “A Big Beef Fan.”
In deposing one of Oprah’s former senior producers, her attorney Charles (“Chip”) Babcock discredited the producer by exposing his past police record, plus an outstanding arrest warrant, which may have been the reason why all future employees of Harpo began