Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [22]
“Oprah was always a big actress,” said her sister. “She had a wild imagination.”
After becoming sexually promiscuous, Oprah devised another way to make money. “She invited men over during the day while my mother was working,” said Patricia. “Her boyfriends were all much older than her, about 19 or in their early 20s. Whenever a guy arrived at our door, Oprah would give Popsicles to me and our younger brother Jeffrey and say, ‘You two go out on the porch and play now.’ Oprah then would go inside with her boyfriend.… I didn’t find out what Oprah was doing until I was older and she showed me how she did ‘The Horse’—which is what she called the sex act.”
It took Patricia many years to realize that Oprah was selling “The Horse”—trading sexual favors for money. Patricia’s awareness of this information and willingness to turn it over to the media eventually led to a rift between the two sisters that would never fully heal, and in 1993 it would lead to one of Oprah’s more momentous decisions when dealing with the publication of her autobiography.
Oprah has admitted to promiscuity during her adolescent years, saying she ran the streets and had sex with any man who would have her because she wanted attention. She also said that she was continually molested by the men in her mother’s house. “I was 36-23-36 at age thirteen, which created a few problems. I was not allowed to talk to boys and they were everywhere.… This happens in a lot of families where there’s a single parent and the mother runs the family: there are boyfriends going in and out of the house and daughters particularly see this. Mothers say, ‘Don’t let some man do this. You keep your dress down! You do what I say!’ When what the child sees is entirely different from what the mother is saying. I had that when I was a kid. ‘Do as I say, not what I do.’ But that doesn’t work. Doesn’t work.”
Her family saw only a promiscuous teenager who threw herself at men, which is why they did not believe her when she finally told them about being sexually molested. They could not see her as a victim.
“I don’t believe a bit of it,” said her “aunt” Katharine many years later. “Oprah was a wild child running the streets of Milwaukee in those days, and not accepting discipline from her mother. She shames herself and her family to now suggest otherwise.” Mrs. Esters pointed to the timing of Oprah’s revelation of sexual abuse and suggested that she simply wanted publicity when she was taking her show national. “That story helped launch Oprah and make her what she is today,” she said. “I don’t hold with telling lies, but in this case I forgive Oprah because she has done so much for other people. Maybe this was the only way for a poor child to succeed and become rich. Now she does her good works to make her amends.… No one in the family believes her stories [of sexual abuse] but now that she’s so rich and powerful everyone is afraid to contradict her. I’m not afraid because I’m not financially dependent on Oprah.… Her audiences may believe her stories. Her family does not.… Let’s leave it at that.”
For Oprah, like other victims of sexual abuse, the burden of not being believed weighs as heavily as the shame of being molested. Most families cannot or will not face the defilement caused by a loved one or by their own complicity—intentional or unintentional—in the violation of a child they did not protect. Sadly, like her relatives, Oprah blamed herself, even as she was counseling others not to accept condemnation. “All the years that I convinced myself I was healed, I wasn’t. I still carried the shame and I unconsciously blamed myself for those men’s acts. Something deep within me felt I must have been a bad little girl for those men to have abused me.”
When school let out in the summer of 1968, Oprah went to Nashville to visit Vernon and Zelma, and was driven