Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [84]
Brown’s courtship of the Mandelas stirred controversy in 1988, when he announced he had secured world rights to the family’s name. Mandela supporters saw this as exploitation, but Brown claimed he had contracted to protect the use of the name. From prison, Nelson Mandela renounced Brown’s claim, but Winnie Mandela seemed eager to work with him. With Stedman in tow, Brown mentioned the former’s relationship with the richest television star in America, and soon Oprah began funding hot lunches for seniors in Alexandra, a poor black township outside of Johannesburg, where people lived in tin shacks without water, electricity, or sewage disposal. “We wanted to focus attention on the plight of Alexandra,” Brown told reporters. “This is one of the poorest and most ignored parts of the country.” Newspapers carried photographs of Brown’s two employees, Stedman Graham and Armstrong Williams, distributing hot meals. They later brought a television set to Alexandra and showed tapes of Oprah’s talk show so the two hundred impoverished senior citizens could see their benefactor; photos of this event also appeared in the press heralding Oprah’s generosity and Brown’s goodwill.
Winnie Mandela sent Oprah a note, which she framed and hung in her Chicago condominium: “Oprah, You must keep alive! Your mission is sacramental!! A nation loves you.” Soon Winnie and Oprah were on the phone and Oprah was making arrangements to rent a Gulfstream jet to take the Mandela daughters skiing. Once known as “the Mother of the Revolution,” Winnie Mandela was later reviled by antiapartheid leaders when her bodyguards were convicted of abducting four teenage boys and killing one of them by slitting his throat. She, too, was convicted of kidnapping, and given a suspended sentence of six years in prison.
The mission of mercy in Alexandra showed Stedman and Williams how Brown operated on the international stage, partnering with Oprah’s money and garnering goodwill for her as well as for himself. They learned how publicizing good deeds works to good advantage. The two men later became business partners and formed the Graham Williams Group, a public relations company that Stedman used to promote his self-empowerment books. He made GWG sound as if it fogged mirrors. “The corporation helps people to become all that they can be,” he told one reporter. “[It] maximizes resources and helps small firms become large corporations and large corporations become multi-corporations.”
When asked to explain what he meant by this, his business partner shrugged. “Stedman and I have been close for a long time,” Armstrong Williams said in 2008. “But I’ve had my problems with Oprah over the years so now I just deal with him.” Williams removed from his house the two photos Oprah had inscribed to him (“Armstrong—My buddy, Oprah” and “Armstrong, You did great on the show! Thank you for doing it. Oprah”) and packed them with the papers he donated to the University of South Carolina.
Oprah began pulling away from her friendship with Williams soon after the journalist David Brock wrote in his book Blinded by the Right that Williams had made a homosexual advance toward him. Williams was later sued by a male associate for sexual harassment but settled the case out of court. Oprah completely distanced herself when it became public that Williams, by then a conservative commentator, had been secretly paid $240,000 by the George W. Bush administration to promote the controversial No Child Left Behind Act. The media criticized Williams for unethical behavior and possibly illegal use of taxpayer money. His newspaper syndicate dropped his column, he lost his syndicated television show, and after a yearlong investigation he was asked to return $34,000 to the U.S. Department of Education in overpayment.
What Oprah did not know was that by then Armstrong Williams was also on the payroll of the tabloids, regularly feeding information to the National Enquirer, The Star,