by Kitty Kelley
A week before the movie’s premiere Oprah decided to do a show on rape, incest, and sexual molestation. When management balked, she said she was going to be seen on the big screen in a few days in a film about the subject, so why not explore it first for her local audience. The station agreed, reluctantly at first, and then ran announcements asking for volunteers to talk about their sexual abuse on the air.
This particular show became Oprah’s signature program—a victim who triumphs over adversity—and the start of the Oprah Winfrey phenomenon. No one realized it at the time, but that show would elevate her to national prominence and eventually make her a champion for victims of sexual abuse. During that program, she introduced a new kind of television that plunged her viewers into two decades of muddy lows and starry highs. In the process, she became the world’s first black female billionaire and a cultural icon of near-saintly status.
“I am the instrument of God,” she said at various times along the way. “I am his messenger….My show is my ministry.”
Oprah’s show on sexual abuse was promoted for days in advance to draw an audience interested in “Incest Victims.” Except for her small staff, no one knew what she intended to do, other than present a titillating subject, which she had been doing since she started on WLS. No one had any idea that she was about to blur the long-standing line in television between discussion and confession, between interviewing and self-revelation. Between objectivity and a fuzzy area of fantasy and factual manipulation.
On Thursday, December 5, 1985, Oprah began her 9:00 A.M. show by introducing a young white woman she identified only as Laurie.
“One out of three women in this country have been sexually abused or molested,” she told her audience before turning to her guest.
“Your father started out fondling you. When did it lead to something other than fondling?”
“I think around between nine and ten,” said Laurie.
“What happened? Do you remember the first time your father had sexual intercourse with you? What did he say to you, how did he tell you, what did he tell you?”
There was not a sound from the audience of mostly white women.
“He just told me that he wanted to make me feel good,” said Laurie.
“Where was your mother?”
“She had gone on a trip somewhere—she was out of town. She was gone for three weeks and I stayed with my father for those three weeks.”
“So he came into your room…and he started fondling you. That has to be a pretty frightening thing when you’re nine years old and your father has sexual intercourse with you.”
Laurie nodded but said nothing.
“I know it’s hard to tell—I really do. I know how hard it is. When he was finished, what did he—or during this act—well, first of all, wasn’t it painful for you?”
Laurie squirmed a bit. “Um. He used to tell me that he was sorry and that he would never do it again. A lot of times after he would do something, he would kneel down and make me pray to the Lord that he wouldn’t do it anymore.”
Moments later Oprah waded into the audience and planted her microphone in front of a middle-aged white woman in glasses.
“I was sexually abused, too,” the woman said. “Well, my life kind of started like Laurie’s with the fondling and…It resulted in a child who’s now—he’s thirty years old right now, but sixteen years of his life he’s been in a state institution [for autism].”
“Were you sexually abused by a member of your family?”
The woman choked up as she admitted being impregnated by her father.
“So this is your father’s child?” said Oprah.
“Yes. It happened very frequently—as with Laurie also—practically every day when my mother would go to work. One of the most horrible experiences that I can remember.”
As the woman broke down and struggled to regain control, Oprah flung her arm around her and then burst into tears herself, covering her eyes with her left hand. With the mic in her right hand, she signaled to the control room. She said later it was to stop the cameras, but they kept rolling as she sobbed into the woman’s shoulder. “The same thing happened to me,” she said. “The fact that I had all these unfortunate experiences permeates my life.”
For the next few seconds Oprah appeared to be discovering for the first time that what she had experienced as a nine-year-old child was indeed rape, a defilement so unspeakable that she had never been able to put it into words until that very moment. Her audience felt as if they were watching the fissures of a soul split open as she admitted her shameful secret. Oprah revealed that she had been raped by her nineteen-year-old cousin when she was forced to share a bed with him in her mother’s apartment. “He told me not to tell. Then he took me to the zoo and bought me an ice-cream cone.” Later she said she was also sexually molested by her cousin’s boyfriend and then her favorite uncle. “I was continually molested from the age of nine until I was fourteen.”
Oprah’s staggering personal confession made national news, and she was applauded by many for her honesty and forthrightness. But her family vehemently denied her accusations, and some people suggested that she was trying to get publicity for her movie role, since she had never discussed her abuse with anyone before her public revelation. “I was so offended [by that],” she said later. “There was something in Parade magazine, a question published not too long ago: ‘Was Oprah Winfrey really sexually abused, or was that just hype for the Oscars?’ Well, I thought, it amazes me that somebody would think that I’d do that as hype. But I suppose it has been done. I suppose.”
She said the management of her station was upset by her “shocking” revelations, and even twenty-three years later, Dennis Swanson, former vice president and general manager of WLS-TV, would not discuss the matter. Long credited with hiring Oprah and bringing her to Chicago, he would not comment on his reactions to her first show about sexual abuse.
At the time, Swanson and his promotion manager, Tim Bennett, were elated by Oprah’s spectacular ratings but stung by press criticism of her emphasis on sex shows, particularly the show she had done on pornography. The TV critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, P. J. Bednarski, had castigated them and the “corporate morality” of WLS for allowing Oprah to devote an hour-long show to hard-core sex. “Shame on them,” he wrote, and then blasted Oprah for inviting three female porn stars to talk about male organs, male endurance, and male ejaculations.
In the saddest portion [of the show] there was a discussion of what they called on the air—the graphic lovemaking “money shot.” That got a lot of laughs….The Ask-the-Porn Stars program, amazingly, carried not a minute of discussion in which Winfrey stated, asked, or even worried that these X-rated stars were, in fact, cheap hucksters, talentless, sleazy skin traders. She barely wondered if these films demeaned women. Instead, she asked, “Don’t you get sore?”
“For someone with the natural talent of Winfrey, it was telling evidence she’s got some growing up to do,” Bednarski wrote, before adding that Oprah’s porn show got a 30 percent share of the 9:00 A.M. Chicago audience, much larger than usual. “It also got mentioned all around town and got its own column right here.” The column’s headline: “When Nothing’s Off Limits: Oprah Winfrey Profits from Porn Stars’ Appeal.”
Oprah understood the axiom of television: She who gets ratings rules. “My mandate is to win,” she told reporters. During crucial “sweeps” weeks she insisted on “bang-bang, shoot-’em-up” shows, for which her producer, Debra DiMaio, led the eureka hunt, with Oprah weighing in with her own ideas. “I’d love to get a priest to talk about sex,” she said. “I’d love to get one to say, ‘Yes, I have a lover. I worship Jesus and her. Yes, I love her and her name is Carolyn.’ ”
In her race for ratings during Black History Month, Oprah booked members of the Ku Klux Klan in their white sheets and cone hoods. She also did a show featuring members of a nudist colony who sat onstage naked. Only their faces were shown on television, but the studio a
udience got a full frontal view, so management insisted the show be taped. “That will allow us to make sure nothing that’s not supposed to be seen on TV will get on,” said Debra DiMaio. Management also said that each member of the audience who arranged to attend had to be called and reminded that the guests would be nude. “No one was turned off,” said DiMaio. “On the contrary, they were excited. I mean, what fun.”
Oprah admitted to being nervous during the nudist show. “I pride myself in being real honest, but on that show I was really faking it. I had to act like it was a perfectly normal thing to be interviewing a bunch of naked people and not look. I wanted to look into the camera and say, ‘My God! There are penises here!’ But I couldn’t. And that made me real nervous.”
When she told her bosses she wanted to do “Women with Sexual Disorders” and interview a woman who had not had an orgasm once during her eighteen-year marriage, and then interview the male sex surrogate who gave her orgasm lessons, and then a young woman so sexually addicted that one night she had twenty-five men in her bed, the program director blanched.
“Management doesn’t want problems, but they want ratings,” Oprah said. “I told them I’ll be decent and I was. They don’t understand what women feel, and I do. Men think, for instance, that if you do a show about mastectomy, you can’t show a breast. I say you have to show the breast.”
The day after her sexual disorders show, the WLS switchboard lit up with irate callers, so Oprah asked her producer to come onstage and invited comments from her studio audience.
“Yesterday’s show was gross,” said one woman. “I don’t know how else to describe it. Absolutely degrading.”
“There are millions of women who never experience sexual pleasure,” said Oprah. “We had six hundred and thirty-three calls from women yesterday after the show, on the computer. We made lots of women feel they are not alone.”
“With so many quality subjects, why go to the bottom of the barrel?”
DiMaio fielded that question: “What’s bottom of the barrel for one person may not be for someone else. We feel good about shows in which we talk about problems, whether it’s incest or agoraphobia or lack of orgasm.”
Oprah stepped in. “It bothers me when we’re accused of being sensational and exploitive. We are not. We are a caring group of people.” A brief pause. “Sometimes we make mistakes.”
Oprah might have been referring to one of her earlier shows, titled “Does Sexual Size Matter?” During a discussion about penis size, she had blurted out, “If you had your choice, you’d like to have a big one if you could. Bring a big one home to Mama!” You could almost hear the collective gasp of 2.95 million TV households in the Chicago market. When the local media had picked themselves off the floor, most were sputtering. P. J. Bednarski said that Oprah had “stretched the limits of taste,” but Alan G. Artner wrote in the Chicago Tribune that Oprah was simply being natural in the way that many people are when “blindly and without guile their self-absorption leads them to play the jester.”
Later Oprah promised reporters that when she went national she would not say the word penis without giving her audience fair warning. “Now I can say penis whenever I want. There. I just said it,” she whooped. “Penis, penis, penis.”
By then she had reporters dancing on strings. They loved her colorful copy and could not conjure adjectives fast enough to describe her. “Big, brassy, loud, aggressive, hyper, laughable, lovable, soulful, lowdown, earthy, raw, hungry,” wrote Howard Rosenberg, TV critic for the Los Angeles Times. Another critic confessed, “I don’t care if she’s a mile wide and an inch deep, she’s irresistible.” The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine dubbed her show the National Enquirer of the Air. “It raises the Lowest Common Denominator to new and lower depths. It’s a yeasty mix of sleaze, freaks, pathos, tack, camp, hype, hugs, hollers, gush, fads and tease marinated in tears.”
Her audience was intoxicated by her raunchy brew. Taping bumpers for an upcoming show, she was supposed to read, “Tuesday on A.M. Chicago: Couples who suffer from impotency.” After flubbing the line twice, she said, “Next week on A.M. Chicago: Couples who can’t get it up.”
Discussing a new diet, she turned to her audience and said, “Oh, yeah. That’s the one that makes your bowel movements smell better.”
During the show on impotence, a solemn middle-aged man said that following his corrective surgery, his testicles had inflated to the size of basketballs. “Wait a minute,” hollered Oprah. “How do you walk with testicles the size of basketballs?”
On another show she interviewed a woman who claimed to have been seduced by seven priests. “What did you do when the priest pulled his pants down?”
“Nothing,” said the woman. “But then he took my hand.” Oprah rolled her eyes, and her audience roared. They loved her irreverence, her inappropriate comments, and her outrageous questions.
“Why did you become a lesbian?” she asked one woman.
On another show, a sociologist described how having a roommate could lead to having a lesbian relationship, and Oprah emphatically announced, “Then I’m never getting a roommate.”
During an interview with a department store official in charge of loss prevention, she asked, “What happens when you catch people stealing? Do they really lose body control? I mean, do they break down and wet themselves?”
Not even celebrities were spared. She questioned Brooke Shields: “Are you really a nice girl?” She asked Sally Field if Burt Reynolds wore his toupee in bed. She blasted Calvin Klein for his advertising. “I hate all those jeans ads. They all have tiny little butts in those ads.” She queried Dudley Moore how a man as short as he was could sleep with women who were so tall. “Luckily,” said the movie star, “most of the extra length seems to be in their legs.” Indeed, she seemed preoccupied with short men in bed. While discussing an appearance by Christie Brinkley, who was soon to marry Billy Joel, Oprah said to her producers, “Who really cares about her acting career? I want to know about her relationship with Billy Joel…[and] what’s it like making love with a short guy? Billy Joel is pretty short, isn’t he?”
Oprah became so popular that WLS extended the morning show to an hour and renamed it in her honor. They also gave her a theme song titled “Everybody Loves Oprah,” which declared, “She’s mod, she’s hip, she’s really got a style.”
Dennis Swanson tried to capitalize on her popularity by putting her on the news. “He wanted to experiment with her as an anchor because her talk show was such a hit,” said Ed Kosowski, a former WLS producer. “She anchored the four P.M. news for a week. It didn’t work. It was a risk for the station and a gamble for Oprah. Swanson took her off immediately. She just didn’t have the journalistic chops. Absolutely no authority. She’s great at the girly-girl stuff, but she just can’t do news.”
Undeterred, Swanson sent his $200,000-a-year talk show host to Ethiopia, with anchors Mary Ann Childers and Dick Johnson, to report on Chicago’s project to ship grain to the African nation in the midst of its famine. A week before she left, Oprah had started a televised diet on Channel 7, to lose fifty pounds, having made a public bet with comedienne Joan Rivers on The Tonight Show. The timing seemed awkward to P. J. Bednarski, who commented on the image of an overfed correspondent interviewing victims of starvation. “Isn’t it a problem sending a personality who confesses to such a love for food to a country where there is so little?” he asked.
Oprah agreed. “You’re right. It’s sick, isn’t it?”
FOR A FEW DAYS after her sexual abuse show, she tried to placate management by not talking about rape and incest. But when she saw the show’s ratings, the letters that poured in, the calls to the WLS switchboard, and the reactions of women on the street, she knew she had given voice to a taboo torment that many women had suffered. She had found an issue that resonated with her predominantly female audience, so she pushed for more shows on sexual abuse. In the process, she fostered an image of herself as anti-male, because so many of her shows presented
men as pigs. However, she became a heroine to women and a champion for children.
With that show, and her confession of what she had endured as a child, Oprah became more than a talk show host who entertained by trolling the raw side of the street. As someone who had suffered and survived and shared her pain, she became an inspiration for victims who felt defeated by adversity.
She was not the first to give voice to the sordid defilement of child abuse. She had been preceded by writers such as Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings), Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye), and Alice Walker (The Color Purple), but Oprah had the megaphone of television, and she used it to reach women shackled by the shame of what had been done to them as children. “What I think is that sexual abuse of children is more common than uncommon in this country,” she said in 1986. “You get five women in one room, and you can get three of them to admit it.” Her own confession, plus her subsequent shows exploring the devastation of sexual molestation, became the strongest force in society to help women begin to heal and recover their lives.
“Incest Victims” (12/5/85)
Serial killer John Wayne Gacy (2/11/86)
“Men Who Rape and Treatment for Rapists” (9/23/86)
“Sexual Abuse in Families” (11/10/86)
The Lisa Steinberg death (2/87)
“Men Who Have Been Raped” (11/87)
Parents whose children have been hurt by babysitters (1988)
Women who have borne children by their own fathers (1988)
“I Want My Abused Kids Back” (1988)
Rape and rape victims (11/7/88)
“In Search of Missing Children” (8/14/89)
“Rapists” (8/23/89)
“Clergy Abuse” (9/14/89)
“ ‘She Asked for It’…The Rape Decision” (10/17/89)
“Date Rape” (12/7/89)
Truddi Chase, victim of multiple personality disorder, discusses her sexual abuse (8/10/90)