Oprah Read Free Page A

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 thinghappened 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