She’s a pillar of strength to millions of Americans, but Oprah Winfrey has revealed for the first time how she “cried and cried” on the dark day when a relative stabbed her in the back and told the world her biggest secret – how she got pregnant and then lost a baby at age 14.
Oprah called it the ultimate betrayal when the unnamed family member sold the tale to the National Enquirer for $19,000 in 1990.
She had struggled for years to keep anyone from learning of her teen pregnancy because she was so ashamed.
“Only my family and closest friends knew,” she wrote in this month’s issue of her magazine, O.
“I would tell no one until I felt safe enough to share my dark past: the years I was sexually abused, from age 10 to 14, my resulting promiscuity as a teenager, and finally, at 14, my becoming pregnant.
“I was so ashamed, I hid the pregnancy until my swollen ankles and belly gave me away. The baby died in the hospital weeks later.”
Oprah said that after the pregnancy, she feared she would be kicked out of school for being promiscuous. Later, she feared it would hurt her burgeoning career.
“I carried the secret into my future, always afraid that if anyone discovered what had happened, they, too, would expel me from their lives.”
The timing of the article comes just as Oprah is being criticized for a show on Missouri kidnap victim Shawn Hornbeck.
Some experts and critics were upset because Oprah asked the parents of Hornbeck, a 15-year-old who was held captive for more than four years, whether they thought he was sexually molested and they said yes.
Oprah’s new essay is framed to fit the theme of the issue: “My first.” While some of her celebrity pals mused about their first job or first broken heart, Oprah wrote about her first betrayal.
She said that after the story of her teen pregnancy was revealed, she was inconsolable.
“I took to my bed and cried for three days,” she wrote. “I felt devastated. Wounded. Betrayed. How could this person do this to me?
“I cried and cried,” she wrote. “I remember [boyfriend] Stedman [Graham] coming into the bedroom that Sunday afternoon, the room darkened from the closed curtains. Standing before me, looking like he, too, had shed tears, he handed me the tabloid. And said, ‘I’m so sorry. You don’t deserve this.’ ”
Oprah has spoken before about the abuse she suffered in her youth. In 1985, she first told viewers on her show that a 19-year-old cousin raped her when she was 9.
“He was the first of three family members to sexually molest me,” she said at the time.
This week’s article, however, is the first time Oprah had ever detailed how she felt about getting pregnant as a teen – and how she felt about being ratted out by a loved one.
Last November, during a show on teen pregnancy, she mentioned her own pregnancy briefly to give a message to her teen guest.
“My father said to me at that time what I’m going to say to you: ‘What you have done is in the past and you alone get to determine what your future will be,’ ” she said.
Writing for O magazine about her shame, Oprah recalled: “I imagined that every person on the street was going to point their finger at me and scream, ‘Pregnant at 14, you wicked girl . . . expelled!’ No one said a word, though – not strangers, not even people I knew. I was shocked. Nobody treated me differently.
“For 20 years, I had been expecting a reaction that never came,” she wrote. “And I soon realized that having the secret out was liberating . . . What I learned for sure was that holding the shame was the greatest burden of all.”