Oprah’s 82-year-old “Aunt Katherine” — who supposedly told biographer Kitty Kelley who the talk-show queen’s true father is — is denying all.
“I’m sorry this book portraying her falsely was ever written and that I participated by answering questions,” Katherine Carr Esters told a Jackson, Miss. newspaper yesterday.
It’s the first time the “aunt” — she’s actually a cousin, but Oprah called her “aunt” because of the age difference — has spoken about the damaging interview she gave the dirt-digging Kelley.
Esters says she wants to talk to Oprah to explain why she spoke with Kelley.
“Kitty Kelley misquoted me when she said I told her who your father was,” Esters said. ” ‘How could I know?’ That’s all I’d want to tell her.”
Esters, who lives a stone’s throw from where Winfrey grew up in rural Mississippi, said that, around the time Kelley came to see her in 2007, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, who was attempting to trace the Winfrey roots, had visited her.
The aunt said she mistakenly believed the two were working together.
“While I found [Esters] to be a strong woman with the courage to speak her mind,” Kelley told the paper in a prepared statement, “I gather that she may have come under some pressure.”