Part One: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?

Oprah Winfrey has been responsible for introducing several of the most toxic monsters of our era to society. But is she a bastard? Robert sits down with Bridgett Todd and Andrew Ti to investigate. (Six Part Series) See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  I watched a man vomit in a casino pit last night. It was beautiful. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that's this week hosted from sunny Las Vegas, Nevada. We've got a real special one for you this week. We've got, got a, an episode about somebody who embodies everything that is meaningful about like where we are in America today, like both our complete divorce as a, as a culture from any sort of shared truth, our acceptance of all sorts of like weird unhinged metaphysical realities, the guy who's probably going to be running Medicaid in the near future. We all owe them to our,

• 0:48Robert Evans?

  our topic this week, our subject this week, someone you all have heard of Oprah Winfrey. And because Oprah is such a big topic and honestly, kind of a scary person to go after. This might be the most powerful bastard we've talked about. I brought in some very special guests. First off, let's say a warm welcome to the great Bridget Todd. Bridget, welcome to the show.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  I want to say it like Oprah does. Thank you for having me. You know how she has that thing?

• 1:18Speaker 02

  I just knew, I just knew you were the right person for this job.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  I was kind of, y'all don't even know.

• 1:25Robert Evans?

  I do.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  I was gonna say Bridget is the host of There Are No Girls on the Internet and

• 1:29Robert Evans?

  That's right.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  And also just one of my favorite people in the entire world.

• 1:34Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  She is here and we are so lucky. Who is our second guest today? Cause we couldn't have just one for Oprah.

• 1:41Robert Evans?

  For Oprah, you gotta bring out that, you gotta have a double barrel, you know, if you're going, if you're going for a grizzly bear. And, and our second round of buckshot this week is Andrew T.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  Thanks for being here, Andrew. Andrew is the host of Yo, Is This Racist?

• 1:59Speaker 03

  What's up? How's it going?

• 2:01Robert Evans?

  We're gonna need to ask that a lot in these episodes.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Boy, howdy.

• 2:04Robert Evans?

  And the answer is always gonna be, yeah.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  Oh, boy.

• 2:07Robert Evans?

  It is. There's a lot of stuff to discuss there.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Robert, Robert and I have been talking about doing the Oprah episodes for what feels like a year. And the subject of like, who do we have on for this? Like, how, like, guests, who do we have on? What do we do? Because like, no matter what, like, I, I mean, I, I read Oprah's bio in like, middle school and like, she comes off with her like, origin story as like, heroic.

• 2:36Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. She's deeply sympathetic in many ways. And these first two episodes are going, you're gonna be sympathetic to her more often than not. Cause we are covering a lot of her childhood in these. The things that she does that are awful and the reason why she deserves to be on this show is not because she's personally odious, right? And like, her personal interactions usually, like, I've run into a bunch of like, reddits where people who worked on the show talk. And more often than not, people who worked on the Oprah Winfrey Show say like, it was, we were paid well. It was a reasonably good gig. You know, you can certainly find people being like, if she was a dick to me when I was like, a barista or whatever. There's, there's stories like that, but I, I wouldn't hang an episode on it. It's more, her level of influence is so Titanic and the things that she has chosen.

• 3:21Robert Evans?

  She's chosen to push a number of people who are, we have done two-part episodes on in the past. Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, both owe their careers and the intense amounts of damage that they've done to society to Oprah Winfrey. Neither of those guys are on anyone's radar, if it's not for Oprah Winfrey. John of God, that Brazilian mystic who raped and molested thousands of people, owes a huge amount of her career in prominence to Oprah Winfrey. There's a number of cases like that. She's tied in massively with the satanic panic. She's tied in massively with a, a number of different like myths. Like, we're gonna talk about like, rainbow parties and the like. So we've got a lot of fun stuff today.

• 4:02Robert Evans?

  I do wanna start by asking, Bridget, Andrew, what are y'alls histories with Oprah?

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Oh, it's a good question.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, I have to say, I'm really glad that you framed the Oprah conversation the way that you did because I almost have like a love hate with Oprah. Yeah. You can't, first of all, you can't be a black woman and not have some deep admiration for Oprah. And I wouldn't say it's only been recently that I have really had to have my come to Jesus moment of some of the bad actors, charlatans, hucksters, and just like bastards that she has made famous and now we're sort of stuck with. So it's sort of a love hate Oprah thing. I did a report on her when I was in fifth grade.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Where I had to dress like her.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:46Robert Evans?

  You're, you're weirdly enough, not the only friend of mine who did a report on Oprah for, when they were in school. Um.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  I, I, I think there's like an element of like, it's a little bit like Obama where you're like, it's good that there's a different type of, um, like, like, like a black person being able to achieve the highest ranks of whatever.

• 5:11Robert Evans?

  The wealthiest, she's the wealthiest person in media, period. Like wealthiest purely, purely media star. Two, two billion, something like that.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  Now, but it, there's also like some version of like having to, so you're like kind of grading on a curve. It's like for a billionaire, she's probably pretty good, you know, relatively speaking. I mean, but she has, you know, the, she has all the trap. It's the same with Obama where you're like, every president has committed crimes against humanity. That's just the job. But like, so for a while, you're like, it's sort of nice that he's like, you know, he is who he is. But then you're like, I just wish you weren't doing all these terrible things.

• 5:52Robert Evans?

  As we'll talk about, one of the complicated things about Oprah, there's a bunch of stuff that really is very sinister about her impact. And then when you, whenever you're reading the, the books and stuff, the critical bios of her, the things they choose to go after her for are always like, well, actually, I don't think she did anything wrong there. Like, there's a lot of very weird, she's, she has, she has also had to, you can't talk about the things she's done bad without also defending her because she has come under fire for so many insanely unreasonable things as well.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  I also did an Oprah Book Report, probably in the fifth grade. And, you know, she was on my television for my, my, my, my mom watched a lot of Oprah. There was a lot of Oprah in my household growing up. And then, like, a few years ago, I was working on a project with Jamie Loftus and we went back and we were looking for like a specific Oprah episode to reference in something. And just the show episode titles were so triggering.

• 6:52Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  And then, and then Robert and Bridget, you were both at, you were both at the DNC in Chicago, but I don't think you guys were both there for Oprah's speech, were you?

• 7:00Robert Evans?

  No, I was at one of the Palestine protests.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  I was in the audience. I remember it very well.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I was there for that and I knew it was like the most like, like detached I felt from an audience in my life. I was like, I was like, oh, no.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Also, Sophie, do you remember, I feel like she got, I, I completely agree with you about the tenor and the vibe of the speech. However, maybe it was just my section. I feel like people were losing their fucking minds when she came out and started talking.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  I, I was like, are, are we hearing the same speech? Like, it truly, I had a very like-

• 7:36Speaker 02

  That's what I'm saying. That's why, that's why I was like, I was, I was like, I was like, really? We're still, we're still, but then again, with the, there were several people that I was like, oh, these are known horrible humans and people are going feral for them as well. But yeah, Oprah, Oprah cheers were louder than-

• 7:53Robert Evans?

  It's hard to get across, because there's really no one on earth like this, how cross, for, at least for a certain kind of, for a certain like category of person, particularly like middle aged moms, from the nineties through the, through the aughts. It's amazing the degree to which Oprah completely cut across like political and cultural boundaries. You know, like my mom was a very conservative white lady in Texas, loved Oprah. Oprah was always on. And like, that was the case with every mom that I knew as a kid. Like Oprah was just like an institution, you know? Like it, it's, it's, it's really, and I don't think she's even quite like that today. Just because like, things have, have gotten considerably more fragmented in the media ecosystem. And so one of the things that's interesting about her is like, when we talk

• 8:38Robert Evans?

  about her influence, there probably won't ever be a single person that influential again in the same way.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. Bridget, at the DNC, when she came out, were you sitting or standing?

• 8:49Speaker 01

  I wish I could say that I like turned my back. You know, I gave her a standing ovation. Even after all my like big talk. But it's exactly what you said.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  Were you in the standing section or the sitting section?

• 9:00Speaker 01

  I was in the seated section.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  So here's my question. When she came out, did you immediately look under your chair?

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  I'm like, Oprah, did you leave me a present?

• 9:08Speaker 01

  You get a car. I wish.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Oprah came out and instinctively was like, is there a gift? There was not.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Honestly, though, if anybody could arrange that, it would be Oprah.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 9:20Robert Evans?

  I should let you know, I've bought you both cars. They're not, they're not, they're Geo Prisms. They are not, like, these are really like burdens for both of you.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Robert's clearing his books. It's really just like a tax-deferred situation.

• 9:37Robert Evans?

  I've got a lot of Geos to offload. I'm underwater on a deal.

• 9:45Speaker 04

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• 10:59Robert Evans?

  Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast and suddenly, wait, what did they just say? Well, the questions raised in those show-stopping moments will be answered in the all-new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor. Hosts Gabe and Chris will dive deep on a specific topic covered in that week's Tuesday episode, from sexual health and HIV prevention to finding the right doctor. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor, now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences. In the spring of 2024, Oprah Winfrey participated in a three-hour special sponsored by Weight Watchers called "Making the Shift." Alongside several other celebrity panelists, she talked about the failures and shortcomings

• 11:44Robert Evans?

  of America's toxic diet culture and took some degree of ownership for her role in perpetuating it, calling herself a "major contributor" and saying, "I've been a major contributor to it. I cannot tell you how many weight loss shows and makeovers I've done, and they have been a staple since I've been working in television." And even this statement, which is fairly unequivocal, underplays the reality of the situation, because it's probably accurate to say that no one human being alive has had more of an impact on how Americans talk about dieting and weight loss than Oprah Winfrey. For the entirety of the time that everyone on this call has been alive, she has been the most public face of diet culture, and tens of thousands of Americans followed along as she gained and lost weight in the public eye.

• 12:27Robert Evans?

  One of the biggest regrets of her career came in 1998 as a result of this, and I'm talking about the famous "wagon of fat" incident, which was precisely what it sounds like. Winfrey launched a new season of her hit daytime talk show by pulling out a red wagon filled with 67 pounds of fat, which is how much she'd lost on her most recent diet. And because this is kind of what Oprah says is, in her view, the lowest moment of her career, I do want to start with playing a clip from this, because it represents the intersection of a couple of very complicated things we're going to have to dissect in these episodes.

• 13:11Speaker 06

  I have lost, as of this morning, as of this morning, 67 pounds since July 7th. 67 pounds and 30 inches from my bust, my waist, and my hips. 7, 12, 11, I think it is. And this, let me tell you, those of you who are starting dieting or dieting a little bit, this is what 67 pounds of fat looks like. I can't, I can't lift it. Now, when you talk about, Jimmy, is this gross or what?

• 13:44Speaker 06

  It is amazing to me that I can't lift it, but I used to carry it around.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  I had that wagon.

• 13:48Robert Evans?

  She's definitely lifting it.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  I had that wagon, that's so disturbing.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  The Radio Flyer people, do you think they were like, "Gotta get in there."

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Oh God, I remember that clip like it was yesterday. When you, as soon as you set it up, I closed my eyes and I can like, I remember it crystal clear, like what a moment in culture.

• 14:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and she does look great in that video, no one can deny that. And it's interesting to me, first off, that this is, this is such like a, especially in like the critical reading on Oprah, this is such like an apocal moment, right? Like how toxic this was, what a bad, you know, moment this was in terms of like, like inculcating toxic attitudes in American, you know, culture vis a vis weight loss. And how like tame it seems, honestly, in a lot of ways, considering like where we are now, just in general with like the TV, how much like worse shit there is every single day. But it's also interesting because like, this is an easy moment to hang on as toxic.

• 14:50Robert Evans?

  I actually don't, I have trouble blaming Oprah for the, for this, even though she's definitely contributing to some really ugly aspects of diet culture. As we'll talk about, the way she gets attacked and like focused on in the media over her weight is probably unique, like I don't know that anyone else has been kind of, anyone else's personal weight has been obsessed over to the same degree that Oprah's has. It certainly was in the late 90s. So yeah, as we'll talk about, I don't see this as like a low point for her, but this is probably what she would name as like the absolute worst thing in her career.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  Wait, and maybe I'm missing something. So and she would, she would say that, or she has said that because it's just like a crass stunt?

• 15:37Robert Evans?

  It's crass, and she has started to say, talk about the degree to which she thinks that diet culture and the obsession with fat and weight loss is unhealthy, and that she was a big part of that, right? Like, she started talking about that. Now, she started talking about that in participation with Weight Watchers? So I don't know, I don't know how much credit you want to give her, right?

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Clearly done in good faith.

• 15:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, maybe not totally done in good, maybe more of just a pivot.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  That's interesting. I will just say, as someone who is like, a little more outside of the Oprah sphere, I think compared to everyone else here, I feel like I didn't particularly perceive, like, I hear what you're saying about like, she was like, one of the faces of, but it was so pervasive everywhere. Not to like, completely let her off the hook, but it is a little just like, that's what you did when you were like, especially marketing to middle-aged women, I feel like.

• 16:32Robert Evans?

  It's partly what you did because Oprah was so successful at it. Like, she, like, it's a, it's a road that was there because she bushwhacked it, you know?

• 16:42Speaker 03

  Right, right, right.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I actually have a similar take. I think that why she regrets this is not because of like, participating in this harmful, toxic diet culture, yada, yada, yada, which she was. I think it was sort of throwing red meat to the people, Robert, that you were just describing, who obsess about her weight personally. I think that it's probably a low point because she was engaging in this like, highly personal, public conversation about her weight, and like, playing into that. I don't, I would probably, I don't know that she was, would say like, oh, I shouldn't have been participating in diet culture writ large.

• 17:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, I think that that's, that that might be a fair critique, but we'll talk about it. But first, for these, for these couple of episodes, we're going to really be getting into like, the, the, the parts of Oprah's career that are mostly, or life, that are mostly like, a lot more empathetic. Although, you know, there's, there's, there's some darkness there too, mainly in like, the way in which she has Kind of lied and judged up some aspects of her background because it makes a better story. Yeah, this this will all be interesting to talk about. So in 2021, one of my sources for this is a book that Oprah released about trauma, much of which she discussed through the lens of her own childhood trauma. She co-authored What Happened to You with Dr. Bruce Perry,

• 18:01Robert Evans?

  an American psychiatrist who specializes in child trauma. And from what I can tell is like one of the less toxic doctors that Oprah is famous for launching to start them. Although, again, that doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot. In an interview about that book for today.com, Oprah posited that her childhood trauma was responsible for her low moments like the wagon of fat incident. I think that certainly all of the feelings of not fitting in of my disease to please, or feeling like if I don't do what everyone wants me to do, I'm going to be rejected somehow. What I was afraid of in every instance, I'm going to get a whipping. I'm afraid I'm going to get that whipping. Thankfully, she adds, the decades of time she spent processing her pain has given her a sort of what she calls post-traumatic wisdom

• 18:47Robert Evans?

  that she thinks makes her a good spokesperson for every kind of suffering in America, or for a lot, many kinds of suffering in American society today, right? Like, because of my trauma, that's why I've done some of the things that I regret. It's my disease to please. It's like my fear of not fitting in. But because I have that trauma, I'm also a perfect spokesperson for many of these kinds of like traumas in American society. And and the fact that she thinks that way is a really important prism to understand what she does. Because Oprah, in a lot of ways, if you look at especially the first 10 or 15 years of her show, it's a mirror in some ways of like the Jerry Springer Show. Like, they're literally doing some of the same episodes, bringing like Klansmen out, you know, to have like big arguments and fights on stage.

• 19:29Robert Evans?

  There's a lot of like, you know, bringing out people in relationships who are having conflicts. It is that kind of like trash TV. And then in the late 90s, she starts to pivot. And largely, the the thing that she pivots around is her taking her own childhood trauma, her own experiences of like physical.

• 19:49Robert Evans?

  And sexual abuse and whatnot and using that as sort of a lens through which to explore those things in American society. And there's both a degree to which there are some really important issues that started getting attention because Oprah used herself as a lens to kind of like highlight them. And also, there's this sense of like

• 20:12Robert Evans?

  almost profiteering from the same things, which makes this very complicated to discuss.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  It's, I feel like it's so weird too, because it's like, at the time, as you're describing it, I probably wouldn't have perceived it as such, but like, we're also in an era where like influencer and just like you, like that is the product that everyone, you know, the children today are very casually selling.

• 20:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  It's almost like the, the concept of like selling out for like between the nineties and the todays of it. It's like, you know, it's, it's not something that you would bat an eye at, everything you're describing right now.

• 20:50Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, but it, it was really unique at the time, right?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Yes. It does seem like she was like very ahead of the game on this, like,

• 20:59Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  I think it's like the influencer bread and butter today, but back then, I mean, I do think that it set her apart from like your Jerry Springers, your Jenny Joneses to really put these kind of trauma off, like, it was like authenticity before that was a thing we expected from TV show hosts.

• 21:16Robert Evans?

  Yep, that's exact, I think that's exactly it, Bridget. And, and what's kind of undeniable is that she was able to kind of get access to a lot of stories of people's hurting by, from her own background of suffering. Her old executive producer, Diane Hudson, once told People Profiles, quote, vulnerability is the key to Oprah's success. People appreciate when you can be honest. It lets them feel more comfortable about themselves. She's got this special kind of connective ability. I see it happen over and over again. Everyone who meets her feels like, oh, now I know her. And that's what you're talking about, that kind of authenticity being the buzzword that it is today. It all really starts with Oprah. And yeah, it is one, i- i- it's both, I think there-

• 21:59Robert Evans?

  There is a lot of vulnerability that she's been willing to put out there. But at the same time, Oprah's not like Oprah is a conscious crafter of her own image and her own story. Right. She knows what she's doing. She's not like a naive in this kind of in this kind of scenario. And that that muddles the waters too, because some of this authenticity is very carefully sculpted. Rather than uh uh something that's kind of come out purely just as a natural reaction, you know? And that's going to make talking about some of this very hard because we do have like, especially when we talk about the traumas of her childhood.

• 22:38Robert Evans?

  You have different sources who disagree and who disagree with like some of the things Oprah says about what happens to her. And as a spoiler, like, we're not going to know like who's actually right here because I I certainly wasn't there when Oprah was a little kid. I'm going to guess neither of you were either.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:54Robert Evans?

  The two, two of the biggest sources for this episode are first that book that Oprah wrote with a doctor about her own trauma. Uh, and then there's two biographies. Uh, one was written kind of early on in Oprah's time as a world famous talk show host. 1999's Oprah Winfrey written by Merrill Noden for people profiles. And if you want even like, you know, that's kind of actually a surprisingly good for being a pop biography. Look at Oprah's backstory and kind of the different uh takes on what happened to her as a kid. Uh, a more recent biography is Kitty Kelly's Oprah, uh, which is another major source for this episode.

• 23:35Robert Evans?

  Now I'm going to warn you Kitty's 2010 book is a mean biography.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  The best kind.

• 23:42Robert Evans?

  It's the best kind, but Kitty is like, she is recognized as a lover of gossip and like, you know, there's a tabloid feel to this. She's also someone who does put in the work to dig up dirt on her subjects, but it tends to be like real dirt, you know? But this is a mean book, you know, like, don't, don't mistake this for a work of like objective biography like. So like all great media figures, um, including, you know, me. Oprah's hometown was a destitute little slice of hell in the middle of nowhere. This is something I really identify with her with, right? She comes up in Kosciusko, Kosciusko, Mississippi, which is 70 or so miles above Jackson. She once said of her hometown, "That place is so small,

• 24:25Robert Evans?

  you can spit and be out of town before your spit hits the ground." Which I both, I get that feeling, right? That like, this isn't even, there's nothing here, right? Like, this isn't even a town, which I like empathize with. That's, that's how I felt as a kid about fucking Isabel. It's a little bit of an exaggeration. There were about 6,700 people in town when she grew up, which like, isn't huge, but it's not quite that tiny. Now, she was born in the home of her maternal grandparents, Hattie Mae and Earlist Lee, who was known as Earless by the family because he was super old and also deaf as hell. The town has that weird Polish name, because it's named after a Polish Revolutionary War general

• 25:08Robert Evans?

  who was also an ardent abolitionist. And as a result, it had a fairly, or not as a result, but like, that, it having that name is a result of the fact that it had a very large black population. It was extremely segregated and extremely poor. So, uh, yeah, that's the town that she grows up in. And it's one of those places that had largely been built around a cotton mill, which went bust in 1948. And that's kind of when things start to fall apart in her hometown, because people start fleeing for northern cities that might still have work. You know, this is, what's happening in Kosciusko is kind of a, a microcosm of like, a much larger national trend at the time, right? Like, this is, this is a thing that's happening elsewhere to a lot of places.

• 25:53Robert Evans?

  Merrill Noden writes, quote, "Oprah's parents were among those who left. Military service had already given 20-year-old Vernon Winfrey a ticket out. He was at home on a furlough from Fort Rucker, Alabama. On the spring day, he met Vernita Lee, an 18-year-old high school student and part-time domestic worker. The two barely knew each other when they had what their daughter has described as a one-day fling under an oak tree. The encounter seems to have been a source of shame for the ambitious young man, who would go on to become a deacon in his church and a Nashville city councilman. 'I'm not proud of what happened with Oprah's mother in me,' Winfrey has said. 'I tell people today that if something like that happens, the boy should help take care of the child.'"

• 26:31Robert Evans?

  So that's the

• 26:33Speaker 03

  Good for him.

• 26:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's not his, he's not told until she's born.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 26:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and, and he does like send financial aid as soon as he's told, but like they don't, they don't really let him know until there's already a kid. And as another spoiler, he might not actually be her biological father. I don't know that that doesn't really make a huge deal in this story because they all think he is during this period of time. And he's like, going to be very much a responsible dad to the extent that he is like, allowed to be. But it is kind of like a little unclear as to what actually, like who her actual like biological dad is. I don't think that there's like a solid answer on that. Every biography will give you a little bit of a different answer. But Vernon is the one that they, they think is the biological father, you know, for, for most of this period of

• 27:23Robert Evans?

  time. And Oprah Gail Winfrey is born on January 29, 1954. And the story behind her name is a fun one. So does anyone know what Oprah's original name was supposed to be?

• 27:36Speaker 03

  This is the one thing I think I know.

• 27:38Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah?

• 27:39Speaker 03

  Isn't it supposed, wasn't it supposed to be Orpa?

• 27:41Robert Evans?

  It was supposed to be Orpa. Yeah, which was, it's a biblical name. Ruth's, like, if you know, I think Ruth was like Moses's sister, or because she was pretty, she was like tight with Moses, if I'm remembering the Bible right. And Orpa was one of her friends. And this is, like, it really says a lot about like, the people here. Orpa is a Bible deep cut. This is the, this is the biblical equivalent of like, a Star Wars fan who names his kid after Kitster Beni, who's one of Anakin Skywalker's little, little friends from Tatooine. Sophie's gonna pull up a picture of Kitster here, not for any real reason. I don't know why I thought this joke deserved to be presented.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  Because, because while we're filming, this is the razzle dazzle.

• 28:25Robert Evans?

  There he is. There's Kitster. Look at him.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  He looks like Ina Gaster doing like, like something on SNL.

• 28:32Robert Evans?

  I'm sure he has like, I'm sure someone out there has like the, has like the original model from when the Phantom Menace came out of this little child.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  Who's this kid? I love, I love that haircut, the built in bangs.

• 28:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, no, he's looking great. He's looking great. Anyway, I'm no more a Bible scholar than I am a fan of the Phantom Menace. I did have to look up that kid's name, although I remembered his face. It's one of those things that's burnt into my head from my childhood. Um, I gotta say though, from what I can read, and maybe I'm missing something here, not being a Bible scholar, it feels like her aunt picking Orpah as a name might have been her throwing shade at the baby. Because in the book of Ruth, Orpah, the, the, the person Orpah has a chance to go with Ruth and someone named Naomi, uh, who are like going down this more godly path or return to her old pagan gods and like her, her, you know, her village or, and

• 29:28Robert Evans?

  whatever. And Orpah turns back and goes back to like being a pagan, right? In rabbinic literature, according to Wikipedia. So again, I'm, I'm not a rabbinic literature ever. Orpah is identified with Harappa, the mother of Goliath and three other Philistine giants. Also Harappa had a lively social life, uh, by which I mean like got around, right? The Babylonian Talmud describes her as being threshed by as many men as a man would thresh wheat.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Not threshed.

• 29:59Robert Evans?

  Threshed.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  That's in the fucking Bible?

• 30:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah. The Bible, the Bible loves doing shit like this.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Who got threshed and how much?

• 30:07Speaker 02

  Her body count was crazy.

• 30:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 30:11Speaker 03

  I'm saying threshed from now on.

• 30:13Robert Evans?

  I'm saying threshed too. Uh, so all told, yeah, it seems like they're kind of shit talking this baby by naming it Orpah. I don't know why else you would go with Orpah. Like it's not a, it's not a super nice name to give a little kid, just based on how the Bible talks about this person. Maybe she just thought it sounded pretty. In any way.

• 30:32Speaker 03

  I think it's just that someone else in the congregation just named a kid Nebuchadnezzar and you just had to like one up.

• 30:36Robert Evans?

  Now that's a name. That's a name and it's also a size of wine bottle. That's now legal in Florida.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 30:43Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm. That just happened.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  So that's like the three liter? Oh, you're sorry.

• 30:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's massive. So, so if you can pull up a picture of a Nebuchadnezzar of wine.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  I'm not, just imagine a really big bottle of wine.

• 30:55Robert Evans?

  It's very big. It's like most of your height of wine. So this is the first time where Oprah gets really lucky. Obviously, she's born into a difficult situation, but she gets an early solid in the fact that somebody fucks up on her birth certificate and the name, the midwife misspells her name as Oprah. And everyone just kind of decides, ah, good enough, right? And this little error might be one of the luckiest breaks that Oprah ever received because I have trouble imagining Orpa working as well as a star's name.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  The Orpa Winfrey Show?

• 31:29Robert Evans?

  The Orpa Winfrey Show? I just have trouble imagining it, you know? Oprah just seems to flow a lot better. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we would all be saying that if she had been named Orpa and they'd been like, we almost called her Oprah. Ah, God, can you imagine? I don't know. But yeah. Anyway, you know what doesn't have a name is the nameless horror, I feel, when I think about you all missing out on these ads.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 31:58Speaker 05

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• 33:04Robert Evans?

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• 33:43Robert Evans?

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• 34:09Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So, we're talking Oprah who has now come into the world. So, once she is born, the job of caring for this new baby is almost immediately made the work of Hattie Mae Presley, her grandmother. And that Presley there is going to be the reason why Oprah will for years, for a big chunk of her life, claim that she is related to Elvis. This does not seem to be the case. I don't think anyone in her family ever believed that, but she will make statements like that for quite some time. And it's one of the things that members of her family will be like, I don't know why she does that. We're not related to Elvis in any way.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Does she still do that today, you think?

• 34:50Robert Evans?

  I don't think she still does it, but maybe I'm wrong about that. All of the times I've found, like, all of the quotes of her claiming that I found her from earlier in her career.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  That's truly a wild thing to claim.

• 35:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I could see it if it was like a widespread family myth that we have, you know, Elvis's kin, but like, it doesn't seem to be, because it's always, in these books, it's always her family being like, yeah, we got, we got nothing to do with Elvis. I don't know why she's doing that.

• 35:18Speaker 03

  Without being too wildly cynical, the value of being related to Elvis has also diminished greatly in the last probably 20 years. So

• 35:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  There's like no reason to keep it up.

• 35:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, it's certainly like there's less, uh, yeah, you get less cred from being related to Elvis.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  Oh, cool.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  I'm like, just having the same last, the same common last, it's like me saying like, my last name is Todd. It's like me saying, oh, Chuck Todd and I are related. It's like, y'all have a very common last name. And what cachet would you be trying to get from that?

• 35:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Or it's like me bragging about my relationship to, uh, Rick Santorum.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  But I mean, but also like without getting too gross about American history, the obvious thing is when a black person and a white person have the same last name, the antecedent tends to be a different thing than direct. Well, or whatever. I mean, there's lots of awful ways, but.

• 36:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I mean, one way, but in this case, there doesn't seem to be any like evidence of that, right? Like that it's because like Presley's not an uncommon last name, right? There's a shitload of fucking Presleys out there. Um, so Hattie Mae was the granddaughter of slaves. So that is like how kind of, you know, we're, we're, we're talking about like the 50s here, right? And she worked as the cook for the sheriff of Cosiusco and managed the household of a rich white family, the Linnards. Um, and at this point, we've got two pretty different, we, we start to get two very different stories of Oprah's first six years alive. She once told reporters, quote, "I never had a store bought dress or a pair of shoes until I was six years old. The only toy I had was a corn cob doll

• 36:56Robert Evans?

  with toothpicks." This is like pretty consistent in terms of how Oprah talks about her life. Uh, Kitty Kelly writes, quote, "She recalled her early years as lonely with no one to play with except the pigs that she rode bareback around her grandmother's yard. I only had barnyard animals to talk to. I read them Bible stories. She regaled her audiences with stories of having to carry water from the well, milk cows and empty the slop jar, a childhood of cinders and ashes that was the stuff of fairy tales. Oprah morphed into Oparella as she spun her tales about the switch wielding grandmother and cane thumping grandfather who raised her until she was six years old. Oh, the whoopins I got, she said. And the degree to which this is myth-making is up for debate.

• 37:38Robert Evans?

  It is worth noting that a lot of, a number of her family members and friends of the family who knew Oprah during this period, very much don't agree with this take on her childhood. And I want to read a quote from that People Profiles biography here. "Among Oprah's many assets may be a gift for self-dramatization. As Vernita once put it, Oprah toots it up a little. In one tale Oprah has often told, she has cast herself as a lonely child whose main comfort was talking to the farm animals. The nearest neighborhood was a bl- neighbor was a blind man up the road, she once said. There weren't other kids, no playmates, no toys, except for one corn cob doll. I played with the animals and I ga- made speeches to the cows." Esters, which is her aunt, has a different explanation for the loneliness Oprah remembers.

• 38:23Robert Evans?

  "Right across the road were Oprah's cousins, the Presley Twins, who were her age. They played together when Oprah was allowed to come outside because Aunt Hat was very protective of her." And it, it seems that there's at least a good amount of evidence that the real Oprah story, at least the story of her childhood, that the majority of the people who were there for it tell, is not that she was like locked, you know, is that she was isolated because this was some like middle of the wor- nowhere dirt farm. It's because she had a grandmother who was something of a helicopter parent, right? And while the family certainly wasn't rich, they weren't dirt poor. And in fact, everyone seems to agree that Oprah had a lot of toys. The whole, "I only had a corn cob doll" thing is definitely not true.

• 39:06Robert Evans?

  But the reason she had a lot of nice toys is that they were all hand-me-downs from the rich white family that Hattie May worked for, which is a complicated thing, right? When you're thinking about like, why would somebody kind of exaggerate the, the lack of stuff that they had as a kid? When it's like, well, but also the stuff that you have comes to you as a result of this relationship that's kind of very fundamentally unequal and that you were probably somewhat aware of at the time. And Oprah, in fact, talks a lot about how she was aware of the fact that like, white girls were treated very differently in her town and wanted to be white as a little kid. So like, this is, this is all very messy.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it goes back to what you were saying, Robert, about how a lot of her early story is quite sympathetic and you, it's very easy. Like, it's, on the one hand, it's easy to say, oh, well, she was doing some mythmaking and saying she didn't have any toys. But it's also like, more complicated and sort of truer to be like, well, she had toys, but they came from the white kids and that she didn't maybe, maybe was aware of the, the dynamic there. Like, it's less satisfying and more complex, but it doesn't make it any less true.

• 40:16Robert Evans?

  Right, right. And it's, it's, it's, it's also one of those things where, like, she talks a lot about being whipped and switched and how like, she didn't feel like the same thing happened to the white kids. Now, does that mean, like, I'm, I'm, white kids in Alabama, I'm sure plenty of them got beat by their parents too. But what, what kind of matters more there is her feeling on it, right? That there were these kids that my grandma's job is to serve and they clearly get these much nicer things than I am. And it's not surprising to me that that would color her, her, like, concept of her childhood, much more than like, what her older aunts would have picked up on, which is like, well, she always had the nice things, right?

• 40:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like, neither of them can be lying and there can still be a discrepancy between what they remember, if that makes sense.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  But it feels like mythmaking is sort of a fair way to say it. Like, this is just kind of like-

• 41:07Robert Evans?

  It's a part of it.

• 41:08Speaker 03

  The exact shorthand, especially in a, like, entertainment capacity, like-

• 41:15Robert Evans?

  The whole, I was, I only had the cows to talk to thing is definitely a bit of mythmaking, because like, everyone does agree, like, no, she had more family around her than that. Like, that's, that's a little, that's a little bit playing it up, right?

• 41:26Speaker 01

  That's like, straight out of the movie Pearl, like, oh, I was putting on speeches for the pigs.

• 41:34Robert Evans?

  So yeah, Oprah, one of the stories she tells is that she was like forced to make friends with cockroaches, which is actually like a reoccurring bit of hers in her early years. Quote, "We were so poor, we couldn't afford a cat or a dog, so I made pets out of two cockroaches. I put them in a jar and named them Melinda and Sandy." And Oprah's sister Patricia Lloyd does not entirely agree with this take. Oprah exaggerated how bad we had it, I guess to get sympathy from her viewers and widen her audience. She never had cockroaches for pets. She always had a dog. She also had a white cat, an eel in an aquarium, and a parakeet called Bo Peep that she tried to teach to talk. And-

• 42:12Speaker 02

  She had an eel? She had a parakeet? Yeah. Come on.

• 42:16Speaker 03

  I'm sorry. It's hard. You really blasted past the eel part.

• 42:19Robert Evans?

  She doesn't have an eel at a point. Well, here's the thing, though, because like Patricia Lloyd is telling the truth, I think. I'm sure that Oprah had those pets. But Patricia is younger than Oprah and doesn't meet Oprah until Oprah is not living with her grandmother anymore. Patricia and Oprah never get along. And a big chunk of this is, I'm not going to throw out stories like this from family members who were like, "Yeah, it wasn't as bad as she says it was," because there's definitely a good amount of myth-making going on here. But also, there's a lot of people who are angry that Oprah got rich and that they didn't get as much of that money as they wanted to get. And so that's also a factor in some of these, like Patricia doesn't know what was going on in that farmhouse, because she wasn't alive then.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  And she's probably just a hater.

• 43:02Robert Evans?

  That's not 0% of why she's saying this, right? Yeah. Now, that said, there's also some evidence that like Oprah really pushes aside how doting her family was to her, because that's not kind of the conception. She always has this sort of like, "I've always been alone" attitude, and maybe that's how she felt. But her maternal aunt Suzie said this to Kitty Kelly. "We all just adored her. We just worshipped her and everything. My mother Hattie gave Oprah everything she wanted her to have and everything Oprah wanted. And so we were poor people, but we got it for her. She claimed she had no dolls, but she had lots of dolls, all kinds of dolls." And I, you know, I don't think that's lying either. I don't think it's uncommon for a kid to be like,

• 43:47Robert Evans?

  well, I felt alone and for the people around that kid to be like, but you weren't, you know? And again, neither of those people are necessarily lying. That just gets down to people taking very different things and like childhood, you're not aware of the stuff that maybe adults see.

• 44:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. How old, wait, how, how old is she in this time period?

• 44:11Robert Evans?

  One to six.

• 44:12Speaker 03

  Oh my God. Yeah.

• 44:13Robert Evans?

  Or birth to six, I should say, right?

• 44:17Speaker 03

  I feel like that, that's exactly the type of disagreement that you always have with you. You don't really remember how nice everyone was to you when you were six.

• 44:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Cause I have a lot of like complaints about my own childhood, like one to seven or eight. And I'm sure my mom would say like, well, we were all working our asses off to take care of you. And it's like, well, yeah, but also you weren't around a lot of the time, you know, like that's just a, nobody's wrong there. As the parent, you're like, but you understand that what I was doing was trying to take care of you. And as the kid, you're like, yeah, but I was still really unhappy, you know? Like, that's just childhood, you know?

• 44:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Anyway, Kitty makes an interesting note here, pulling from a 2009 interview Oprah did with Barbra Streisand, in which Barbara, who grew up in poverty, talked about the fact that her only doll was a hot water bottle. Oprah, who had previously claimed to only have a doll she made from a corn cob, said, replied, wow, you were poorer than I was. So again, myth making is going on here. She's not ever totally consistent. You know, how poor she was depends on who she's talking to. When she's talking to somebody who was like really growing up also very poor, Oprah maybe like, you know, eases up on the throttle a little bit.

• 45:29Robert Evans?

  But she's an entertainer. Yeah.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  I remember that Barbara Walters Oprah crossover very well because it ends with a very good performance where

• 45:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Barbara Walters painted Oprah's microphone white because she was not Barbara Walters. Barbara Streisand painted her microphone white because her thing is like, wait, are you talking about Streisand or Walters?

• 45:50Robert Evans?

  I think I'm talking about Streisand. Let me double check in this. So I don't have to fuck this up.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  If it's Streisand, that was like a very big moment in Oprah lore.

• 46:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I think it's, I'm pretty sure it's Streisand. It's just that she also talked, she talked to everyone. There's, because we just talked about Barbara Walters in here, who she, she mentioned like wishing that she had been white as a little girl to Barbara Walters. Barbara Streisand, I think, is the interview about how poor they were. Yeah. Yeah.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  All the Barbers.

• 46:19Robert Evans?

  All the Barbers. Too many Barbers in this story. If they were famous in the 90s or early 2000s, Oprah had a tearful conversation with them. So yeah, Kitty Kelly quotes from a Life article in 1997, which includes this line, Oprah was the least powerful of girls, born poor and illegitimate on the segregated South on a town in Cozusco, Mississippi. She spent her first six years there, abandoned to her maternal grandmother. And so you can see that like this spin on the story, which is, parts of it I'm sure are emotionally true. Some of it is certainly literally true, but also the idea that she was abandoned, I think it's more, I think that doesn't quite get at the truth, which is that her grandmother

• 47:01Robert Evans?

  took her over because her mother was not a reliable parent. And this was, she benefited a lot from the fact that she had her grandmother during this. Very similar actually to Clarence Thomas's story, right? Where you had this kid who was growing up in a very impoverished background, but wound up being taken care of their grandparent, who was the absolute most responsible person to raise them in that period of time. And so it is this situation where that's both, I'm sure, very difficult for the child who's not being raised by their parents, but it's also not this situation of like, this is an example of there being a strong safety net in her childhood, that a number of, a lot of other kids in the same situation wouldn't necessarily benefit it from.

• 47:44Robert Evans?

  And both of those things are, I think, critical to talk about, whether we're talking about Thomas or talking about Winfrey. And this is where you get kind of a lot of the discrepancies because the Winfrey family historian, Catherine Esters, who is, I think, technically a cousin, but one of those cousins who Oprah grew up seeing as an aunt, has really taken a lot of issues with Oprah's description of her childhood. And she told Kitty Kelly this. "All things considered, those years with Hattie Mae were the best thing that could have happened to a baby girl born to poor kin. Oprah grew up as an only child with the full and undivided attention of every one of us, her grandparents, her aunts, uncles, and cousins, as well as her mother, who Oprah never mentions was with her every day for the first four and a half years of Oprah's life, until she went north to Milwaukee to find a better job."

• 48:28Robert Evans?

  And when I read this, I was very surprised because all of the other things I'd read about her childhood said that her mom had left immediately. But Esters claims like, no, her mom was there for four and a half years and then just bounced for like 18 months to try and set up a life and does eventually bring her up to Milwaukee, which is a different version of her story, right? Like, again, there's, there's a lot, there's less abandonment here than, than at least certain versions of the story. And obviously, I wasn't there to tell you who was lying or not, but yeah.

• 48:57Speaker 03

  I don't know, it just, that feels like exactly like perception, though. Like, if, between zero and four, if your mom leaves, how would you materially know the difference between four and one? You know, really, you're, you're, you're barely there.

• 49:13Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 49:13Speaker 03

  As a kid.

• 49:14Robert Evans?

  Right. And that is kind of the difficulty of how formative that period is and then how like shitty our memory is of it. Because like, I always would, like, especially when I do stuff like this and I read about, like, well, if I were to write my own recollection of like my early childhood out and then talk to my relatives about it, how many of them would be like, no, that's not what happened?

• 49:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:34Robert Evans?

  No, right?

• 49:35Speaker 03

  You're a kid.

• 49:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you're, you're a small child. So again, I don't even know how much of this is myth-making and just that was her, she felt abandoned. And so maybe then it is like, is that even more accurate than the truth that her mom was actually there most of the time, if that's what she took out of that period of time?

• 49:54Speaker 01

  I don't know if you know the answer to this, but

• 49:56Robert Evans?

  No.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Are the, are, are the family members that, that are speaking on this, sort of correcting the record, are they alleging that Oprah is sort of outright falsifying

• 50:06Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  what her childhood was like?

• 50:08Robert Evans?

  Aunt Catherine definitely is. She is very much, she's talking a lot of shade about Oprah. I think she takes it very personally because she was one of the people helping to raise her that she talks about her childhood this way. And there's always the question of like, how much does money and people being unhappy about money play into some of this? I can't answer that. There's been allegations of that too. You know, nobody's like coming into this without an angle, but Aunt Catherine is definitely alleging Oprah lies a lot about her childhood. That is her, is precisely how she frames it. Is that like she's telling a lot of tall tales, you know?

• 50:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, complicated.

• 50:56Speaker 03

  So it's just like when the successful person in your family is the most like the richest person in media. That's, that's what it becomes a thing.

• 51:04Robert Evans?

  That's a complicated.

• 51:05Speaker 03

  Sounds so standard to any shit talking family, I have to say.

• 51:09Robert Evans?

  Right, right.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  I would be such a hater if my sibling became Oprah famous.

• 51:14Robert Evans?

  Two billion dollars, yeah.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Put a microphone on my face and I'll say whatever. I would be such a hater.

• 51:20Robert Evans?

  No, just, just buy me a vineyard and I'll shut up. You'll never hear from me again. Go date Stedman. We're good.

• 51:29Robert Evans?

  So there's also another aspect of this that didn't really come out until more recently. I mean, Oprah was open a lot about physical abuse that she endured, although I should say, when I say physical abuse, it is accurate to call it abuse. It is also totally normal corporal punishment for the time, right? Like the stuff she is talking about, my grandma would make me go get a switch and then would beat me if I did things that were bad. That is extremely normal for this place and time, right?

• 51:56Speaker 01

  I have to say like, that is how I was raised. I grew up in the South. That's, I mean, that's just like, I know a lot of people.

• 52:02Robert Evans?

  It's my public school.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Same. Like I know a lot of people today for whom that is like a normal vibe, even though it is abuse.

• 52:10Robert Evans?

  And it's one of those things people will critique her for like and be like, ah, she wasn't really, she wasn't beat more than anybody else. Like, you know, Hattie was not particularly violent for a parent in that era. But also, I don't think Oprah's wrong for being like, this is really fucked up and you shouldn't hit kids with switches. So I think I give that point to Oprah on the whole.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. And especially making the kid go out and get their own switch.

• 52:33Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  If you've ever had to do that, that's like a special kind of psychological torture.

• 52:39Robert Evans?

  A lot of it does sound very familiar. Yeah, just growing up in the South. Like, I got smacked, you know, I don't think more than my fair share. And it's the kind of thing where like, there's a part of me that wants to be, if I were to hear someone else complaining about the kind of stuff that was done to me as a kid, I'd be like, oh, man, that shit was just growing up as a kid in rural Oklahoma in the 90s. But it's also bad. You shouldn't do that to kids. So maybe, maybe I'll just shut up about that, you know? It's that kind of like, it's that attitude where like, if you went through something and you never really thought of it as that bad, then you get kind of offended when other people speak up, even if they should be. You know, it's, that's probably just a thing we have to get over as people.

• 53:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, see, I, I went through it. I, I paid off my student loans. I did X O Y bullshit. And it's like, well.

• 53:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 53:26Speaker 03

  Why, why should everyone suffer this?

• 53:28Robert Evans?

  Been hitting me as a kid, I guess.

• 53:32Robert Evans?

  Earlier, I mentioned that 2021 book with Dr. Bruce Perry, who by Oprah's standards is a pretty good doctor, but also seems to think ADHD isn't real. So again, by Oprah's standards, does a lot of heavy lifting there. Like, I was reading through this guy's bio and I was like, okay, he seems like a real, oh, he doesn't think ADHD is a thing, huh? Okay. Cool. We got some RFK vibes coming off of this fella. Um, in that book, What Happened to You: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing, each chapter opens up with a brief vignette or essay by either Oprah or Dr. Perry. And the rest of each chapter is literally just like a conversation transcript between the two, written out in Q and A format.

• 54:13Robert Evans?

  It is a very lazy book, in my opinion, right? This is the easiest way to write a fucking book. Everyone does like 10 pages of essays and then you just fucking record a conversation? Man, how do I get that job? Right? Like, that's. Beautiful grift, beautiful grift. That said, there's also some like, pretty poignant vignettes from Oprah here, which I think maybe fills it out a little bit more. That includes some stark claims from her childhood. Now, we should remember, this book came out just a couple of years ago. So this is a senior citizen reflecting half a century later on things that would have happened when she was six at the oldest. So the best case scenario here, there's no way, you know, even if we discount like some myth making, you're never going to be perfectly accurate in your recollections of stuff that happened in this time.

• 54:58Robert Evans?

  But here's how Oprah writes about, you know, the way in which discipline was done when she was a child. "At the time, it was accepted practice for caregivers to use corporal punishment to discipline a child. My grandmother, Hattie Mae, embraced it. But even at three years old, I knew what I was experiencing was wrong. One of the worst beatings I can recall happened on a Sunday morning. Going to church played a major role in our lives. Just before we were to leave for service, I was sent to the well behind our house to pump water. The farmhouse where I lived with my grandparents did not have indoor plumbing. From the window, my grandmother caught a glimpse of me twirling my fingers in the water and became enraged. Though I was only daydreaming innocently, as any child might, she was angry because this was our drinking water, and I had put my fingers in it. She then asked me if I had been playing in the water, and I said, no. She bent me over and whipped me so violently, my flesh welted.

• 55:44Robert Evans?

  Afterward, I managed to put on my white Sunday best dress. Blood began to seep through and stain the crisp fabric a deep crimson. Livid at the sight, she chastised me for getting blood on my dress, then sent me to Sunday school. In the rural South, this is how black children were raised."

• 56:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and it's one of those Esters, Aunt Catherine, takes a lot of issue with this. She was like, Hattie Mae did not beat Oprah every day of her life. And like, I'm sure it wasn't every day, but I don't think Oprah's probably, that's a very specific story to have lied about.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  And it's like so visceral that if you, if that happened to you while you were a little kid, no shit, it's gonna be memorable. No shit, it's gonna be something you can recall.

• 56:25Robert Evans?

  That'll stick with you.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, of course, that would stick with you.

• 56:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and I think this might be, again, when we talk about, because it'd be very easy, especially since this is a bastards episode, to just lean on Esters being like, she lied about this, she lied about that. But like, well, she was one of the people who was taking care of Oprah when Oprah was getting smacked around as a kid, and maybe did some of the smacking, and maybe doesn't want to think about that as having been a problem, right?

• 56:55Robert Evans?

  Cool stuff. Um, I think Oprah does genuinely care about child abuse. It's something she has devoted a lot of her life to trying to fight, although ways in, in ways that have been unperfect, they're imperfect. There's like criticisms of some of the stuff that she's tried to do for this, but it is something that she's like, put a lot of time and effort into. And that kind of does make me think she's probably telling the truth, all in all, about like, what she experienced as a kid. And what's interesting to me is that Oprah, while she's all, you know, been mostly seems to have negative things to say about her grandma, she's also very clear that like, Hattie Mae is the first person who inculcated with her, uh, within her, the behavior that made

• 57:36Robert Evans?

  her a success later on. Quote, "I developed a keen sense of when trouble was brewing. I recognized the shift in my grandmother's voice, or the look that meant I had displeased her. She was not a mean person. I believe she cared for me and wanted me to be a good girl. And I understood that hushing my mouth or silence was the only way to ensure a quick end to punishment and pain. For the next 40 years, that pattern of conditioned compliance, the result of deeply rooted trauma, would define every relationship, interaction and decision in my life. The long-term impact of being whooped, then forced to hush and even smile about it, turned me into a world-class people pleaser for most of my life."

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Oof.

• 58:12Robert Evans?

  And I think there's a, Oprah would suggest that like, part of why she got to be so good at what we call myth-making, at entertaining people, because what is entertainment but people pleasing, is that she's been so much of her early childhood trying to keep her grandmother happy, right?

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I mean, I, not to be sympathizing with our bastard, but I, I mean, like that, yeah, I mean, like, that is my, that is my childhood, right? Like, I think that is like, classic kid who grew up getting that kind of punishment in a household where even as an adult, you become so perceptive to like, the tiniest little changes in someone's demeanor. And you kind of had to be to, to survive in households like that. Like, that is like, that rings true to me.

• 58:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, my, my child, I wouldn't say was as extreme as what Oprah has related, but I definitely vibe with the, the feeling of like, there is someone in my house who gets angry at me easily, and I'm going to get very good at like, people pleasing and at lying in order to avoid pissing them off.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  And I have to ask Robert, like, as a, like, podcaster to podcaster, do you kind of feel like this is like, why you are good at like, storytelling and entertaining and keeping people happy and laughing and smiling with you, right? Like, she's not wrong.

• 59:29Robert Evans?

  I, I don't think she's wrong at all. And like, it's, it's all of that, and it's also why I've always been really good at talking to the cops, at like, lying to the cops, at getting out of trouble with the police, is that I know when somebody has me dead to rights, I know how to weasel out of it. Like, allegedly lying, yeah.

• 59:46Speaker 03

  Why do the cops is not a crime?

• 59:49Speaker 02

  Allegedly, allegedly, allegedly.

• 59:51Robert Evans?

  Allegedly, yeah. Uh, a lot of successful entertainers have something like this in their background, right? I, I actually had this written out, like, you learn to please people and that teaches you how to please crowds, right?

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  Speaking of pleasing crowds.

• 1:00:05Robert Evans?

  Fuck the crowds, let's please our advertisers.

• 1:00:08Speaker 03

  The only crowd that matters.

• 1:00:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:13Speaker 05

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• 1:00:43Robert Evans?

  You love the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast, but you've got questions. Don't worry, everybody does. To answer them, hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson-Rasso just dropped a new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor. For all your burning questions, the guys turn to the experts, including Dr. Dimitri Duskalakis, an infectious disease doctor, public health honcho, and big time advocate in LGBTQ plus health, HIV prevention and health equity. Think of it as the after show to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions where the crew dives deep into topics and stories from that week's Tuesday episode. Episodes cover topics including testing and why are they swabbing there?

• 1:01:24Robert Evans?

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• 1:01:49Robert Evans?

  So, on the whole, you know, I think Oprah lies a lot about the specific, I think there are specifics that get exaggerated, just specifics that are misremembered about her past, but I don't think that means her, we should discount what she says, right? And I think particularly we should pay attention when she says, quote, "The most pervasive feeling I remember from my own childhood is loneliness." And I can believe that at the same time as I believe her Aunt Catherine when she tells Kitty Kelly, quote, "Oprah makes her first six years sound like the worst thing that ever befell a child born to folks just trying to survive. I was there for most of the time and I can tell you she was spoiled and petted and indulged better than any little girl in these parts. Every parent knows that a child's first six years lays the foundation for life and

• 1:02:33Robert Evans?

  those first six years down here with Hattie Mae gave Oprah the foundation for her self-confidence, her speaking ability and her desire to succeed." I don't actually think both of those things are in conflict the way that they both think it does. Yeah.

• 1:02:49Speaker 03

  I think that's exactly like, as we've been saying, like, these are all the skills you gain. I do feel it's worth saying that though sometimes you gain these skills, also the majority of the time, people are crushed and hurt by this type of.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  It can be both. You can be crushed, but also a good entertainer.

• 1:03:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:09Robert Evans?

  You can be, you can be.

• 1:03:10Speaker 03

  But it's not like a magic spell.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  No, no, I would not recommend. This is not how I would recommend raising a child.

• 1:03:16Robert Evans?

  Entertainers, but for, in more cases, like, if you're an entertainer, like, this story still ends in a place like the fucking floor in front of the Viper Room as opposed to having $2 billion, you know? R.I.P. River Phoenix.

• 1:03:31Robert Evans?

  So there's another story Oprah tells in this book, which again, I don't like this book overall, but this passage struck me. And if it's, if it is accurate, I think it's something that may hint of some darkness buried in the family history that its historian Aunt Catherine may not be willing to see. Quote, "Growing up in Mississippi, I always slept with my grandmother. My grandfather, who had dementia, slept in a side room. One night, I was suddenly awakened to see my grandfather standing over the bed. Even before I opened my eyes, I could sense my grandmother's fear. I could feel her heightened awareness as she slowly repeated, 'Earl, get back to bed. Earl, get back to bed.' He wouldn't go. He was trying to choke her, fighting to get his hands around her neck. When she finally managed to push him off of her and run to the

• 1:04:15Robert Evans?

  door, she cried out for one of our neighbors called Cousin Henry, who lived down the road. 'Henry, Henry, Henry!' Henry was blind, but without hesitation, he came in the middle of the night to help my grandmother put my grandfather back in his bedroom. My grandmother then wedged a chair under the doorknob to her bedroom door and found some cans to put around the door. The next morning, she tied those cans together and hung them from the door. And every night for the rest of my days living with my grandmother, the cans were on the door and the chair was up under the knob. I would try to sleep while listening to make sure that the cans didn't move."

• 1:04:47Speaker 03

  Fuck.

• 1:04:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

  So dark.

• 1:04:50Speaker 03

  That's so scary. Yeah.

• 1:04:53Robert Evans?

  It's, it's interesting. She, she tells this anecdote in the book because it goes along with another story she's telling, which is that she's talking about like this school shooting, right? In 1988, when a girl, a woman named Lori Dan entered a second grade classroom in Winnetka and started shooting, killing an eight-year-old and wounding five other kids. And Oprah tells her own story because like in the aftermath of this shooting, there had been like a discussion about whether or not to like chain and lock the school doors and have them manned by security guards. And the principal refused to implement these changes because he was like, if there's a chain on the door, it sends a message to the kids that they're unsafe. And kind of Oprah brings up the story to be like, I really feel that because of this, these cans hung from the door that were supposed to make

• 1:05:37Robert Evans?

  us safer, that just reminded me that there was this constant danger, you know, from my grandfather. Um, so yeah, anyway, interesting.

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  I don't have children, but it is so fucked up to me. That's like, I mean, we're not going to make them safe, but we don't want to make them feel unsafe.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  Which they are.

• 1:05:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:59Robert Evans?

  And it's, you know, Aunt Catherine, I think, would probably say, again, would doubt that that had happened. One of the statements she made to Kitty Kelly was, "I've talked to her about this over the years. I've confronted her and asked, 'Why do you tell such lies?' Oprah told me, 'That's what people want to hear. The truth is boring, Aunt Catherine. People don't want to be bored. They want stories with drama.'" And so it is like, you can't help think to a little bit like, well, did she, did she make that up or add to that in order to have something that was relevant to the story of a shooting from her own life, which is like a thing, you know, being able to like, like, and it's,

• 1:06:41Robert Evans?

  like, you can't know. It is, it is kind of worth stating that, like, a lot of the people who will argue that about Oprah, and these are arguments coming from members of her family, Aunt Catherine ahead of them, are also people who probably have a deep emotional interest in remembering, you know, Grandma Hattie and her husband as one kind of person. And Oprah, the fact that Oprah doesn't remember them that way is probably deeply offensive to these people. And maybe, yeah, I, yeah, I don't know. There's like no way to know what actually happened, right? None of us were there. But the fact that this conflict is present is as much a part of the story as what actually happened, right?

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  I would also say, just growing up in like a southern black family, I do think there might be some aspect of like, don't, you're not meant to talk about whatever happens in our house. And so the, like, like, her aunt being offended that she would even be talking about anything that went on, you know, behind closed doors in their house, that, I could really see that. And like, again, I don't think it's all one or the other, that she's just like, callously making this up because people need a story. Probably some of that, but that doesn't mean that her family members would not be invested in these stories that paint them in not so great light, you know, not so great light, be not something that's talked about on a national stage.

• 1:08:02Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right. Yeah. And I think that's like, that's a pretty important part of it as well.

• 1:08:07Speaker 03

  I will say, another thing that is kind of weird, and partially because I'm relatively not versed in Oprah and the elements of her bastardiness, you know, the ones that I know about mostly seem to be about elevating horrible men, which you can almost sort of do. You know, I could see paths to that. Anyway, I guess what I mean is like, none of these like trauma, well, not even, not the traumas, but none of these like lies or like questionable stories. It's like weird because that doesn't seem like the dimension of which, like, like the type of bad person that does those things tends to be more of like just a general asshole or a liar in some

• 1:08:49Speaker 03

  way. And it's just interesting that I'm like, this doesn't seem to be the bad part, I guess.

• 1:08:55Robert Evans?

  No, no. So, well, also, she's six up to this point in the story.

• 1:08:59Speaker 03

  Like, so, of course. Even, even, even in the retellings, sorry, like, even if they are exaggerations, like, it's so weird because it's like, she could do all that stuff and still not promote Dr. Oz. Like, she could be a weird, kind of like shady, you know, Hollywood person, which happens.

• 1:09:16Robert Evans?

  Most people who lie about their childhoods don't also start Dr. Oz's career.

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  Yes. I think that's, that's like, maybe what I'm saying.

• 1:09:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Um, so, you know, the, the, the attitude of her, a number of members of her family, including her mom, Vernita, and her Aunt Catherine, uh, is that, uh, and this is Aunt Catherine again, she always wanted to have the spotlight. If adults were talking and she couldn't get their attention, she'd walk over and hit them to make them pay attention to her. And I think that that's, you know, that's probably true because I have seen other kids do that. You know, it's a thing you have to like, stop when a kid is doing that. But like, that's not an uncommon stage of development or like for kids to scream and pout when they don't get attention, you know? Like, they're small children. They are still learning these sorts of things. Um, that said,

• 1:10:04Robert Evans?

  it's not inconsistent with what Oprah says about being lonely or about wanting to be a people pleaser. This is also a kid that is obsessed with having people pay attention to her. And as a result, she is from a very early age, a performer, which is really interesting to me. She, like, every black church in her hometown, she's given like speeches at and like read poems at and, and whatnot. By the time she is six or seven, um, which is a continuing thing in her life. When she moves, you know, to the big city, she'll be doing the same thing, going at every Single church she can find and like doing these kind of live performances. She's doing that from the age of like four or five. Um, and this appears to be something in which she is entirely self motivated to do.

• 1:10:48Robert Evans?

  Um, like she is pushing for her family to take her to these churches so that she can do like live performances, right? Like this is always a thing that she wants in her life.

• 1:11:00Robert Evans?

  Um, which is, you know, interesting to me and something that's going to be a bigger thing in part two of our episodes, but that concludes part one of the Oprah Winfrey story.

• 1:11:12Speaker 03

  That's wild. I didn't realize that the church circuit was basically like open mic night for being a talk show host.

• 1:11:17Robert Evans?

  Oh, my God. Specific kind of open night, Mike.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, it definitely is. I have seen the folks who like, if you ever.

• 1:11:25Speaker 03

  It makes sense.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, like people who speak at a certain kind of cadence, you're like, ooh, that you're a church kid. You were like raised giving speeches at church.

• 1:11:33Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:11:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. And it makes, it's, it's really interesting to me that like she has, cause like it, this does kind of speak to some of the things, uh, her, her aunt was saying about like, you know, we were all really focused on her. There was so much attention that went her way because, well, yeah, I mean, it would probably be pretty hard for her to have gotten taken to all of these different like places, right? Um, to all of these different like churches and whatnot, if her family wasn't interested in, in her and like focused on her success. That said, and also that's exactly the kind of thing a kid who was deeply lonely would really want to do, right? Like that's because those are the kind of kids who become entertainers in a lot of.

• 1:12:15Speaker 03

  It is a pretty unique thing. I can't imagine. I mean, I don't think I got comfortable speaking publicly till I was like 28. So like the fact that like a, yeah, a six year old was like, let, let me, I just need, I just need some stage time this Sunday morning.

• 1:12:33Robert Evans?

  I loved it. I was a little, I, church wasn't where I did it, but like, yeah, I was.

• 1:12:39Speaker 03

  I mean, I guess I was, I like attention, but like truly public speaking is, I think, different.

• 1:12:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what she's doing, the fact that she is like, she is, she has the confidence in her speaking abilities to want to get up at church, which is like a, a big thing in a lot of ways, especially to a little kid. That's really interesting to me.

• 1:12:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:00Robert Evans?

  Anyone surprised about anything so far?

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  I think it's surprising to see the like conflicting stories.

• 1:13:08Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:13:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:11Speaker 03

  I I will say, I don't think anyone's scrutiny of any of the tales they tell about being six or younger would hold up to anything that's been put through this. So like every, every knock against Oprah in this capacity, I am wildly sympathetic to. I'm just like, I don't know. You're talking about when you were six and you're doing it in front of presumably a bunch of like white producers and network executives mostly. So it's like, gotta do what you gotta do sometimes.

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  I am surprised that I pretty much uncritically, just every thing that Oprah ever said about her childhood, I believed, I repeated it in my fifth grade report. Sophie, I don't know if you did too, but that like, like the thing about the dolls and her first getting her first pair of shoes at six, I specifically put that in my report. And now I'm like, dang, should have fact checked that.

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  Fifth grade us.

• 1:14:10Speaker 03

  I know, terrible journalists.

• 1:14:15Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. Yeah, it's a, I'm always fascinated by like the vagaries of memory, you know? Like the, the past is not just a foreign country. It's, it didn't happen. It's a fantasy. It's a fiction novel, right? It's a fiction novel that you've been writing your entire life without even knowing it. Anyway, go sleep on that, everybody. We'll be back in a couple of days.

• 1:14:39Robert Evans?

  Oh, wait, pluggables.

• 1:14:40Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

  From us?

• 1:14:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:42Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, yes. Plug.

• 1:14:44Speaker 03

  I'll just go, Yo is racist, that's my podcast. We have the, the premium shows at suboptimalpods.com. Trying to think, mostly just been talking about this amazing celery salad I had, I made the other day. I've had it three times since I made it.

• 1:14:58Speaker 02

  Well done.

• 1:14:59Speaker 03

  Celery, lemon, shallot and dates. Okay.

• 1:15:04Speaker 03

  It's pretty, it's a crazy ass salad. I put blue cheese in it too, but you know. And walnuts.

• 1:15:10Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:15:10Speaker 03

  All right, now I'm done. That's my plug.

• 1:15:12Speaker 02

  Bridget.

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  Definitely making that salad. Yeah, listen to my podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet, about the exploration of the intersection of identity and social media and technology. And listen to my podcast that I do with Mozilla Foundation called IRL that explores who has the power in AI and ethics in AI. New season coming soon. Check it out.

• 1:15:33Speaker 02

  I want to plug at the end here just a couple of organizations just because of the devastating fires in Los Angeles. If you are able to help, just check out Water Drop L.A. and K-Town for all for reliable resources of how to help people with mutual aid.

• 1:15:52Speaker 02

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/behindthebastards.

• 1:16:16Speaker 05

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• 1:17:17Speaker 04

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