As Media.
Welcome back to Behind the Bastard's We're.
On page eighteen fifty two.
I know a podcast where Robert Evans accidentally wrote twenty almost twenty four thousand words about Oprah for this these episodes. The normal length of a book is fifty thousand words, so half of a book about fucking Oprah, And like I was having panic attacks at the end of this of like, oh my god, I'm leaving so much out. I'm leaving so much from like this, this this really good book age of Oprah out because like I just don't
even know how to like fit everything in. But I have to start this episode with our wonderful guests, the inimitable bridget Todd and the glorious Sainted. I don't know, Andrew t I'm trying to think of new new adjectives to.
Continua becomes what did you do to become a saint?
What's a saying I actually have to die? No you don't, No, you don't. I think you don't have to die. I'm probably okay.
Just let me know I'm down.
Bridgie, you could also be a saint, but I'm not. I just don't get major Catholic vibes from you.
Oh, I actually did go to Catholic school.
Oh you did, well, Okay, I'm gonna I'm going to redirect the habit that I've got headed for Andrew, and it's going to go to you, Andrew. Sorry, I'm not saying anything.
You have to uh, you know, live virtuously.
You have to die for the faith, so like you have.
To martyr h perform miracles.
He's performed a miracle.
I don't know.
I don't know if all of these are required at once.
And I think there's every everyone who's made it on time for Behind the Bastards recording, since that sat through a whole episode as a guest has performed a miracle.
I said, it has been a martyr.
But yeah, my most miraculous thing is since we're doing video is I'm holding up my favorite coffee cup.
Wow, I love that.
By chance to buy that in Maryland? Did you? That's giving me big Maryland vibes?
I'm sure from Maryland? Maine.
Oh, they have they do crabs out there too?
No?
Not good?
Oh?
Could they?
I can't imagine mastations. It's so hardcore lobster territory. I don't know if lobsters and crabs fight. Sorry for we're already over.
We're The whole discussion has been how long this is going to be? And I've just trying to figure out if there's crabs in Maine.
Yeah, there's there's. There's for sure crabs in Maine. They've got lobster at McDonald's.
In part part But that's my whole point.
Part three seems normal.
Part four is I there's there's there's no logic to the number of parts. This might may wind up more episodes than we thought. I have to start with something, which is a mea culpa. I made some mistakes in the last episodes. Guys, tell us I'm so sorry. I'm
so so sorry. So here's the thing. When you're doing a podcast like this, like it's a mix of you do a bunch of research and you write a bunch of things to get a bunch of facts out that you are as accurate as you can, but you're also having a conversation, so you do stuff like, oh, I'm bringing up the biblical story of Ruth. I don't know much about Ruth. I only included it in the episode to make a bad joke about Star Wars. The Phantom Menace, and so I made a comment about it. I don't know,
I think she's got something to do with Moses. She does not, And all of the Bible people got onto me for that one, and I'm sorry.
How big a part of your audience is the Bible people.
A shockingly large number of Well, I think it's because we have a lot of like ex vangelicals in the audience, like a lot of people who were raised evangelical and then got better.
I'm just gonna throw this out there. That wasn't an error. That was a fucking dork trap, and they all fell into it.
They felt the same cannot be said for my heinous and unforgivable comments about the March of Dimes because I made a comment that like, I don't know, I guess it's probably a cancer charity, and then a bunch of people popped in and be like, no, it's for this, and then other people were like, actually, when Oprah was a kid, it didn't do that. It was for a completely different thing. So we're all wrong, although again it had nothing to do with cancer. So I was wrongest,
but like you guys were wrong too. Most of you who criticized me because it wasn't about that then, so fuck you. I love you. I'm sorry.
What is it for?
It's it's right now. I think it's for like 's's let's look up the march at times, let's let's get it right. Babies, Yeah, immature babies. But it was like about polio before that and.
Trying to correct Robert.
That is my mother.
Improved the health of mothers and babies, right, Robert.
Robert is never wrong, He's perfect.
Yeah, I never like say stuff during Like one of the things you learn about yourself during doing this is like how often in daily conversation and we all do this, you just like say things that are a part of your understanding of the world that are not right, because that's like life. We all pick up a bunch of bullshit, like the number of time.
I just don't think you should have to apologize.
Right now, I take that burden from you.
I'm sorry saying Robert, but he's innocent.
All I'm saying is record everything you've ever you ever say in a single day of conversations with people, and then run them by a fact checker, and you will be amazed at how much of like the load bearing fat pillars of your reality are things you absolutely believe without thinking that are not true. It's amazing.
It's the worst part of being a podcaster is like having a public record of stupid shit that you thought, or if you're me, shit that you thought was pronounced one way and it's put another way.
The pronunciation like, So for this episode, I spent almost three hours looking at Oprah's uh one of her charity's tax returns. None of that made it end of the episode turned out not to be interesting. But you know what I didn't remember to do was look up whether or not Ruth had anything to fucking do with Moses, Like, I just don't.
I think you just you're you're doing great, Pal.
I've fail to see how this is a problem.
I think.
Also, I just wanted to jump in March of Dimes previous Polio charity.
The way things are going, they might need to go back. I know.
That's that's again. I love Polio. And I feel like because we got a lot of my favorite writers, Robert, I think.
We're fifty two pages.
Okay, well let's get into this. So when we last left off, Oprah had gotten her first radio gig with a radio DJ who was surprisingly not problematic John Heidelberg. People online have been pointing out other stuff about him apparently, fine, So congratulations John Heidelberg. When we're talking about DJs being problematic, I'm talking about old timey radio DJs, because if you look into the history of like very famous old timey radio DJs, not a lot of them were great people.
But apparently John was so good for you, John Heidelberg, you went our behind the Bastard's Award for being a sex best as a DJ in the nineteen seventies. You're the only person who's won that award, by the way.
Yeah, that's got to be a club of one.
Yeah, that is a club of You are the loneliest man in history. So the next several years of Oprah's life involved a pretty boring time in college. We're not going to get into it, but she starts doing beauty contests, and she's very good at beauty contests. One of the biggest moments in her early life is she wins the miss Fire Prevention contest. Now, I know what you're all saying, what the fuck is miss fire prevention? And to understand this, you have to know that back in the nineteen seventies,
everything was flammable. People only wore petroleum products, Every couch was made out of petroleum products, and everyone fell asleep with a lit cigarette in their mouth, so everything and everyone was constantly on fire. Yeah, so this was a
real problem. Also, everyone was on binzos, so you would it was like every week in your neighborhood either a drunk day labor like either either the husband would come home from like his work in a fucking law factory and pass out drunk with a cigarette in his mouth and wipe out the entire family, or the housewife would take too many benzos and pass out with a lit cigarette in her mouth and wipe out the whole family.
But either whatever was happening, fire was killing absolutely everyone, and so we were like, we have to find the hottest person in order to represent not burning your family to death because you fell asleep with a lit cigarette in your mouth, and Oprah was that person. Isn't that nice.
Fun fact about that.
That's why we have like flame retardant couches now, because the cigarette industry was like, we can't keep getting popped for.
That were possibility.
We're fine with killing people so many other ways, but all these house fires are really cutting into our business.
Please tell me the first fire retarded couches were just made of asbestos.
It probably will. God, I'll have to go for a nice asbestus couch to know that I'm both like sitting down on the couch to watch horrible news happen and also shortening my time on this earth. Beautiful. Oprah was the first black woman to win the Miss Fire Prevention contest, and that's great. During questioning by a panel of judges, she said that she wanted to be a journalist like
Barbara Walters. She was asked what she would do if she was given a million dollars, and everyone else in the contest expressed kind of like, I'll help the poor, I'll help my family, whereas Oprah just admitted I would spend, spend, spend, I'd just be a spending fool.
Awesome, Actually love that.
You better respect that. Look, I grew up poor as shit. I would spend it.
Now.
This was definitely a legitimate win Miss Fire Prevention. However, her next big contest win, the Miss Black Nashville contest,
was a little bit shadier. Everyone involved about it seems to agree that another girl, Maud had been a better contestant, but Oprah shocked everyone by winning, and the motor of the event would later claim that several people complained to him, and so he did a recount of the votes and found out that Maud had in fact been the rightful winner, but her name had gotten switched with Oprah's by somebody
for unknown reasons. Now we don't know what happened. Some people have theorized Oprah set the whole thing up somehow. I think there's at least an equally good probability based on just like the vibes. I get that the promoter of the event kind of had a weird thing for Oprah. His name was Gordon El Greco Brown, and I don't trust that name. I just don't trust that name like that that is the name of like a used car dealer from fucking Encina who also happens to be a
neo Nazi. I'm not saying that's Gordon Ell Greco Brown. I'm just saying that's the name Gordon O. That's what that conjures, Gordon El like the Greco Brown Elco.
So he's Gordon Gecko L Brown.
Yeah, Yeah, that that man has so many different opinions on the various coke dealers in his area that he has to keep track of them in a notebook. Anyway, when Oprah was notified, I'm not saying that about the literal. I'm not slandering the actual man. I'm just saying that's how his name sounds. Anyway. Oprah gets notified of this error that Maud really won, and she says like, well, fuck it, you guys gave me the award. I'm not
giving it back. In Kitty Kelly's kind of mean biography, a lot is made about the fact that Oprah like doesn't give this up and I don't know, I don't really care, like you handed her the award, so she's not wrong to be like, fuck you, guys. Oprah goes to Tennessee State University, or TSU, which is a black college, but she doesn't go to the more prestigious in nearby Fisk University, known locally as the Black Harvard. I think this is just a matter of expense. Oprah seems to
be insecure about this. Later, she spends her social time hanging out at FISK. Her dad is like, look, you know I could afford to send her to TSU. And so I did. I will say, because Kitty Kelly makes a lot about like, yeah, Oprah couldn't get into the good school, she couldn't hack it. I've read like from the anecdotes we get about TSU, it doesn't sound great. There's a good one from one of her professors, doctor W. D. Cox, that and this, this is what this guy, doctor Cox,
this actual professor says later about teaching Oprah. And I think he thinks this makes him sound funny. During our stay in the city, a girl was reported raped on the second floor. I told a lie on Oprah. If Oprah had known about the rape, she'd have shouted you who I'm up here. Oprah didn't take too kindly to that joke. She was quite provoked. Do you guys catch that? He says a girl got raped? And I said, hey, Oprah,
you would like that. That's the talking about this decades later, being like, can you believe she didn't find it funny? That's nuts, that's insane.
Somebody laughed at him though, and he that like charged that shit.
Maybe or the whole like, I don't know what things you're like in the seventies.
Laugh at men's jokes that aren't funny.
Just you should get fired, period.
Yeah.
The whole joke is I bet you'd like get it like that's yeah, wild stuff.
You want to me that he like even in retelling that he's like and she didn't even find it funny.
She wasn't. Can you believe it?
He describes it as enjoying a little foolishness at Oprah's expense. He's still going, that's not what that is, a little foolish should be like, you know, talking about I don't know the fact that she's obviously wants to be a star, making a little bit of joke about how she likes attention, not like that.
This is not yeah, like and this this dude has been holding onto that joke.
For Kitty Kelly in twenty ten ten Jesus Christ, Oh you just know, like just I'm guessing based on his age that like she goes to see him in an old folks home and like his fucking kids come in, They're like, oh no, get her out of here. We can't let dad be talking to a journalist like, oh my god, so Oprah. The big standout detail from her college years is she plays Coretta Scott King in a local production of the Tragedy of Martin Luther King Junior.
And the main reason this is relevant is that a reviewer for the school paper reviews this play by saying, Martin Luther King murdered twice? I do love how bit you that is?
That's good?
Like shit? Imagine because he had to have sat with that review title just being like, I can't say this, can I?
I'm so glad for.
I'm doing it. Near the end of nineteen seventy two, oh forgets her first TV gig when her boss at WVOL called a local TV station WTVFTV and told them that he had a girl who was interested in broadcasting. This was during a period where the FCC had just introduced diversity requirements for on air talent, and Oprah was hired quickly. She generally describes this as an affirmative action. Hire Again, the guy you hires her is like, no, she was the best qualified candidate, you know, I don't
know either way. It doesn't really matter because this proves to be a very good hiring decision. The truth Oprah was a skilled performer and had experienced both on the radio and as a pageant winner. That said, she was hired to be a journalist, which she had no experience doing, and she winds up reporting on city Hall, she cheerfully admitted. As soon as she starts the job, she tells all her coworkers, I lied during my interview. I don't know how to do this job. Like her first day, she
tells the crew, I don't know what I'm doing. Please help me because, like I told the director, I understood how to do this job. And it's a remark. It's a mark of her charisma that everyone on the crew's like, well, okay, that's kind of nice.
Damn yeah, Like what a it's not even a hail Mary, But what do you like? Like high variants, play the Hey, by the way, what's up?
How do you do this job?
I mean that is how like entertainment works, right, Like everyone I know in this industry has a story of like, yeah, I talked myself into a room that I probably didn't have the right to be in and then it worked hard.
Yes, the b side of admitting yeah, I would say a lot.
Less yeah, I one of the Again, we're about to get into all of the horrible things Oprah has been involved in. But one thing that I do consistently admire about her is that she doesn't dress up this aspect of her life. She's like, yeah, man, I lied, sheeated and stolen until I could be on TV. You know, is everyone who gets famous on DV right, Like, yeah, I.
Got my first podcast job lying about knowing final cut pro and then I had to like go on learn how to use pro.
Yes, that's how. Look, kids, if you're looking at getting entertained into entertainment, get good at lying, because that's the job Oprah experienced. A This is an uncomfortable transition, but there are a lot of racism on the job. A large part of it was like she's the first black on air talent that they have.
Uh.
She winds up interviewing a lot of people who like they see a black journalist and just start calling her slurs to her face. She won awards though she's very ambitious. Her colleagues. That's the primary thing her colleagues from this period remember about her is that Oprah is a climber. She is somebody who is like crawling up to the top.
Right.
At one point, she takes over for a producer who, like she gets on set, he clearly doesn't know what he's doing for this Black History Week presentation, and she directs the entire segment herself. She is also, by everyone's admission, doing Hella drugs during this period, although everyone at the TV station is doing Hella drugs, this is a local TV station in the seventies. I want to read a paragraph from the book Oprah, a biography based on a
conversation with her former colleague Patty Outlaw. It was just nuts working at that station. Drugs, drugs, drugs all the time, drugs all over the place. They were even selling window panes of LSD in the hall. Drugs were so prevalent that the new staff gave Vic Mason, Oprah's co anchor, a coke spoon as a gift. Chris and I look the other way, said Jimmy Norton, who confirmed that station management removed a vending machine once they discovered it had
been rigged to dispense marijuana. That sounds pretty cool.
Oh my god, in Chicago, where was this?
Yeah? No, no, No, they're not even in I think they're Yeah, they're in Nashville, Stone, Nashville. Yeah, they're in Nashville. Still, she does move up to the big leagues pretty quickly, but she doesn't go straight to Chicago. After a few
years in Nashville, she gets a job in Baltimore. She's not really happy there, even though this is a big step up Baltimore obviously being a bigger city, because she feels like she's on a ticking timer right but like by the time, her attitude is like, by the time I'm twenty four, I have to be where I want to be because then I'm like too old and washed up, which you know, that's the way a lot of people, that's the way TV is for a lot of women aligently,
but like it's certainly not going to be that way for Oprah. Baltimore turns out to be a disaster though. The longtime anchorman for the station, who she has made to be like the co anchor, hates her and she's not really experienced enough, like he's been doing it for decades. She doesn't really know what she's doing yet, so she very quickly gets demoted, but she's still on contract. So it's one of those things where she's getting a lot of money, but she's basically not doing the job that
she got hired to do. She's instead getting all these terrible little human interest stories that she considers beneath her. So this is a frustrating period, but her saving grace is always her ambition. Denied itansmen at the station, she starts performing at churches, schools in different black community spaces,
building a fan base locally the hard way. She also has a series of interracial relationships while she is working at the station, which is noteworthy because that is not a common thing at the time, and the fact that she is dating white guys in her personal life becomes public news. A bunch of local white radio DJs make it like a reoccurring thing that they talk about on
the air, like Oprah is dating. I don't just bring that up to be like wow, and like it's like no, no, no, this is like she has to deal with this being part of like local news.
Can I say something because I do think it highlights how unequal the playing fields are for black women in media. I mean black women across the spectrum of any profession, but like like local radio DJs, so people who ostensibly are also colleagues are also in media, making it a joke segment about who she is dating romantically privately like that having to contend with that on top of having to do your job with all these eyes on you. I mean like it's completely ridiculous.
Yeah, yeah, like it's nuts and like, for an example of how fucking insane it is, one of these local radio DJs described she's dating like a Jewish reporter right who works at a competing station. One of these guys on the radio describes their relationship as Omar Sharif is dating aunt Jemima Jesus Jesus Christ. Oh boy, you should just explode when you say something like that.
God.
So, she had always been something of a binge eater, largely as a response to stress, and as is probably not surprising, the stress of like being in the public eye and having all of this shit about you be public discussion causes that to be even more of a problem. In nineteen seventy seven, she starts paying a diet doctor to help her drop weight for the first time, and she starts attending overreaders anonymous courses. Sure of stress and starving herself causes her hair to fall out, or at
least that's one story. Oprah later is going to insist that she lost her hair because executives at the station demanded that she go to New York for a French hairdresser to quote make me a Puerto Rican by bleaching her skin and changing her hair. I don't know. Yeah, Like, because you get these two different versions of how she loses her hair, it's very hard to say what the truth is. The news producer is like the company didn't
have the budget to send her to New York. She also claims that the former news director tries to get her to change her name to Susie. He denies this. I don't know, it's all a little muddled. It doesn't I don't know how much like where the truth lies here super matters, Right, There's definitely some stuff that she's like exaggerating, but she's also literally people are talking about her relationships on the air in a very racist way.
So like, I don't know, I feel like you get the general gist, which is that she is in an incredibly stressful and unfair situation here at work.
Yeah yeah, Like the public record is like even if she's straight up lying about literally is yeah like here say like who cares?
Like yeah, right right, Like that's kind of where I
land on this. That said, I will say this station allows her to work her way like that she is not like locked out of moving back up, and she works her way back up to reporting the news over the next couple of years in Baltimore, and in fact, she rebuilds her reputation with her bosses well enough that nineteen seventy seven, the new station manager, William Baker, gives her the big break that is going to lead her to the position of kind of impossible wealth and cultural
power that she's going to attain. He had been brought on to the station after creating in another station a morning talk show called Morning Exchange, and his job was
to do the same thing for Baltimore. Right, morning shows are a new concept, like this is this is the guy playing a video game while ranting about politics on a stream of nineteen seventy seven is like people waking up in the morning to see one to two charming, handsome people talk about bullshit while you like, get the kid's breakfasts ready.
Right.
The hottest new thing in entertainment. Phil Donahue had kind of helped to kick off the trend of like talk shows in nineteen sixty eight, and his show, which was just named Donahue, had become like the most popular thing on television. Morning shows were a refinement of this idea. Right, you generally have a male host and a female co host, and this is how you lock in viewers who are either getting ready for work or like stay at home
moms starting their day. Baker's wife, Jean Marie, was the one who recommended Oprah to be the female co host of this new morning show. Apparently at some sort of like work event, she sees Winfrey and she like says to her husband, that's your host. And Baker listens to his wife, which proves to be a wise decision because for whatever I mean, there's a number of reasons, but tens of millions of American women feel the exact same way that the first time they see Oprah, like, oh yeah,
this is somebody I want to watch every morning. Right, So Jean Marie was definitely keyed into something there. Oprah does not like that she's been picked for this job. She's horrified at first, actually, because in her attitude, she
sees this as another demotion. Right, she had been a co anchor and then kicked down to doing these like human interest kind of like, oh, you know there's a new you know, it's the kind of stuff they make fun of an anchorman, right, there's like a new puppy parade or some bullshit, and she's like that, that's this, This is like fluff. I want to be doing like I think that the I want to be Barbara Walters.
I want to be doing something more hard nosed. Part of what discussed her is that a big fit thing on this morning show is dialing for dollars, which is a way that new stations would keep people watching because you don't want anyone to switch to another channel if they get bored for a second. So you have this thing where periodically throughout the day people submit their phone numbers to the station and we randomly Oprah draws one out of a bowl and the station will just send
money to that person. Yeah, that's how they and you have to be watching constantly to know if your number gets picked. Like that's literally how they They're like bribing people, please keep watching the show.
I mean, gambling has never not been the underlying driver of everything.
All of American society. Yes, yes, this whole country's one big roulette wheel. And Oprah didn't want to be the creupier. It's a croupier for Roulette, is that how you say it?
It is about to get another people being like, actually, you said it wrong, Robert.
It's this.
I'm sorry. All of the people who would correct me on that will die if they spend more than eleven seconds away from a slot machine. Those are life support systems for a chunk of the populace.
I think Roulette is also a croupier, but I don't know.
I think I got it, I don't know. I don't care. I like the word creupia, speaking of gambling, gamble on whether or not these products actually do what they say they are they do probably, And we're back. So Oprah's got this job offer to host this morning show, and she's like, this sounds like death right, This sounds like the end of my career. Like you're trying to fob me off on this thing, and I will be locked into this, you know, doing something nobody respects for the
rest of my life. The thing that she tells Baker is I'm a news person. I don't want to do a talk show. Then she films her first episode and her mind completely changed. The way she describes this is as soon as she sits down and makes an episode of the Morning Show. Her opinion on it changes on a dime. And the reason why is because she gets to hang out with famous people and she's like, oh wait oh, and I'm going to read a quote now from the People Profiles biography of Oprah. This she told
herself is heaven. She recalled, I interviewed Benny from All My Children and the Carvel ice cream Man, and thought, heaven because you get to say whatever you feel. You truly get to be yourself. Within a year, people are talking, which is the Morning Show was beating Donahue in Baltimore, the only show in America to do so. Winfrey would never read another headline. The minute that first show was over, she told good Housekeeping, I thought, thank god, I found
what I was meant to do. It was like breathing for me. And that's like very interesting to me because it's hard to get across like Donahue is. He's like the mister Beast of his era, if you'll forgive me from trying to like make he is like the biggest guy on on daytime TV, and Oprah is the like, this is the only local show that beats Donahue anywhere in the United States, and it's due to the fact that Oprah is on it right and she has this
absolutely unique electric connection with her audience. This is recognized by people with money and television, and things start to move very fast for Oprah after this point, as Pel scholar Amanda Colin writes in her thesis paper on it was role in American culture. In nineteen eighty four, Oprah moved to Chicago, Illinois to host wlstv's morning talk show Am Chicago, which became the number one local talk show, surpassing ratings for the most popular show at the time,
Donahue just one month after she began. The show where national syndication in nineteen eighty six, becoming the highest rated talk show in television history. In nineteen eighty eight, Oprah established Harpo Oprah Backwards Studios, a production facility in Chicago, making her the third woman in the American entertainment industry after Mary Pickford and Lucille Ball, to own her own studio. AM Chicago became the Oprah Winfrey Show and remained the
number one talk show for twenty consecutive seasons. So this is like a very rapid explosion in popularity. She goes from getting the show to it becoming number one, to
it being entirely reframed to being just around Oprah. And she establishes a production company and gets like a significant degree of ownership in her own show, which is like, this is one of the things that's most interesting about Oprah is, especially for somebody who was raised without any access to money, the sheer degree of like business savvy that she has the fact that she owns a large piece of everything she's involved in and eventually owns all of it, right, Like she is not like she she
kind of has this, probably because of how she got fucked over with that first job. This understanding that like, if I don't own it, it's not worth shit to me, right anyway, Oprah.
So I just.
Realize something crazy, which is that Oprah, the character that Oprah plays in The Color Purple, she's married to a character named Harpo.
Really, It's like, isn't that crazy?
Because I started rewatching it, but I'm gonna be honest, I didn't finish it, uh because I was tired. Harpo is name.
She's married to a character named Harpo in the movie. That's why I doesn't realize that that. It's also the name of her, it's also her name backward.
Yeah, uh huh Yeavy. That's I wonder that has to do a beit because she already had harpo the studio. At that point, we're gonna talk a little bit about the color purple, and Steven Spielberg comes in. I don't know if he's a hero. Well, he's not a hero. He's a weird kind of villain in this story. But we'll get to that. And that's that. I can't wait so for about a full generation after nineteen eighty four. Oprah's fame is a rocket ship. It just keeps going up and up and up. But what made her show
so special. Colan's argument is that she offered quote, despair disguised as entertainment. In other words, she sensationalized and repackaged human suffering for an audience. Quote. When Oprah came on the scene, she mirrored this Donahue formula, but with a unique twist of her own. She, unlike Donahue, revealed her own personal struggles and stressed to self help mantra. The audience loved it, and the Oprah Winfrey Show quickly surpassed
her predecessor's ratings. Commonly referred to as trash TV. Oprah transformed the talk show genre by turning trash into treasure. And that's kind of she starts out and she is viewed as like trash. She's viewed as Jerry Springer right for a while, because she's doing that stuff. She's bringing on like I'm going to bring on a bunch of
single undred mothers who are fighting with their dads. I'm gonna bring on like some clansmen to have an argument with, like you know whoever on stage and like hope that there's a fistfighter some shit. She's doing pieces of that, But kind of what shifts the meaning of what she's doing is that, unlike a Springer or a Donna Hue kind of character, she's not standing back and being like,
look at this zoo I've brought to you. She's like opening up her own difficult, troubled past, which kind of adds this this like shot of vulnerability into the whole mixture that makes it unique and that you can see it immediate. That's why it stands out right, That's why she rises above these other figures so quickly, right.
The most Spring and Donaghue, you never got the impression. Their point of view was like, look at this shit, look at.
This crazy shit.
Yeah, yeah, like I have an opinion on this crazy shit.
I have an opinion. And also like like you people, like all you troubled people that I bring on the show, I also have had my troubles and I'm not too big to admit them, whereas like Cherry Springer would never like break down and cry in front of his audience.
Even's final thought, Oh god, yeah, I'm sure of course.
The one thing I remember from that show is when Haroldo got his nose broken by a chair. I think that was on Jerry. Was that on Heraldo or Jerry? I thought it was.
I think it was that might have been Heraldo.
Is that just on Herald? Whatever the is? Rivera got his nose broken by a chair. Everybody never forget.
But I think your point about like this setting Oprah apart, I think it really is a testament to how her troubled background really is something that she draws from and is able to like like that's I think that is the secret sauce of what made this connect in a different way.
Yeah, because it's like we're taught it's the same kind of like quote unquote trash, but there's less of a voyeuristic attitude because, like anytime it starts to lean too much, Oprah will drop some sort of anecdote about her own background and you're like, oh, okay, so she's really she's on the same level as us, right, which she's not, but that's how it feels to the viewer at least. The most significant moment for her career in this period came right after she moved to Chicago to start The
Oprah Winfrey Show. On Thursday, December fifth, nineteen eighty five, at nine AM, Oprah started her morning show by bringing on a young white abuse victim named LORII. She opened up by reading some statistics about sexual abuse, namely that one in three women in the United States had experienced it, and then asked, Laurie, your father started out fondling you. When did it lead to something other than fondling? She pressed with more and more detailed questions, asking what did
he say to you, how did he tell you? What did he tell you? And this is all very uncomfortable to see on TV right, and even especially like reading the transcript, it's there's an element of it that seems a little bit exploitive, kind of constantly pushing for those details in front of an audience that said it. Also, this is kind of how interviews work. It's just usually when journalists interview people about these kind of experiences, you
don't get the direct interview transcript. You get an article where they've kind of taken out the details but also kind of softened aspects of it so that it doesn't feel that uncomfortable. Oprah's kind of giving you the raw feed, and seeing something like this, which is normally a private process rendered as public entertainment, is kind of a new thing.
And particularly what's new about it is that because of the way Oprah does this, rather than people feeling like, oh, she's kind of exploding this woman, people from the audience start to join in spontaneously sharing their own stories of sexual abuse as children. People in the audience start breaking down into tears, and then Oprah starts talking about her own sexual abuse, telling everyone the fact that I had all these unfortunate experiences permeates my life and I'm gonna
quote from Kitty Kelly's book here. 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 shameful secret. And nothing like this had ever happened on
daytime TV. There had certainly been like people talking about sexual abuse, but the fact that an episode interviewing a survivor would lead to both members of the audience breaking down and sharing their own stories and then the host doing it, that's a totally novel thing, right, Like that has never happened before on television, and it creates a firestorm.
The fact that Oprah does this on air becomes national and then international news, and it is people like the people running the station are not happy, Like the actual executive is the station are like this is supposed to be a happy morning show. This is this is like this is like for people to like watch what they're drinking? What the what the hell is going on here?
Right?
Like?
Why why are we having stories of child sexual abuse? But the ratings are off the charts. It's one of those things where she both gets in trouble with the people running the station and also this makes her too big to fail, Like this is this, this is It's impossible to overstate what a massive moment this is for both television as a medium and also for Oprah's career.
Yeah it's I mean, it's there's also just that yeah, like what a I guessed risk or like thank god, it's a.
Huge risk because like if the ratings had like her her, the people running the station are not happy if the ratings had not been there, like she could have gotten
fired for this. And it's also there's it's such a complicated thing to parse out because one thing she's doing is this is one of the very first times and a public space with this much exposure, that you have victims of rape talking about it, not in a way that's mediated by psychiatrists or law enforcement or anything like that, but is just like survivors talking about it.
Right.
And at the same time, Oprah very sees the reaction to this, sees how well it does, and her immediate takeaway is like sex cells, we need all of the sex episodes, every kind of sex, not just like this where people are talking about you know their trauma, but like, whatever we can get that involves sex, that's what's going to make this show keep it on top, right, So, like, after this episode she starts Invite. She invites a bunch of female porn stars on to talk about the penises
of her post stars of their co stars. That episode gets a thirty percent share of the Chicago audience and provokes even more news articles about Oprah because people are now like, is this smut? Like how do we talk about what she's doing? Nobody's done anything like this before, and a lot of the coverage is super critical, super like this is incredibly irresponsible. People shouldn't be doing this.
But it all just drives viewers right more. And the more stuff that she puts out there that gets people shocked and like angry or you know, titillated, the more people watch her show. When reporters interviewer about this, Oprah tells them, my mandate is to win, admitting that her overriding purpose and bringing victims of sexual violence and sex workers onto her show is to draw eyeballs. Kitty Kelly quotes her former producer, Deborah de Meo, paraphrasing the way
Oprah pitched show ideas to her team. I'd love to get a priest to talk about sex. 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.
I love how Like that's a life like pretty twisted over was like I want the like free, I want some freaky d in here.
Find me a priest who's fucking some lady named Carolyn and get her on, get him on. Oh man. So yeah, that's like I don't even you can, I guess moralize that however you want. It's so fascinating that it goes from I have like shared my own horrible experience and people connected with that, to like, so we got to get some priest who's fucking a lady on this show right where that's where this guy has to continue going.
You know. It is also weird to conclu not weird, but like I mean, I guess like more media savvy than I am to conclude from that first show that sex cells rather than like vulnerability cells or authenticity cells or whatever.
But also all of them sell because her vulnerability and authenticity keeps her piet. It's a huge part of her ongoing popularity. But so is the sex, So is the really sleazy stuff. They never stop doing that, right, I guess the answer is all of it. And Oprah has very good instincts, you know, wherever we want to land morally on what she's doing here. This shit works now. It is worth noting that she is depicted in the media.
This is very hard for like, I had trouble grasping this because by the time I was aware of Oprah, she had such a different like reputation in the eighties. She in late seventies and eighties, She's Jerry Springer right. She is not a respectable media figure to a lot of people. That is not how she's talked about to
a lot of people around this time. An article in McCall's magazine on the Oprah Winfrey Show described what it did it best as quote get him in the gut show topics, sexual disorders, battered wise, self mutilation, overweight people and the people who hate them, you know, all that kind of stuff. Oprah often would say, nothing is taboo, and she meant it. Whinfrey's own struggles with weight loss and gain quickly became a central part of the show, as well, we open this series with the infamous wagon
of fat incident from nineteen eighty or ninety eight. That was gross and bad, but it's also worth noting if you want to put that into the context, like how we could get to something that gross. It comes after a decade of constant public obsession with every pound Oprah lost or gained. And this is where we're gonna talk
about the color purple again. So as I've noted, Oprah struggles with you know, binge eating, with her body self image from adolescence on like a lot of us, like maybe everybody, she has a habit of stress eating and was noted by co workers to binge to really uncomfortable levels during parties and the like. When she becomes this TV star in the mid eighties, people start talking about this, like it becomes both in gossip columns and shit like
the fucking you know, National Inquirer and stuff. There's like articles about, you know, stories of Oprah and eating and whatnot. And she kind of pivots on this to become radically open to her audience about her dieting and her struggles with weight gain. Now this helps drive her popularity, but it's also it both is in part a reaction to and also helps lead to ship like this nineteen eighty five appearance on the Tonight Show with Joan Rivers, which
I'm gonna play for you now. This is one of the most uncomfortable things I've seen on television.
Oh my god, Joan was such a bit. I can't wait to see. This is so bad. I mean, I like Loki, love her, but like, let's be real.
Oh yeah, yeah, this is this is not great. As you went into beauty contest, they tell me your beauty contest win us.
Yeah, I'm those fifty pounds ago or so, yeah, but.
So what'd you win?
Well?
I wont them as fire prevention contest?
Was that a who?
What fire prevention to?
Has you gained the weight?
I ate a lot because.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
No, you said fifty pounds.
You shouldn't let that.
Happen to you, very Jody.
You know what, No, I don't want to hear let me tell you that, pretty girl, are you single?
You must lose the weight.
I'm going to you know what we are now am Chicago. In Chicago, we're starting a diet with Oprah Grace. Yes, in conjunction with a tribute so that I have been put under pressure to finally do it.
I am trying to lose five pounds.
Will you know how to laugh with me in March when I'm back and you lose fifteen, I'll lose five. But well, listen, that's you. I'll do I'll keep these and I'm not.
I'm fer I'll do it.
If you do it, you will.
Yeah, it's a deal.
It's a deal. It's a deal.
Five pounding it.
Grace.
Yes, that's great, that's great, that's great.
I'm excited about it though, because I've gone up and down and up, and I've been on every diet. If you tried the banana, weeni and egg diet, you might know a banana weening and egg? Where eat a banana, a weeni and egg? And I've done the pickles and peanut butter diet. I just eat cookies.
But I only eat like eight hundred callies with the cookies. I forget you do it that way?
Oh yeah. I saw nel Carter on her last night who'd lost Yes, but you couldn't tell. She's still very chubby. She just lose more. You lose more, well, I think wall people go oh I'm not people and help friends that die truth to say, you are still a pig?
Okay, well, why you are eating disorders so rampant? Is it because these are our parents? Effectively?
Oh I gotta say though, like that was not as this is.
That was not as bad as I thought it was going to be.
It's people talk to bigger people, Like people feel totally comfortable saying shit like this two people's faces and they don't even think twice about it.
It says like totally how people talk.
Part of what you're seeing there is like Oprah being a professional, because when she describes this moment, she's like, yeah, like I was not happy, like this was that, Like the the laughing and stuff was all faked. I was very unhappy that we were having this conversation, right like obviously yeah, no, It's like I can't believe the kind
of shit that you'd saying there. It was made like this whole situation was made worse at the time because like, not long after this, while she is like doing this very famous publicized diet, it gets announced on the Joan Rivers Show. Like the first big thing she does after this is she sent to Ethiopia to report on Chicago's efforts to help the famine. So the story is simultaneously Oprah trying to lose thirty pounds and Oprah reporting on
a famine and the Ethiopia not great vibes. One of her colleagues asks like, hey, is this kind of gross? And Oprah applies, You're right, it's sick, isn't it?
It is sick.
It is kind of sick.
Now.
One fair critique of these episodes is that we're not going to go into super clinical detail about all of the different fad diets and dangerous weight loss missinformation that comes out of the Oprah Winfrey Show. Part of why is because the podcast maintenance Face has done a ton of that, so you can check all of that out. I think part of it is just that, like you get the idea here, right, It's both important to note that, like Oprah like that that clip there, there's a lot
of pushing on everyone listening to that. Feel bad about your body, be ashamed if you've gained weight, embrace dangerous strategies to lose it. Oprah has a lot, and Oprah will admit it today, a lot of guilt and spreading that. But also she is in such a unique position where like, I don't know if there's ever been a single person that so many Americans have been so obsessed with their body size. Like it's kind of hard not to not for that to affect you in a bad way. Like
we really were insane about Oprah. Yeah, I don't know what else to say about that. I will say in order to kind of point out the way in which people talked about her. One of the most prominent TV critics of the day, Richard Blackwell, described Oprah as bumpy, frumpy, and downright lumpy on the cover of TV Guide. Jesus So, right around the time this is all happening, Oprah is on the Tonight Show. Like right around when she's on the Tonight Show, she is auditioning for a role in
the color Purple. After the episode, where again this is not as friendly a situation as it appears on the air, she's very unhappy about this. She's stress each she gave more weight, and then she checks herself into a fat farm, an emergency weight loss boot camp type program to lose
the weight. Steven Spielberg, who had directed the movie, finds out and he calls Oprah and Spielberg says, I hear you're at a fat farm, you lose a pound, you could lose this part, she's like, she's fucked no matter what.
I don't love anybody like micromanaging somebody else's weight.
But yeah.
The color Purple is based on a novel by Alice Walker and the character she was portraying, like, I like, I get it's not something I think he should have said, but I get where he's coming from.
It's it's yeah, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know where I should. Yeah, yeah, it's uncomfortable.
Does Oprah talk about like like not not like to well, yeah, I mean, I guess what I'm about to say is gonna sound victim. But I'm just caring because part of the like this like like attention to her weight. She even if it was like going to happen anyway, she did profit from like it was like part of the like editorial strategy of her show, right, Like, does she talk about leaning in on that?
She She hugely leans in right like she does? She does. She in part she makes the specifics of like how much she's gaining or how much she is losing and what diet she is doing. Part of the show. A lot of the money that comes in as a result of diet advice. She has deals and gets millions and millions from groups like weight Watchers, right pushing a lot of different diets she gets paid and also just like
fills airtime and makes money that way. Putting on different diet experts and diet books and a lot of that stuff is extremely dangerous. It is both she is being victimized by the whole media environment and also profiting on that by pushing the same kind of poison on everyone else. Right like that That's what's happening here, right like it is a story of both victimization and profiting off of
putting some pretty toxic and oprah. You know, the thing she's doing right now is at least copying to some of that right now, copying to some of that while also getting money from weight Watchers. So, I don't know, I don't know where we want to put that out.
The one thing I am curious about is when we as a culture made the transition from saying weenies to hot dogs.
A hot dog based diet today which you should never have had a hot dog based diet.
Yeah, I guess I guess not.
You would know. Yeah. Anyway, so she gives up after or at least the way that Oprah tells the story. After Spielberg's like, if you lose a pound, you could lose this part, Oprah does like fuck it and gives up on getting the role and keeps the role, and yeah, she winds up doing very well. She gets like massively, you know. Like one of the interesting things about Oprah is she could have had just a whole career as
a major Hollywood star. Like she just decides to keep being Oprah Winfrey because that turns out to be much better for her than being like a movie star. But she's very like has a very successful acting career starting out.
Oh, I mean Color Purple is like it is a classic. It's probably the movie I have seen the most times in my life. Like it is like a like the way that she was in that movie, it was a revelation, like even thinking about it now, as good as like Whoopi Goldberg is in that movie and Danny Glover is in that movie. Danny is the standout character. Even so, probably her big scene in the Color Purple is when she gives the speech to Seeley all my life. I
had to fight. If you've heard that Kendrick Lamar song, all right, that's the beginning of that song comes from. Is Oprah's big scene in that movie? Like that movie, the way it shifted the culture we like really cannot be overstated.
Yeah. Yeah, And it's so fascinating to me that like that would be for most people, like, oh shit, I've made it. I've like been in this highly praised Hollywood. You know, that's the rest of my life. Is I'm going to be in movies. Oprah's like, no, no, I know a better way to get really famous. So while this is going on, her movie career is starting, Oprah is continuing to you know, be trash TV. Right, that's
really this era. And sex is not the only thing that she finds out that sells racism gets people to tune in. So during Black History Month in the eighties, Oprah started booking KKK members to show up wearing sheets and hoods. Intermittently, she would book guests with something important to say too, like when she did the Women with Sexual Disorders episode and talk to a woman who had
never orgasmed. Oprah brought in a sex surrogate to coach her on air, which elicit a flood of complaints, as Kitty Kelly documents, 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 experienced sexual pleasures, said Oprah. We had six hundred and sixty and thirty three calls for women yesterday after the show on the computer.
We made lots of women feel there, not alone. And this is what makes especially in this era, it's always back and forth, right, because there's this mix of like, oh, that's some of the grossest TV I've heard about, and like, oh, you're really pushing out some very unhealthy attitudes towards dieting
into society. And also it's incredibly important for people to know about stuff like sexual dysfunction and that there's like coaching for that, and to not feel ashamed, like this is a thing that we can talk about in public. And Oprah's always so much of both of those things.
That said, when for every episode like this, you'd get where it's like, yeah, I'm glad someone in the fucking eighties was talking about like sexual dysfunction and the fact that there are treatments available that you can and should seek you. So right from that to Oprah being like, also, the devil is coming for your children, and this is going to get us onto one of my favorite subjects, how Oprah Winfrey helped start the Satanic Panic? But first, ah, yes,
but first you know who else is the devil? But like the sexy devil, Like the devil when he's played by that guy who also played the President in the Command and conquer Red Alert too. You know that guy.
I'm just nodding. I'm just nodding.
Everyone's just nodding. Nobody else remembers that guy. He played the devil once. Look him up. We're back. Four people are so happy I just made that reference. Everyone else has stopped listening forever. So Satanic Panic. In nineteen eighty nine, a Canadian psychiatrist and con man named Lawrence Pasder wrote a book about his patient, who he later married, Michelle Smith, claiming he recovered her memories of participating and elaborate impossible
Satanic rituals while being abused for the devil's gain. This book, Michelle remembers, helped launch the Satanic Panic, a religious moral panic that ruined hundreds of lives and laid much of the groundwork for QAnon to take off today. We maybe don't get the Trump presidency without the Satanic panic. That was some necessary groundwork, right, You got to put in those load bearing pillars, and this is where that's coming from.
And Oprah helps get it off the ground. She brings Laurence and Michelle onto her show, along with several other prominent If you are a Satanic panic con person, right who is like I worship the Devil, I sacrificed babies, Oprah will let you say whatever to At this point, literally tens of millions of people are tuning into her show.
I want to start with a clip of a nineteen eighty six episode which wasn't about the Satanic Panic, but contained a sting for their upcoming episode on devil worshipers. And I want to it's just because you know, we talk. I throw to ads in a lot of you know, different ways here, but I got a bow to the master class here.
All right, we'll come back and we're going to talk about sex some more.
Back in a moment, the Devil.
The screen after she says that is just a picture of the devil on a TV screen holding his own tail, with the Thursday Victims of Satanic worship. I love that iconic coming next to the devil.
Oh my god.
Also, we're gonna talk about sex and more. We should have thrown to ads now, Sophie, Sorry, that would have been the way.
To do it.
Uh, next time, Bud, you got to.
Learn from the masters here. Now I'm gonna play or I'm gonna have Sophie play another clip. I think from closer to nineteen eighty nine or nineteen ninety. Most of Oprah's early shows are not preserved in a convenient way, So I did my best here.
Our next guest was used also in word shipping. The devil participated in human sacrifice, rituals, rituals, and cannibalism. She says her family has been involved in rituals for generations. She's currently an extensive therapy suffers from multiple personality disorder, meaning she's blocked out many of the terrifying and painful memories of her childhood. Rachel, who is also in disguise to protect her identity, you come from generations of ritualistic abuse.
Yes, my family is an extensive family tree, and they keep track of who's don In thousand and.
She's in disguise, good really yes, yeah, okay, okay, what's the disguise?
What's disgus like?
Is this there?
Isses?
Okay? Okay, yeah, the clark can her?
Yeah, she put on.
When she takes those glasses off, her family's not going to recognize the devil can't catch.
Her, sorry, presuming just was very.
Thrown off by them. That is funny, Okay.
In disguise, it's impossible to tell on her.
And I don't say this to shame her. I'm shaming the nineties. You can't tell a bad wig from normal hair.
In like nineteen you know you can't.
There's no way to do it.
But that brooch is long, that brooches something.
Yes, thousand who hasn't been involved and it's gone back who by seventeen hundred and so you were right. I was going into a family that believes in this.
And this is it. This is Does everyone else think it's a nice Jewish family from the outside? You appear to be a nice Jewish girl, definitely, and you all are worshiping the devil inside the home?
Right, there's other Jewish families across the country not just know.
Really, so.
I don't think I have to tell you why this is dangerous. That's a real bad thing to have twenty million people watching, like not great, Well, the Jews are secretly worshiping the devil.
Gee.
They might appear as like wholesome, normal family, but the hind closed doors.
So yeah, Oprah is literally just doing the blood libel on data TV, on the most popular talk show in the country. And we're going to continue here because it just gets I am shocked that this was allowed.
What kind of things went on in the family.
Well, there would be rituals in which babies would be sacrificed, and you would have to you.
Know babies, So are people who bread.
Babies in our family, no one would know about it. A lot of people were overweight, so you couldn't tell if they were pregnant or not.
Or they would.
Supposedly go away for a while and then come back. The other thing I want to point out, not all Jewish the sacrifice babies.
I mean, it's not kind. I heard of any Jewish people sacrifice some babies.
But anyway, so you.
Witnessed the sacrifice right when I was very young, I was forced to participate in that in which I had a sacrifice an infant, and.
The purpose of sacrifices to what is to bring you what?
What are you sacrificing for?
For power?
Yeah, I have a lot of questions. First off, do we think it makes it better for Oprah to offhandy to be like I've never heard of Jewish people sacrificeing babies before anyway, tell me about these Jewish baby sacrifices. Oh god, I mean this does get closer to her future crimes.
Of like like clearly if even even if you want.
To remove like the any sort of like willful malice from Oprah, like a pretty shameful credulity is on display here, yes, Like.
Yeah, Like Mike, as a middling journalist, my first question would be, are you not worried you're gonna get arrested because you just admitted to murdering a baby on television?
Yeah?
You know that's a crime, right, But there's no statut limitations on killing a baby.
So I have a question.
Like, like what is the production of this, like behind the scenes, Like where do they find this?
Lady? Did they are just like, oh, you've got.
A story about killing babies and sacrifice, come on on the air or tell us about it?
You know, you get pieces of this. Nobody will directly say like we just we're full of shit, right, we just lied, you know, but but you can tell that what's happening. You get this, Like that previous clip rope was like I want a priest too, did this and this and this right, because it'll it'll sell an episode. She's like, I want someone talking about sacrificing babies. And you know what is exists in the world, and you
don't have to coach people on this. If you let enough people know, you can get on TV in front of twenty million people, if you talk about sacrificing a baby, there will be someone whose desperation for attention is so high that they will come on television and claim to have sacrificed a baby. That's the way people are.
That's the person you should give a platform for sure. That's a healthy person, well adjusted. Help them spread their message.
Yes, we love Oprah Winfrey doing things that are Again, as a guy who's read a lot of Nazi propaganda, almost indistinguishable from Nazi propaganda like this is specifically one of the major justifications of the Holocaust. Jews are abducting Christian babies and sacrificing them to the devil, like that is really bad to do. I really can't emphasize enough
how dangerous this thing is. And if you look at shit like in QAnon right where there's a like a third of the country believes that the Democratic Party are literally eating babies to gain everlasting youth, which like just look at Nancy Pelosi, Guys, she's not getting everlasting youth, like her hip just broke. This is unequivocal bastardism, right, Like, this is a bad thing to be doing.
Yeah, and you know, I mean presumably the thing was like wink, We're not going to ask you any hard questions, right, let's just get the rating.
Just tell me, give me some detention. And it's it's so fucked up that, like, on one hand, when you're doing this about like you are talking to someone about their their difficulty. You know, I've never experienced an orgasm. You're asking these kind of questions to get them to say more. That is making other people with the problem of whom there are many feel less alone. Same thing
with like sexual assault survivors. And then the fact that you have your you have absolutely no compunction with like I'll do the same thing for Lias about juice sacrificing babies. Yeah, fascinating stuff.
I'm curious if she because it sounds like at one point in her her career she really thought of herself as like a news person, a journalism person.
What does she think about her career now?
You know, here's the thing, because Oprah never really trained in journalism very much. I don't know if she maybe believes this, if she thinks these are the same, Like, that's kind of the thing to me because but also I want to be like, you are clearly brilliant. You are a once in a lifetime genius at least it's
some things. But also, as we've all seen, we've all become increasingly aware of people who are like, well, you're clearly brilliant at one thing, and now your access to Twitter has made us all aware that you don't understand anything else.
So, I mean, the evidence is seems to be that people who are brilliant on one thing may actually.
Be terrible in everything.
Standard.
Yeah, it may just be that Oprah is a once in a lifetime mind when it comes to the business of entertainment, and also honestly believed this woman sacrificing babies with her family.
I don't know.
Now that said, we have the fact that we have quotes from her being like, hey, get me a priest who said this makes me kind of lean more in the direction of Norah Oprah new right. Some of this, A lot of this is bullshit and it was just trying to get eyeballs on the TV, don't I think it's often a mix, Like, I don't know how much she's able to parse it herself. I want to talk about another incident that kind of really makes me go back and forth, which is the McMartin preschool satanic abuse scandal.
Now we cover this in our episodes on the Satanic Panic, but the gist of the case is that a bunch of parents became convinced that their children, more than three hundred of them at all, had been systematically abused by a Satanic cult headed by the McMartin family, who ran a private preschool. The initial allegations, which included claims that one of the alleged molesters could fly, were made by Judy Johnson, who suffered from schizophrenia and was a hardcore alcoholic.
From her allegations, a community hysteria developed, which was stoked by an abuse therapy clinic run by Kee McFarlane, who provided investigations that pushed children with leading questions towards generating allegations. A whole lot of people had their lives ruined by this. And despite the fact that the investigation literally dug up the ground around the school to try to find secret satanic torture tunnels, no one was ever convicted of molesting
any kids and people. I don't. I hate relitigating this because people are always like WEO. But they did find tunnels, No, they didn't. They found trash buried underneath the school because a farm had been there and people bury trash. All of the shit that was buried in there was stuffed from the era at which there was a farm there where people were burying trash, the dead animal bones. That's just what happens in the ground, guys. That's just how
things are. It's not they weren't running tunnels to molest toddlers for the devil.
It's also just it's like the logistics of like running a fucking satanic call, Like what the fuck are you talking about again?
It's one of those and like I'm not saying no kid ever got molested at this or other preschools like that. A lot of times the satanic abuse does come from there's a real sexual abuse problem, and then it gets turned into something that absolutely isn't happening, and again, shitloads of innocent people get wrapped into it too. Yeah, I don't think I'm not saying that was a happen at Macmartin because again, nobody got convicted of anything.
So it's not highly correlated with Satan. No, in fact, it might be higher correlated with Satan's old friend.
Yeah. And in fact, church leaders, Southern Baptist leaders, Catholic priests, police officers, these are the people who are molesting kids. And honestly, more than any of those their own parents and relatives, that's who does it. That's who molests kids.
But it's so much more satisfying to believe it's I'm like big conspiracy, and Andrew to your point.
Look at a cousin and uncle. Huh sorry what they can fucking fly?
What do they need tunnles for?
Yeah? Yeah, what do they need?
Why?
Why are they doing.
This in tunnels?
Like?
Why does that make more sense?
Yeah? So as this in this case winds on for like like a couple of years, Oprah, it is constantly on the show, they are following. This is like the OJ Simpson trial, you know, before the OJ Simpson trial for Winfrey. And here like they are following every twist and turn in this case breathlessly. And when these people don't get convicted, Oprah and her audience are outraged. She refuses to accept this. She brings a bunch of the children and parents and even some of the jurors onto
the show to relitigate the case. And She's not the only person doing this. She's part of a trendon daytime TV. Heraldo Rivera does the same thing, so does Sally Jesse Raphael, But as La Times columnist Howard Rosenberg noted, compared to them, Raaldo was as judicious as the Supreme Court. In other words, he's saying Heraldo's coverage of this was responsible next to Oprah's. And Heraldo Rivera is not a responsible man. I don't
know how else to describe him. Again, when he got hit in the nose with that share, it was the best thing that ever happened to this country. Quote and here's Rosenberg, the level of fairness here was typified by Winfrey's admission that she would have made a poor macmartin juror because I would say the children said it, all right,
you're right. The studio audience applauded. You see pieces this too that like if the children say it, it's true, If a mom says it, it's true, it's like, No, you have to have an evidentiary standard when you are accusing huge numbers of people of hideous crimes. You can't just say we put a bunch of kids in a room and wouldn't let them leave until they told stories of satanic molestation tunnels and then lock people up forever. That's a bad way to run a society. Yeah, I
don't know good stuff. So while she's doing this, she like has all these people on. She tells like a former mcmartin's student, like to tell the audience what she told the jury, like over sixteen days of testimony. And while this is happening, like you're getting these frequent shots of the audience like shaking their heads and like listening to these horrible stories. One of the moms tells Winfrey, I'm outraged at this verdict, And yeah, it's it's just
it's very irresponsible. I don't know. I think it's probably bad for there to be a case where all of these people are rung through the mud on television, then acquitted and then have a whole show where you're like, but actually they were still guilty. These people molest these innocent people molested. A shitload of kids are running us like their lives are already ruined. Oprah, what are you doing?
I don't know.
I don't like this. I don't like this.
Has she ever spoken about any of that? No? No, no, no no.
And I'd have to imagine if she did, the answer would be like, well, everybody was doing it, like this is what people didn't but.
You were the most popular of them, right right right?
Yeah, he use this thing with I mean even the most popular shows. Though, It's like you are still following trends, like you may have a hand on the scale for sure, but there is a point to where you know the yeah, as we've seen multiple times, like the snowball gets out of control and you are simply, regardless of your size, you are along for the ride.
Yep, Well how's everyone feeling so far?
Finally got bad?
It did it did?
It was pretty bad before, but finally Oprah's doing some evident bad.
The worm has turned, you would say, Uh, anyway, plugs.
Love that everybody's been bummed.
Play to go.
Yeah, I know that was like a like a tough spot to end at.
I guess, although I will say I'm still thinking about that headline or that title of her of the review MLK shot twice.
That I'm gonna be thinking about that one for a long time.
That's that is a level of petty. That is very beautiful. Yeah, very nice. I don't know. I got a podcast called Jos Racist. It's fine.
Check out?
Yo?
Is this racist? Check out? There are no girls on the internet. Uh, and find our our hosts online and let them know your favorite moment from the Oprah Winfrey Show. Bombard us all on Blue Sky with your favorite Oprah clips. Don't do that, oh do it to me?
I mean I had to like bite my tongue as I have so much to say. Go ahead and sumam me on behind our on Blue Sky. I want to hear your favorite Oprah takes. I will tell you mine.
Don't bite your tongue.
Oh it would just be me talking about and another time on Oprah she did this and then another episode she did that it would be so unfun to listen to.
Well, part four, we're gonna we'll find out, We'll find out, We're gonna supercharge Bridget. Just just let you loose until next time. Folks, don't put people up in front of the country and tell them that you sacrifice babies for the devil.
Yeah.
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