Oprah Winfrey seems to have it all: oodles of cash, a stable relationship, and a best
friend who never leaves her side.
So surely she must've also had an idyllic childhood.
Sadly, however, that isn't the case.
This is her tragic life story.
Winfrey's early years were filled with instability.
It all began in rural Mississippi, where she lived with her maternal grandmother, Hattie
Mae Lee.
She was then shipped off to Wisconsin to live with her mom, Vernita Lee, when she was 6
years old.
That move turned out to be the most dramatic of them all.
In 2015, she revealed,
"I suddenly land in a place that's completely foreign to me.
I don't know anybody.
I don't really even know my mother."
Before Winfrey could get settled in Wisconsin, she was sent to Tennessee to live with her
dad, or, rather, a man she presumed to be her dad, a coal miner named Vernon Lee.
Eventually, she returned to live with her mother again.
The constant changes in her home life definitely took a toll on her, but her faith helped her
push through.
"I grew up with an understanding that there was this God — all-knowing, all-powerful
— who loved me.
The wonder of that, the magical mystery of that, is what carried me when I was separated
from my grandmother and sent to live with my mother at 6 years old."
Winfrey's early years on her grandmother's rural Mississippi pig farm were far from ideal,
to put it mildly.
She and her grandmother didn't have much money, so their home was lacking common amenities.
Running water and electricity were scarce.
Nevertheless, Winfrey enjoyed the wide open spaces that were available, as it was in direct
contrast to the tiny apartment she shared with her mother and two half-siblings, Patricia
and Jeffrey.
"I was the smart dark-skinned one who read too much, and my half-sister was considered,
you know, the pretty, the pretty one.
So I had some of those same issues of, 'You're not good enough.'"
As with most incidents in her early life, abuse sadly crept its way in.
This time, it was physical.
She told David Letterman in 2012,
"I went to a well to get some water and carry it in a bucket.
And I was playing in the water with my fingers, and my grandmother had seen me out the window
and she didn't like it.
She whipped me so badly that I had welts on my back and the welts would bleed.
And then when I put on my Sunday dress, I was bleeding from the welts.
And then she was very upset with me because I got blood on the dress.
So then I got another whipping for getting blood on the dress."
Nowadays, Winfrey has an entire team of stylists who get her all dolled up in gorgeous gowns,
and her work closet at Harpo Studios is filled to the brim with designer duds.
But this self-made multi-billionaire didn't always have a collection of luxury goods at
her disposal.
While growing up in extreme poverty, she had no choice but to wear hessian overalls made
out of potato sacks.
Her makeshift outfits led her to be crowned with the rather unfortunate nickname "Sack
Girl."
When describing her childhood on the farm, she told David Letterman,
"I grew up in an environment where children were seen and not heard."
This led Winfrey to retreat and look for engagement in other places.
Instead of having the typical farm animals as her pets, she had pet cockroaches instead.
And since her family couldn't afford a box filled with toys for her, she made her own
baby doll from a dried corncob.
During the time she lived with her mom, Winfrey experienced intense colorism, a term used
to describe prejudice within a racial group that favors lighter skin.
"It really boils down to the belief that the lighter your skin tone, the prettier you are,
the smarter you are."
"More valuable and worthy."
While recalling the time she arrived at the home where her mother was renting a room,
she revealed,
"I remember the first night entering into that house and being told that I wouldn't
be able to sleep with my mother and I wouldn't be able to sleep inside the house.
There was a little foyer-porch before you actually got inside the house.
I was put outside to sleep there."
Winfrey was confused at first, but she later realized exactly what was going on, as she
explained,
"My mother was boarding with this very light-skinned black woman who could have passed for white.
I could tell instantly when I walked in the room that she didn't like me.
It was because of the color of my skin."
Instead of putting up a fight, the young Winfrey obliged and found solace within her sleeping
arrangements, looking toward her faith for comfort.
As she put it,
"I remember praying on my knees the very first night I had been removed from my grandmother.
I don't remember ever shedding a tear about it because I knew that God was my father,
Jesus was my brother, and they were with me."
"I believe that prayer is your heart's yearning for all that is God."
Over the years, Winfrey has been open about her traumatic childhood, including the time
she survived being brutally assaulted and violated when she was just 9 years old.
That wasn't the only time Winfrey was violated during her childhood, as she was molested
by various relatives when she was between the ages of 10 and 14.
After all this abuse, her self-esteem and self-worth were beyond crushed.
As she explained in O, The Oprah Magazine,
"It was a very long time before I understood how completely my life had been changed — how
in one instant, I was no longer a child.
When you are sexually violated, it's not the physical act that destroys you.
It's the weight of the secret you feel you have to keep, the person you have to become
so no one will discover what you're hiding."
The traumatic experiences caused Winfrey to confuse "mistreatment with love."
And it took her many years to come to grips with the entire ordeal, as she revealed that
she held the belief that she was at fault for the abuse up until her 30s.
At the age of 14, Winfrey found herself pregnant, so she tried to drink laundry detergent in
an attempt to terminate the pregnancy.
At the time, she tried to make sense of the turn her life had taken at an early age.
In a 2011 interview on Piers Morgan Tonight, she confessed,
"Getting pregnant was a result of bad choices, not having boundaries, sexual abuse from the
time I was 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13."
Tragically, Winfrey would later lose her child shortly after giving birth.
"The baby died, and that was my biggest life secret.
And I lived in such fear of that secret coming out.
It was my great life shame."
A loss, of course, is often accompanied by some form of grief, but looking back on the
way everything played out, Winfrey was able to find a silver lining.
In 2017, she told Good Housekeeping UK,
"I didn't want babies.
I wouldn't have been a good mum for babies.
I don't have the patience.
I have the patience for puppies, but that's a quick stage!"
Winfrey's son was brought into the world when she was 14 years old, but he was born prematurely
and died in the hospital shortly afterwards.
When she worked up the courage to tell her family about the possibility that her favorite
uncle was the father of her child, they brushed off her allegations.
As she explained to People Magazine in 1994, because she had been promiscuous, they believed
that if anything happened, it must've been her fault.
Looking back on her teenage pregnancy, Winfrey told the New York Daily News in 2011 that
she had "no connection" to the baby whatsoever.
In her eyes, losing the child was a blessing in disguise.
As she put it,
"When the baby died, I knew that it was my second chance."
Despite feeling detached, Winfrey eventually gave her premature baby a name after an Australian
reporter encouraged her to do so.
In 2015, she told a crowd at Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne,
"So I have named him, I had a little boy named Canaan.
I did have a son.
And I named him Canaan because Canaan means new land, new life."
Winfrey is an open book when it comes to personal details about her life, but the startling
admission that she experimented with drugs was something she never intended to talk about.
Back in January 1995, she was filming a program about drug addicts who were in recovery.
After one woman shared her story of smoking crack cocaine, Winfrey revealed that she also
went through a period of drug use with an ex-boyfriend.
She later decided to dive a little bit deeper into the topic in an interview on the Today
show.
She admitted,
"I had used drugs in my 20s with this boyfriend and I was more addicted to the boyfriend than
I was to the drugs."
Her choice of drug at the time was crack, though as Winfrey explained,
"It wasn't called crack at the time.
It was called freebasing.
It was before crack was crack."
On Thanksgiving Day in 2018, Winfrey lost her mother, Vernita Lee.
She was 83.
A spokesperson for Winfrey told the Huffington Post at the time,
"The family of Vernita Lee are saddened to share of her passing on November 22, 2018
at her home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin."
Despite Winfrey's rocky relationship with her mother early in her life, the two eventually
reconciled.
Less than a month after Lee's death, Winfrey opened up to People Magazine about spending
time with her mother during her last days in hospice care.
She explained,
"I sat with my mother.
I said, 'I don't know if you're going to make it.
Do you think you're going to make it?'
She said, 'I don't think I am.'
I had a conversation with her about what that felt like, what it felt like to be near the
end.
I started telling all the people who cared about her that, 'She knows it's the end, so,
if you want to say goodbye, you should come and say goodbye.'"
After everyone traveled to say their goodbyes, Winfrey did the same.
She told People,
"I stood in the doorway and I said, 'goodbye.'
I knew it was going to be the last time we said goodbye."
One of the last things Winfrey told her mother before she passed was,
"Thank you.
Thank you, because I know it's been hard for you."
Winfrey has admitted that after she got pregnant at 14, she hit rock bottom.
But things were far worse than anyone could've imagined.
Her attempt to terminate her pregnancy by drinking laundry detergent was only one part
of her plan.
In 2017, she told The Hollywood Reporter,
"I became pregnant and hid the pregnancy.
I'd intended to kill myself actually.
I thought there's no way other than killing myself.
I was just planning on how to do it.
If I'd had the Internet, I might not be alive because now you can just Google how to do
it."
Winfrey's reason for wanting to harm herself arose after she was sent to live with her
father in Nashville.
At the time that she moved in, he had no idea that she was pregnant, and he reportedly made
the following heartless comment:
"I would rather see a daughter of mine floating down the Cumberland River than to bring shame
on this family and the indecency of an illegitimate child."
If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide
Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or text HOME to the Crisis Text Line at 741741.