Oprah Winfrey explains 'secret son' ambush
Earlier this month, Oprah Winfrey was reportedly "ambushed" by her "secret son," but now she is setting the record straight.
Earlier this month, Oprah Winfrey was reportedly “ambushed” by her “secret son,” but now she is setting the record straight.
According to Entertainment Tonight, the “son” is Calvin Mitchell, a boy that she met in the 1990s and tried to help.
“We were shooting in the projects in Chicago and I was sitting on set during a break, and this cute little sparkly-eyed boy came underneath the yellow tape to hand me a soda. I was so charmed by him that I started talking to him about his family, his school life, and found out that he was in a situation where his mother didn’t have a job and they were stuck in the projects,” Winfrey explained to ET.
She went on to say that she helped Mitchell’s mother find a job and helped the family get out of the projects. Oprah helped Mitchell to get an education, and when he struggled in the first private school she put him in, she helped get him into another.
“I said, ‘Calvin, this is the moment. This is a seminal moment for you. I know you are 16 and can’t see the road ahead, but if you leave this school and refuse to get an education — I have tried to offer you an education twice — there isn’t another school I can put you in. If you leave this school, I am done. There is nothing else I can do.’ … And that was my last conversation with Calvin in the early ’90s.”
Then, earlier this month, she saw Mitchell again, just before a taping of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Oprah said she was “disappointed” when she realized the whole thing was “a setup” with a tabloid.
Still, Winfrey said she has learned a valuable lesson from this whole thing, and it inspired here to create her Leadership Academy for Girls in 2007.
“I learned from that experience, if you really want to change somebody’s life, you gotta be able to spend enough time with them to change the way they think about what their life can be,” she said. “It isn’t enough to give a person a new life or money or a new car, you have to teach them how to fish themselves.”
