Oprah Winfrey is no stranger to the limelight or public scrutiny. But her negative experience with the late Joan Rivers is still something that sticks in her memory. And now she’s getting candid about it.
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As you may have heard by now, Winfrey recently released her book—”Enough: Your Health, Your Weight, and What It’s Like to Be Free,” co-written with Dr. Ania Jastreboff—which details her weight loss journey, best practices, mindset shifts and more. The former daytime talk show host and her health have long been a hot topic in Hollywood with everything from magazines to comedians having poked fun at her larger size, especially back in the late 80s.
In a new interview with “The View” on Wednesday, while there to promote her book, Winfrey detailed a “tough period” where her fluctuating size was consistently made fun of in the news around the same time her daytime career began to pop off. It was during those early years, she explained, that she appeared on The Tonight Show with host Joan Rivers in 1985 and that their encounter was anything but pleasant.
Describing the appearance as a “horrible moment,” Winfrey explained: “Joan Rivers said to me, ‘Shame, shame, shame on you for not losing the weight. How did you gain the weight?’ I remember leaving feeling embarrassed, but she said I could come back if I lost 15 pounds. I wasn’t even upset with her. I thought, ‘I’ve got to get on it, I’ve got to lose those 15 pounds.’” (To note, this wasn’t the first time Rivers decided to come for a Black woman’s looks. Who could forget that cringey interview she did with Whoopi Goldberg from the 90s where she tried to suggest she wasn’t beautiful and that she needed to be thinner?)
Winfrey then went on to explain how she blamed herself and internalized the shame and felt the years-long bad jokes were warranted because she felt like she should have been able to lose the weight.
“What I felt all those years, the shame and the blame that I gave to myself, I felt it was because it was my fault. I felt it was my fault I was overweight,” Winfrey said. “So, when comedians made fun of me, I felt like, well, ‘it’s okay for me to be the butt of their jokes because I should be losing the weight. I should be able to keep the weight off.’ I felt embarrassed every time I put the weight back on. I accepted it because I felt that they were right.”
Fast forward to the last three to four years and any weight-shamers shouldn’t have anything to say about how she looks now given how snatched and small she is. And it’s all thanks to GLP-1 medication and better eating and health choices.
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