Famous talk show host, Oprah Winfrey has cleared the air on
report of being "ambushed" by her "secret son" while coming
back from a recording earlier this month. Speaking with Entertainment
Tonight, she said it was a setup. She
gave the details of how she met Calvin Mitchell in the early 90's while she was
filming the TV movie There Are No
Children Here. She describes herself as being taken by the boy and wanting
to help when she found out he and his family were stuck in the projects.
"We realized they don't have any clocks in the house," Winfrey says. "We went out, Stedman and I, went to K-Mart that moment, got a bag full of clocks, came back to the house, taught them how to set the alarm and all that."
But those efforts didn't prevent Mitchell from getting
expelled from the school.
"I had a long conversation with him about how
disappointed I was but I was going to give him another chance," Winfrey
explains to Nancy O'Dell. "I found a school in Mississippi that was a
private boarding school because I thought if I could remove him from the
environment that he'd been accustomed to growing up in, that maybe that would
be helpful to him."
However, Mitchell voiced discontent with the school and
Winfrey had her last conversation with him in the early nineties. That
was until Winfrey got wind that the young man had sold his story to a tabloid.
"As I left, and he was looking so forlorn, he was like,
'Can I speak to you?' So I said to somebody on my team, 'Will somebody get
Calvin's number so I can contact him later," Winfrey says. "I didn't
realize the whole thing was a setup. When I realized the whole thing was
a setup, I was no longer interested in speaking to him."
"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 says. "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."
"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 says. "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."
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