Does Oprah Have a Secret Son? Here’s the Sad Truth

No good deed goes unpunished, darlings.

Rumors have been swirling this week that Oprah has a “secret son” whom she ignored and abandoned, and who then ambushed her after her appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

But the truth is, the guy in question wasn’t her son at all, but rather a young man she tried to help through school who repaid her kindness with trying to set her up all these years later.

 

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Back in the 90s, Oprah Winfrey was filming some made for TV movie when she encountered a wayward teen named Calvin Mitchell, who was struggling living in the projects with his family. Moved by his story, Oprah essentially became his Daddy Warbucks, putting him in a private school and even moving his family into a nice home.

But, to her huge disappointment, that didn’t turn Calvin’s life around. She heard that he was missing classes at school, and Calvin’s family claimed that it was because they couldn’t get him up on time for school. Um…ok.

“We realized they don’t have any clocks in the house,” recalled O. “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 alas, Calvin managed to get expelled anyway. Still believing in her ward, she gave him another chance.

“I had a long conversation with him about how disappointed I was but I was going to give him another chance,” Oprah told Entertainment Tonight. “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.”

NEWP. Calvin still squandered this incredible opportunity and Oprah cut ties with him shortly thereafter. Recently she heard that he’d sold his story to the tabloids and realized that him ambushing her after the Colbert show was all part of a carefully crafted setup to further his tabloid payday.

“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.”

Poor Op. How frustrating to try to change someone’s life for the better, only to have them laugh in the face of your generosity. Why, I remember when I tried to steer a friend away from culottes, to no avail. Now she’s gone full hipster and no one can help her now.

When have you tried to help someone only to have it bite you in the bum?

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