This week , Oprah Winfrey was "ambushed" by her "secret son" after a taping of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, the former talk show host revealed how she met Calvin Mitchell (as a little boy right) in the early 90's while she was filming the TV movie There Are No Children Here.
According to her, She was taken by the boy after he offered her a diet coke and wanted to help when she found out he and his family were stuck in the projects.
She enrolled Mitchell in a local private school and moved the family to a better home. But hope turned to disappointment when the school principal informed her that the boy had been missing classes. The family's excuse was that they couldn't get up on time to get the boy to school.
She discovered that his family didn't have any clocks in the house. Her Partner Stedman and herself 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. That however 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. 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, the boy again voiced discontent with the school and she 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 years after
"When I realized the whole thing was a setup, I was no longer interested in speaking to him."
Although Winfrey says she wasn't hurt by the experience, she did admit she was left disappointed by the boy again, but counts it as a learning experience.
"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. 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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