LOS ANGELES – A tearful Oprah Winfrey has denied she is a lesbian, saying that constant rumours about her close relationship with a female friend were irritating “because it means that somebody must think I am lying”.
The influential TV talk show host addressed the nature of her 20-year relationship with Gayle King in an emotional interview with journalist Barbara Walters that will be broadcast on ABC television today.
“She is the mother I never had. She is the sister everybody would want. She is the friend that everybody deserves. I don’t know a better person,” Winfrey said of King, fighting back tears.
“It’s making me cry because I’m thinking about how much I probably have never told her that. Tissue please,” she added.
King and Winfrey (56) met while working at a Baltimore TV station in the 1980s and have been inseparable professionally and personally, sparking much media speculation that they are gay.
“I’m not a lesbian. I’m not even kind of a lesbian,” Winfrey told Walters in an excerpt of the interview released on Tuesday. “And the reason why it irritates me is because it means that somebody must think I’m lying. That’s number one. Number two . . . why would you want to hide it? That is not the way I run my life.”
Winfrey, whose show is watched by millions in the United States and 145 other countries, also has a more than 20-year low-profile relationship with businessman Stedman Graham.
Walters said yesterday that the couple shared a house and that Winfrey speaks of that relationship in the interview. – (Reuters)