“Joan Rivers turns to me and she says, ‘Tell me, why are you so fat?'” Oprah said the late comedian told her during her appearance on ‘The Tonight Show’ in 1985.
Oprah Winfrey is looking back at the time when she was body-shamed by the late Joan Rivers on national television.
On Monday’s episode of The Jamie Kern Lima Show podcast, the television icon recalled being interviewed by the late comedian on The Tonight Show in 1985, and opened up about her reaction to Rivers calling her out over her weight.
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“I’ve been shamed on The Tonight Show by Joan Rivers. I had my first appearance on The Tonight Show,” Oprah began, adding that they were supposed to be discussing the success of her Chicago-based talk show.
“Joan Rivers turns to me and she says, ‘Tell me, why are you so fat?’ … on national television,” she continued. “And I don’t know what to do with that. I just am like, ‘Well, I just love potato chips, Joan.’ She [goes], ‘No seriously! Shame on you! Shame on you!'”
The 70-year-old TV personality said Rivers told her she only return to the late-night show if she lost weight.
“‘I’ll let you come back if you lose 15 pounds. You need to lose 15 pounds.’ She says to me on national television,” Oprah recalled. “And I accepted. I accept that I should be shamed because how dare me be sitting up here on The Tonight Show.”
The former talk show host said she “had agreed that I was going to go away and lose 15 pounds,” but that didn’t ultimately happen.
“Of course, I didn’t lose the 15 pounds. I went and ate my way to another 10 pounds,” she explained.
At the time, Oprah said she had previously auditioned for 1985’s The Color Purple, but hadn’t heard anything, so she assumed she didn’t land the role because she was “overweight,” and decided to go to a health retreat, which were then called “fat farms.”
While at the retreat, Oprah began to accept that the role wasn’t going to happen for her, before she got a phone call from the film’s director, Steven Spielberg.
“I cried and prayed some more, and in the moment I felt the release … a woman comes running out and she says, ‘There’s a phone call for you,'” she recalled. “The phone call from Steven Spielberg saying, ‘I hear you’re at a fat farm. You lose a pound, you could lose this part.’ The fact that it happened in the instant I’d know[n] I’d let it go was the greatest life lesson I have ever received.”
“I physically felt the release, and I saw that the second I did that, it changed,” Oprah continued. “The second I stopped resisting, the second I stopped wondering, the second I stopped putting myself in the fear space and said, ‘It is well. Use me how you choose to use me. I thought this was the answer, but now I see it’s not. I’m willing to be open to wherever you take me.’ The instant, I did that, I saw that woman.”
“That became my grounding teaching for the rest of my life and career,” she concluded. “Do everything you can, work as hard as you can, and then let it go.”
Oprah, of course, was ultimately cast as Sofia in The Color Purple, and later received an Oscar nomination for her performance.
The media icon has been open about her struggles with her weight over the years. In February, Oprah made the decision to step down after a decade serving on the Weight Watchers board of directors after she disclosed her recent use of weight-loss medication.
The following month, she got candid about her decades-long weight loss journey in a TV special titled An Oprah Special: Shame, Blame, and the Weight Loss Revolution.
