Oprah Winfrey Opens Up About Her Own Sexual Abuse

Oprah Winfrey interviewed two men accusing the late Michael Jackson of sexual abuse in HBO’s documentary Leaving Neverland.

In the film, Wade Robson, 36, and James Safechuck, 40, allege Michael Jackson molested them as boys. Oprah’s special aired immediately following the second half of the doc.

But while Oprah has been open about her success and obstacles, for years she stayed quiet about her own experience with sexual abuse — specifically that she was molested by a cousin, an uncle, and a family friend as a young girl.

“It happened to me at 9, and then 10, and then 11, and then 12, 13, 14. You don’t have the language to begin to explain what’s happening to you,” she revealed to People magazine. “That’s why you feel you’re not going to be believed. And if the abuser, the molester, is any good, they will make you feel that you are complicit, that you were part of it. That’s what keeps you from telling.”

Thanks to the #MeToo movement, hundreds of women in the entertainment industry, including herself, came forward to speak up about their own sexual harassment stories.

“Women all over the country have been in situations with domineering, brutish men and had to remain silent about it to keep food on the table,” she said about women always having to deal with brutish men in the workplace.

“I had a boss who was just a brute,” she added. “This was at WJZ-TV in Baltimore. I knew that saying anything at the time would have taken me out of television forever. That nothing would have been done about it. I wasn’t going to be there forever, so I said nothing. Every time he would pass my desk, I would turn around and try to disappear.”

“The moment I first confessed on The Oprah Winfrey Show to being molested, I confessed because there had been a time years before when a girl on the People Are Talking show I did in Baltimore had told the story of being molested, and I did not have the courage at that time to say out loud, ‘Me too,’” she revealed.

Read more at People.