Oprah Winfrey Discusses How Joan Rivers’ Body-Shaming Comment Left a Lasting Impact
Oprah Winfrey opened up about being body-shamed by Joan Rivers on The Tonight Show.
The conversation with Rivers happened in 1985.
“I accepted that I should be shamed,” Winfrey recalled.
In a two-part interview on The Jamie Kern Lima Show, Oprah Winfrey did a deep dive into her complicated relationship with weight and weight loss—which included stories of being body shamed. More specifically, in part two, which released Tuesday, Winfrey recounted a time when Joan Rivers body shamed her on The Tonight Show.
In 1985, Winfrey joined Rivers to discuss her morning talk show A.M. Chicago. Shortly into the conversation, the late, notoriously frank stand-up comedian changed the topic. “Joan Rivers turns to me and she says ‘Tell me, why are you so fat?’” Winfrey recalled to Kern. “On national television, and I don’t know what to do with that.”
She continued: “I just did, like, ‘Oh, I just love potato chips, Joan.’”
Rivers didn’t stop there. “I’ll let you come back if you lose 15 lbs. You need to lose 15 lbs,” she pressed on, per Winfrey. And the lifestyle mogul accepted the challenge—she and Rivers “agreed that I was gonna go away and lose 15 pounds,” Winfrey recalled. “And of course, I didn’t lose the 15 pounds. I went and ate my way to another 10 pounds.”
Elaborating, Winfrey said that she believed she deserved Rivers’ comment. “I accept[ed] it,” she said. “I accept[ed] that I should be shamed, because how dare me, be sitting up here on The Tonight Show.”
In the first part of her interview with Lima, Winfrey recalled another touchstone of the public discussion about her weight, some of which she admits to driving. In a 1988 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, for example, she walked on stage pulling a wagon full of fat to illustrate how much weight she had lost on OptiFast, an all-liquid diet.
“I didn’t have a morsel of food for five solid months,” she recalled. The conversation around her size continued when the weight slowly returned in the following weeks. “Three days later, I was 5 pounds heavier, and a week later I was 10 pounds heavier,” she said. “I’d gone from 145 [pounds] on the day of the show... I think I was 157 in the course of, like, a week and a half or two. And the shame started again.”
It was only recently that the 70-year-old decided to make a change in how she perceives and discusses weight loss. In May, she publicly apologized for being “a major contributor to diet culture” over the last 40 years and opened up about using weight loss drugs for “maintenance.” Now, she’s turning over a new leaf.
“I’m done with it,” she said. “I was judgmental because I have been so judged. I actually don’t know anybody who’s been more publicly judged about their weight than myself and I have carried and borne the shame of other people.”
In an interview with People, she drew a similar boundary. “I’m absolutely done with the shaming,” she said. “From other people and particularly myself.”
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