Some things should stay in the past. At least that’s what many social media users are saying after Oprah Winfrey shared a previously unknown story about the late Whitney Houston.
During a Q&A session at France’s Cannes Lions marketing festival this week, Winfrey recalled Houston’s final appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and shared troubling details about the iconic singer.
“We did the whole, ‘Hey girl, how you doing?’ greeting thing and then I stopped the cameras, and I went behind stage, and I said, ‘So tell me, what do you want to happen here? And I’m gonna tell you what I want to happen here,’” Winfrey told the festival audience.
Winfrey said when the singer returned to the talk show in 2009, she had relapsed.
“She had gone back on drugs,” the media mogul recalled. “The first interview I did with her when we’d gone behind stage and I asked about her intentions, she was clean. But the day she came to my show to perform in front of the audience, she was not, and she fell off of the stage.”
Related: Mo’Nique Trashes ‘Gatekeepers’ Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry
The former talk show host said she wanted to protect Houston and asked the studio audience not to share photos from the taping. “I knew that if that story got out … she would be destroyed by that,” she explained.
Winfrey said the audience honored her request and details about Houston’s mishap never made it into the press.
“And so even though the audience was there and the audience had cameras, I begged them not to put those pictures out because it would ruin her life, and they did not. That would not happen today, I can tell you that,” Winfrey said.
Houston died in 2012 from drowning and the “effects of atherosclerotic heart disease and cocaine use,” according to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s autopsy report.
The Neighborhood Talk social media account posted video of Winfrey’s now-viral comments to Instagram Tuesday. More than 12,000 people commented on the post and many took issue with the talk show titan’s remarks.
“Why is she telling us now?” one person commented.
“This is so tacky,” someone else wrote.
“Interviewer should’ve asked ‘so what are your intentions with sharing that with us now?'” another person replied.
“So you blast it on a panel…… Monique was right,” someone else wrote in reference to comedian Mo’Nique, who is a longtime Oprah critic.
“Spare her in life, tarnish her in death? My God today,” commented Survivor season 46 contestant Tevin Davis.
Winfrey was at the festival to receive an award, Variety reported. The legendary television personality brought up Houston while talking about legacy, purpose and responsibility.
On Tuesday evening, Houston’s estate released a statement saying the Grammy-winning singer was “not high” when she visited Oprah.
“Whitney absolutely fell off the stage, but it was during a sound check, and it was due to the darkness of the area and her unfamiliarity with the stage. She was absolutely not high,” estate executor Pat Houston told TMZ.
You can watch the full clip from Oprah’s interview at Cannes Lions here.
Discover more from Urban Hollywood 411
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
