When you're as rich, powerful and influential as Oprah Winfrey, everyone wants a bit of you; some people want your attention, some people want your love and some people want to blackmail you out of $1.5 million with tapes of people slagging you off.
According to reports, the latter has been happening to Oprah Winfrey quite recently. A man from Atlanta has been charged with attempted extortion, after an apparent plan of his to blackmail Oprah with a tape of an employee of hers being less than complimentary backfired and he ended up getting arrested. This all happened last month, but news of the alleged extortion attempt has only just surfaced. Now it's out in the open, though, Oprah Winfrey is free to start preparing her special Everybody Gets $1.5 Million Except That Sonofabith Keifer Bonvillain, 36, From Atlanta episode.
If there was ever one universal rule that the entire population of Earth would do well to remember, it's that you don't fuck with Oprah Winfrey. If you don't serve Oprah in your boutique – regardless of if you're open or closed – she'll call you a racist. If you call Oprah a lesbian, she'll bang on about it until the end of time. And if you have the audacity to suggest that Oprah would be a good president, she'll sue you all the way to kingdom come.
But despite this – and all the good work she does like fund African schools and make a radio station so you can hear her voice whenever you want – some people still don't immediately fall to their knees in blind worship the instant they see Oprah Winfrey. 50 Cent isn't a fan of Oprah Winfrey and Tom Cruise wouldn't even invite Oprah to his wedding. Which is bad enough, but when people start trying to extort $1.5 million from Oprah, that's when the shit really hits the fan.
Keifer Bonvillain is alleged to have done that very thing, by taping an employee of Oprah Winfrey saying "awful things" about her for 12 hours, then emailing Oprah Winfrey herself and demanding $1.5 million to stop him writing a book about it. E! Online reports:
According to the criminal complaint, Bonvillain was corralled the day after one of Winfrey's representatives, who was secretly working with the FBI, wired him $3,000 and agreed to meet with him in an Atlanta hotel parking lot to pay the balance in exchange for the tapes. Despite the feds having recorded conversations between Bonvillain and Winfrey's rep in which he agreed to hand over the recordings, he nevertheless told the Chicago Sun-Times it was all a big misunderstanding. "There is nothing to it," he said. "It's nothing. It's a big mix-up."
Bonvillain has now been released on $20,000 bail and is back home in Atlanta either trying to fix this miscarriage of justice or wondering why he ever thought he could get away with taking on the might of Oprah Winfrey, depending on if he did it or not.
Also – $1.5 million? That's quite a lot, but then again if Keifer Bonvillain would have put in a bit more legwork – say, by taking pictures of Oprah in her nightie and boasting that he injects poison into her body while she slept – he really could have gunned for the same $2 million figure that Yoko Ono's alleged creepy blackmailing driver was after.
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Jerome Flynne says
He was going to make an entire book about one person saying mean things about Oprah? That’s a pretty shitty idea. Also – Bonvillain is one letter off ‘Bond Villain’… he should have tried to extort Oprah with a tall Euro dude with metal teeth
96dbFreak says
There’s another person, (apart from Mr Sutherland) on Earth called “Keifer”?????? Sounds unlikely to me.