Oprah Winfrey loves to force stuff on people – whether it's a fleet of cars, charity debit cards or just nuggets of homespun self-help advice – but force young girls acts to perform sexual acts in Oprah's name and it's a different matter entirely.
That's the case with the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy in South Africa anyway, where it turns out that instead of giving talented-yet impoverished South African girls the chance to develop the full potential that their conditions would have stopped them from reaching, she was actually inadvertently letting them get sexually abused by one of the staff. And now Oprah Winfrey has spoken to journalists about her "devastation" at discovering the scandal, promising that she'd "clean house" while introducing her new all-star teaching staff who'd make sure this would never happen again – Gary Glitter, Jonathan King, R Kelly and the creepy guy from down the road who your mum says touches women on the bus.
Oprah Winfrey didn't get to be the globe-straddling multimedia billionaire that she is now without hitting a few roadbumps along the way. But ultimately these have helped Oprah along her life's path, because there literally isn't a problem in the world that Oprah Winfrey doesn't have some down-home folksy advice for, even if that advice is increasingly "throw money at it it. Spend spend spend. I'm a billionaire, you know."
So far Oprah Winfrey's tactic has paid off – like when Oprah Winfrey heard she didn't have her own radio station, she splashed the cash and got one. Problem solved. Similarly, when Nelson Mandela told Oprah Winfrey that education standards in South Africa were less than satisfactory, Oprah vowed to pay for her own school there, one that took the raw material of the country's most talented but underprivileged girls and turned them into tiny little Oprah-clones through lessons on how to start a successful book club and how to sue people who think you'd be a good president or something.
But when the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy opened, it turned out that the end product wasn't intelligent, free-thinking modern young women but cowering sexual assault victims thanks to the alleged antics of dormitory matron Tiny Virginia Makopo, who's accused of 13 counts of assault, indecent assault and criminal injury against students aged 13 to 23.
Although Oprah Winfrey has apologised to the parents of the students, and visited the school twice in the last month to give the students her personal phone number and email address, yesterday marked the first time that Oprah had discussed the scandal publicly, to journalists via satellite from her home. And here's what she had to say:
"This has been one of the most devastating, if not the most devastating, experience of my life. As with all such experiences, there is always something to be gained, something to be learned… I am a mama bear when it comes to protecting my children. These girls are my children. That is not just rhetoric. I take their futures, and the possibility for what their futures hold, very personally."
That's a big statement from someone who once suffered the indignity of not being let into a French shop when it was closed even though she's on telly and stuff.
So now Oprah Winfrey needs to rebuild her school's reputation from the ground up. The headteacher of the academy has already been suspended, and more changes will no doubt be made as time goes on. For instance, the school's graduation pack will now include a T-shirt bearing the slogan 'Graduated From Oprah Winfrey's Leadership Academy' instead of the current 'I Studied At The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy And All I Got Was A Harrowing Indecent Assault Off A Woman With A Funny Name' which everyone has to agree is a step in the right direction.