Oprah Winfrey once helped cover up an onstage fall Whitney Houston suffered while performing on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
“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.’ And that was one of the most powerful interviews,” Winfrey, 72, said Tuesday at Cannes Lions, per Variety.
Houston — who had long struggled with substance abuse — later returned to perform on the talk show and, at that time, had already relapsed.
“I had such trust from ‘The Oprah Show’ audience … I think it was [Houston’s] last show with us, and she had gone back on drugs,” the Emmy-winning host continued. “The first interview I did with her when we’d gone behind stage and I asked her about her intention, she was clean.”
“But the day she came to my show then to perform in front of the audience, she was not, and she fell off of the stage,” she said.
“I knew that if that story got out … she would be destroyed by that,” Winfrey, this year’s recipient of the LionHeart Award at the Cannes Lions, recalled.
Winfrey continued: “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.”
The “Greatest Love of All” hitmaker died at 48 years old after she accidentally drowned in the bathtub in February 2012. However, the effects of heart disease and cocaine use were also listed as underlying causes behind her cause of death.
For many years, it was believed Houston started abusing substances during her relationship with Bobby Brown, whom she was married to from 1992 until she filed for divorce in 2006.
But, according to the 2018 documentary “Whitney,” Houston’s history with drugs began well before she became acquainted with the “My Prerogative” artist.
In the film, it was revealed that Houston’s brothers Gary and Michael — who would travel with their sister and serve as bodyguards — both admitted to facilitating and participating in their sister’s drug use.
“If anything was gonna be done, I was gonna be the one to show it to her,” Michael says in the film.
A friend of the brothers, Keith Kelly, also confessed that he was the one who first gave Houston drugs — a bag of marijuana and a snort of cocaine — on her 16th birthday.
“There’s an amusing but also kind of tragic moment where her brother Michael says, ‘We used to do rings around Bobby. He was not able to keep up with us. We lapped him in drug-taking. He’s a lightweight,’” the film’s director, Kevin Macdonald, told The Post at the time. “That kind of vindicates Bobby.”
If you or someone you know is affected by any of the issues raised in this story, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Helpline at 800-662-4357.
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