Twenty-five years ago, a family member exposed a secret of Oprah Winfrey’s that she was devastated about at the time – that she had become pregnant at age 14 and the prematurely born baby had died weeks later.
Winfrey has now turned her painful past into a prosperous life, which included rape at the hands of several family members and resulted in the pregnancy. During her An Evening with Oprah tour in Melbourne, Australia, she revealed she named her late son Kaynan.
“I did an interview with a reporter before I came to Australia and she said you should name the baby son who died,” she told the crowd of thousands, News.com.au reports. “So I have named him, I had a little boy named Kaynan. I did have a son. And I named him Kaynan because Kaynan means new land, new life.”
Winfrey also talked about the sexual abuse she experienced by three family members, which started when she was only nine.
"I was raped at 9 years old by a cousin, then again by another family member, and another family member,” she said.
People reports in 2007, she wrote about the pregnancy reveal in her O, The Oprah Magazine, calling it “liberating” that her secret was out although she cried in bed for three days for fear it would ruin how people looked at her.