At 31, Oprah Winfrey was just launching her media career. The former beauty pageant winner, who had gained 42 to 50 pounds over time, had recently relocated from Maryland to Illinois to begin hosting the “AM Chicago” morning show at the time.
In promotion for her new show, she was invited for the first time to “The Tonight Show,” where Joan Rivers was the guest host for Johnny Carson in 1985.
At the time, Oprah felt prepared. However, she had no idea that the comedian would shift the segment’s focus away from her new show and onto her weight.
It was Oprah’s first appearance on national television, and the scrutiny over her weight, coupled with the external pressures from Hollywood to lose weight, left an indelible mark on the now-billionaire media maven.
“Joan’s introduction was great. I made it from curtain to couch without tripping and launched into my amusing little anecdote about winning the Miss Fire Prevention pageant. It was all going smoothly; I was starting to settle in. And then it happened: Joan interrupted with perhaps the only question I hadn’t prepared for: ‘So how’d you gain the weight?’” Oprah recalled.
Rivers, a comedian who was just as known for roasting people as she was for her plastic surgery and obsession with how people look, told Oprah, “You shouldn’t let that happen to you. You’re very pretty. I don’t want to hear it. You’re a pretty girl and you’re single. You must lose the weight.”
Oprah tried to defend herself, saying that she was going to lose it and start a public campaign, “Diet with Oprah.”
It’s a moment she would never forget, and neither has the world even 10 years after Rivers death from cardiac arrest in 2014. Years later in 2016, when discussing the experience in her book “Food, Health, and Happiness,” Oprah said she thought, “Did she just use my national television debut to ask me why I was so fat?”
“The studio started spinning,” she remembered. “The word fat…fat…faaaaatttttt reverberated in my brain. Joan sat behind Johnny’s big wooden desk, telling me that she didn’t want to hear my excuses and that I shouldn’t have let this happen.”
She continued, “The audience laughed nervously as she wagged her flawlessly manicured finger at me, pointed out that I was still ‘a single girl,’ and challenged me to come back 15 pounds lighter next time she hosted. And the whole time I just sat there smiling breezily, wanting nothing more than to crawl under my chair.”
Rivers kept pushing and later the conversation turned to Nell Carter, another plus-size Black woman.
“I just saw Nell Carter on here last night, who lost [some weight],” Oprah said.
Rivers interrupted, “Yes, but you couldn’t tell. She’s still very chubby. Don’t you think you should lose more?”
As Oprah tried to answer, she was cut off again, with Rivers disagreeing saying, “People must help friends that diet. Tell a friend the truth. You must say you are still a pig, lose more weight.”
“The Color Purple” producer tried to clean it up, clarifying that no one was calling the “Give Me A Break” star a “pig.”
Many people commented on the exchange, shocked at how easily Rivers engaged in fat-shaming the young star, noting that such behavior would likely not be tolerated today.
“Joan had an obsession with appearance. It was the most obvious thing about her,” one person wrote on YouTube.
Another wrote, “Imagine this conversation today. The amount of beauty at every size and death threats that Joanne would receive.”
“Whoa. big s/o to Oprah`s patience bcs Joan here needs few slaps for those insults,” one comment read.
One X user noted that this was not the only time, Joan told someone she didn’t know to lose weight.
“Years ago, a friend of mine met Joan at an event and within 30 seconds of meeting her, Joan said, ‘You’re very attractive but you need to lose weight.’ It was completely unsolicited. I guess that was just her thing,” she tweeted.
At 70, Oprah is now is slim, looks trim and feels as if she has a handle on her struggles with obesity. In March 2024, she admitted to using weight loss drugs to help her get a grasp on her fluctuating size.
“I couldn’t work out anymore. I can’t climb any faster or run any faster. I was down to eating one meal a day. There’s nothing else I can do,” Oprah said to Gayle King and Charles Barkley on their show, “King Charles.”
She said with the assistance of the unnamed weight-loss drug she has a “sense of hope” and no longer blames herself for not being able to lose it on her own.
“I now use it as I feel I need it, as a tool to manage not yo-yoing,” the former Weight Watcher’s Ambassador said, adding, “The fact that there’s a medically approved prescription for managing weight and staying healthier, in my lifetime, feels like relief, like redemption, like a gift, and not something to hide behind and once again be ridiculed for. I’m absolutely done with the shaming from other people and particularly myself.”
Oprah also says she works out to maintain her new svelte shape, and looks so good and fit that Joan is probably turning in her grave in awe.
