*A man by the name of Calvin Mitchell is telling Radar Online that he was nearly adopted by Oprah Winfrey as a child, and that she considered him to be her “son,” but cut off all contact with him in his teen years, sending him into a deep depression.
And he now wants to know why she cut him off. (Video below.)
“I want to ask Oprah, ‘Why did you leave me? Why did you leave me?’” he told Radar.
“I’m still empty,” he said. “I’m still searching. I don’t have closure to this. I just don’t understand.”
Mitchell claimed Winfrey turned her back on him after helping to raise him for five years when, as a 17-year-old, he dropped out of the prestigious private school that she was paying for him to attend.
“I was young. I made a dumb decision, and Oprah wouldn’t forgive me,” said Calvin, now a 35-year-old truck driver. “I feel like what she did was wrong.”
Mitchell said he met Oprah in 1992 when he was cast as an 11-year-old extra on the ABC drama, “There Are No Children Here.”
He says one day he slipped past set security on set, got a Diet Coke from a soda machine and presented it to Winfrey, who was so touched that she offered the child a job as her so-called “personal bodyguard.”
After filming ended, Winfrey kept in contact with Mitchell — and even tried to make the boy part of her family.
“Oprah asked my mom if she could adopt me, and my mom denied her,” he revealed.
Mitchell’s mother, 56-year-old Eva Mitchell, told Radar: “It felt strange because I felt if someone wanted to help me with my children, that’s one thing. But to actually adopt one child knowing I have others? I couldn’t allow her to separate my children.”
Despite the refusal, Winfrey’s partner Stedman Graham continued to treat Mitchell as one of his own.
“He used to take me to [Chicago] Bulls games, and we went to the black rodeo that he hosted every year,” Calvin told Radar.
“We had a close relationship.” Oprah and Stedman were like family to me.”
Winfrey often gave the boy gifts, and Mitchell recalled that some came with messages attached, such as: “To my son Calvin, I love you.”
When Mitchell became older, Winfrey paid for him to attend The Piney Woods School, a prestigious Christian-based boarding school for African Americans in Mississippi. But Mitchell grew homesick and dropped out in his junior year, despite Winfrey’s pleas that he stay and graduate.
“I just wanted to come home, and Oprah didn’t understand that,” Mitchell said.
“She told me, ‘Calvin, just try to work it out. You can do it. Just hang in there.’ She was trying to inspire me to do what was right. But even after the long pep talk she gave me, I still left.”
After that – no more Oprah for Calvin. The abandonment, Calvin says, sent him spiraling into a deep depression.
“By leaving school, I’d failed my whole family. I’d let everybody down,” he told Radar. “But I thought Oprah and Stedman would still be a part of my life. At one point, it was like I’d lost my whole world.”
“If it were my child, regardless of what that child did, they still would be a part of my life. Oprah and I had grown so tight that I thought she’d be a part of my life — forever.”
Watch Calvin’s interview with Radar below:
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