“I stopped having the warm fuzzies for Oprah some years back,” said author Deborah Smith after reading Friday’s not-so-charitable thoughts about the If I Did It show. Smith tells a story of how BelleBooks wanted to use one of Oprah Winfrey‘s on-air remarks about one of their authors as a blurb on her new book—after all, if you had a book called Bra Talk, and Oprah had called your author “the best cleavage cop in the business,” you’d be all over that, too, right?
“When I finally got one of Oprah’s publicity minions on the phone,” Smith writes, “she informed me with no humor and no sympathy that the Great One’s comments were all copyrighted and could not be used by our tiny little (woman-owned, woman-run) publishing company in any way whatsoever to promote the book.” Not only that, but when Susan Nethero finally did get on the show a second time, the show’s producers nixed any mention of the book, and wouldn’t even let her give free copies to the audience members. “This is how Oprah empowers her fellow women?” Smith concludes. “It was quite an eye-opener, lemme tell ya.”
(As you may recall, Chris Rose has a similar story about his appearance on the show last month.)