Inside Oprah Winfrey's family as star gets candid about brother's cause of death
Oprah Winfrey emotionally reflected on how "different" her late brother's life might have been today in a touching Pride Month post.
Oprah Winfrey pays tribute to her father as he dies aged 88
Oprah Winfrey got candid for Pride Month in a rare admission about her family life as she opened up on Instagram about her late brother, Jeffrey Lee, who tragically died of AIDS in 1989 at the age of 29.
Reflecting on the time around her little brother’s death, Oprah admitted: “The world was an extremely cruel place not just for people suffering from AIDS but also for LGBTQ people in general.
The media mogul let herself get carried away in daydreams as she pictured what her brother’s reaction to the modern world might be if he had lived: “I often think if he’d lived be so amazed at how much the world has changed. That there actually is gay marriage and a Pride Month!
“How different his life might have been had he lived in these times in a world that saw and appreciated him for who he was rather than attempting to shame him for his sexuality.”
Dressed in a rainbow sweater for the occasion, the 70-year-old ended her touching video message by wishing viewers a good Pride Month and the “continued freedom to rise to the truest, highest expression of yourself as a human being”.
Despite having been in the spotlight for decades as one of TV’s most famous faces, Oprah has managed to keep her family life far from the public eye, just offering glimpses of her parents or little anecdotes of her siblings.
The 70-year-old was born to housemaid Vernita Lee and future councilman Vernon Winfrey, who never married.
She spent the first six years of her life being raised by her grandmother and when she reunited with her mother to go live in Milwaukee, she had a younger sister, Patricia Lee Lloyd, who tragically died in 2003 with a coroner determining her cause of death at the time as an overdose of Oxycodone.
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Two years later, Vernita was struggling to make ends meet for both of her daughters and so Oprah went to live with her father in Nashville.
While she was away, the TV legend’s mother gave birth to another daughter, also named Patricia, who was given up for adoption before Oprah even knew she existed and when she did eventually return to Milwaukee she was greeted by her new baby brother, Jeffrey.
The talk show icon didn’t know she had a second sister until 2010 and the pair publicly reunited in 2011 on an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show.
