On last night’s episode of The Daily Show, Trevor Noah had one of the all-time great talk show guests on the program: Oprah Winfrey. She was there to promote her new book, The Path Made Clear: Discovering Your Life’s Direction And Purpose, but they also talked about Leaving Neverland and After Neverland, the latter being her interview with the subjects of the Michael Jackson documentary. Although there were rumors yesterday that Oprah might have been distancing herself from the documentary and her special about it, she vehemently denied that this was the case.
Noah asked if Oprah ever wavered in her beliefs about the documentary when detractors tried to discredit some of the details in Leaving Neverland, and she said she never did. She also spoke about the backlash she received following After Neverland, saying, “I haven’t had that much hateration since I did the puppy episode with Ellen,” referring to the episode in which Ellen DeGeneres famously came out as gay. She continued, “But when I saw that documentary, I realized that a lot of people are going to get triggered by watching it, and that a lot of people will not understand what the pattern is. I had done 217 shows trying to get people to understand that it’s not about one person, that it is about the pattern, it is about the seduction. People call it molestation, but there is a big seducing that goes on, and that was important enough for me to take the hateration for.”
Watch the full interview above, and read our interview with Leaving Neverland director Dan Reed here.
