Oprah Winfrey was visibly upset last month when a reporter asked her if she would take a paternity test to verify claims that an ailing Mississippi farmer is her biological father.
"I will not be taking a paternity test, ever! I've never heard of him. I know who is claiming to be my real father,” she told a New York Post reporter outside the Four-Seasons hotel in Manhattan.
Winfrey’s mother Vernita Lee says Oprah doesn’t have to submit to a DNA test to refute paternity claims by WWII veteran Nohr Robinson because she’s never met the man.
“I never seen him before,” says Lee, in an exclusive interview with N’Digo magazine, due out Thursday. “I really think this is outrageous for that man to say that and I don’t even know him. He wants Oprah to give him some money. That’s why he’s saying he is her father.”
Robinson emerged after biographer Kitty Kelly’s book “Oprah: A Biography” stoked claims that Winfrey was not sired by Vernon Winfrey.
Robinson said a DNA sample would prove his claims, and that he didn’t want anything from her other than to meet before he died.
Lee says he’s a liar.
During the wide-ranging interview with N’Digo, Lee also talks about her decision to leave Oprah behind in Mississippi while she moved to Milwaukee in search of a better life.
“I wanted to grow up and be a grown person,” she continues. “And I left home when I was 20-years-old. I just wanted to go to work and be somebody."
In her book, Kelly implies that Oprah's teenage years were troubled ones, in which the talk show host called her self a teen "prostitute."
“Even when she was writing her own autobiography, and she was finally going to come forward, she described herself as a ‘prostitute,’ which is a rather harsh description, I think," Kelly said during an interview with Matt Lauer on the Today Show. “She had talked about her teenage promiscuity, which is really kind of a natural outgrowth of a terrible, terrible sexual molestation she endured.”
Lee says that shouldn't be attributed to her absence.
“I am a good mom,” Lee says. “I know I am a good mom.When my children were small, I took care of them."
The magazine hits shelves Thursday, May 6 and the full interview will be available.
