Oprah Winfrey opened up about her teenage pregnancy during a live event at the Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne, Australia, People reported. The media mogul spoke candidly about the sexual abuse in her past, which resulted in a pregnancy when Winfrey was just 14 years old. She revealed the name she recently gave the son she lost just shortly after giving birth.
"I did an interview with a reporter before I came to Australia and she said you should name the baby son who died," the 61-year-old former talk show host told the audience, according to the Herald Sun.
"So I have named him, I had a little boy named Canaan," she continued, according to the Herald Sun. "I did have a son. And I named him Canaan because Canaan means new land, new life."
She went on to explain in detail the sexual abuse she suffered as a child. Winfrey said a cousin first raped her when she was 9 years old. Two more family members raped her after that and at 14 years old, she became pregnant.
Winfrey said she hid her pregnancy out of "pain and shame," according to People. She gave birth to her premature baby boy, who later died at the hospital.
The media guru said she viewed her son's death as a "second chance" in a 2011 interview with CNN's Piers Morgan.
"I went back to school, and nobody knew. Because had anybody known at that time, I wouldn't have been able to be head of student council," Winfrey told CNN. "I wouldn't have been chosen as one of the two teenagers in the state of Tennessee to go to the White House conference on youth. None of those things would have happened, and the entire trajectory of my life would have been different."
