Oprah Winfrey has shared a rare reflection on losing her brother, Jeffery Lee.
In honour of Pride Month, the 70-year-old media mogul has spoken about his death, at 29, from AIDS-related causes – 35 years ago.
WATCH THE VIDEO ABOVE: Oprah Winfrey speaks out on younger brother’s death.
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“It was 35 years ago that my younger brother Jeffrey Lee died from AIDS. He was 29 years old,” Winfrey reflected in a video posted to Oprah Daily’s Instagram on Wednesday.
“The year was 1989, and the world was an extremely cruel place.
“Not just for people suffering from AIDS, but also for LGBTQ people in general.”
In the 1980s, an HIV diagnosis was essentially a death sentence, with no treatment available for HIV/AIDS.
According to the World Health Organisation, AIDS has claimed the lives of more than 40.4 million people.
Although there is still no cure for HIV, medicines can control the infection and keep the disease from progressing.
Winfrey’s message continued: “I often think if he’d lived, he’d be so amazed at how much the world has changed.
“That there actually is gay marriage and a Pride Month.
“I believe that every single person has a right to love who they want to love, and be the person who they most want to be.
“And my hope for you is that you are living a life that feels authentic to you, and that you have the support around you to do so, no matter your sexuality.
“And whether or not you are celebrating Pride this month, or always, I wish for you the continued freedom to rise to your truest, highest expression of yourself as a human being.”
Pride Month was formally recognised in the US in 1999 by then President Bill Clinton, 21 years after the first Mardi Gras Pride Month in Australia.
Lee was Winfrey’s half-brother by way of their mother Vernita Lee.
The TV superstar famously had a challenging upbringing in Mississippi during the 1950s, with her mother being a single teenaged mum.
Speaking with US Today’s Hoda Kotb in 2021, Winfrey spoke of the challenges and the lessons the tough time taught her.
“I wouldn’t take anything (away from) having been raised the way that I was,” she said.
“It is because I was sexually abused, raped, that I have such empathy for people who’ve experienced that.
“It is because I was raised poor, and no running water, and going to the well, and getting whippings that I have such compassion for people who have experienced it.”
She called her 25 years on The Oprah Winfrey Show “therapy” for dealing with the traumas.
“The first time I was able to admit that I had been sexually abused, raped, assaulted as a nine-year-old happened on television,” Winfrey said.
“And it happened on television because a woman was sharing her story.
“And I thought, I swear, until that moment, I was the only person who ever had that happen to me.
“So in the middle of her in a show, sharing her story, I went, ‘That happened to me’.”
