“You get a car! You get a car! You get a car!” — and a nugget of wisdom, too!
A fortunate Oprah Winfrey fan who was one of the lucky audience members to be gifted diamond earrings, a luxury handbag and a brand-new car during the TV icon’s “favourite things” giveaway is revealing what the talk show host said to the crowd once cameras stopped rolling, the NY Post reports.
“I was in the audience of the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2010, when she gave away Volkswagen Beetles for Christmas,” said Candi Davis, from Chicago, in her trending TikTok tell-all. “It was a crazy, crazy day.”
In the clip, which has raked in more than 3.1 million views, Ms Davis, a married mum of two, explained that Winfrey — now 69, who famously gave away her first round of free cars to a live studio audience in September 2004 — got extremely candid with show-goers after awarding them each shiny new vehicles. (Winfrey allegedly paid the taxes for each recipient of the cars gifted on Ms Davis’ show date.)
Representatives for Oprah Winfrey did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
“She kicked off her gold high heels shoes, sat down on the edge of the stage and talked to all of us,” Ms Davis recalled of the November 2010 exchange. “And she said, ‘I know you don’t feel like you deserve any of this stuff, and you don’t.’”
“‘None of you deserve it,’” continued the car-winner of Winfrey’s alleged address. “‘But you are worthy of it, and I want you to remember that.’”
Ms Davis went on to laud Winfrey’s casual pep talk as “a beautiful moment”.
However, cynical critics on social media argued that instead, the supposed word of encouragement was actually a thinly veiled diss.
“‘None of you deserve it, but you’re worthy’ … kind of sounds like a backhanded compliment,” penned a perturbed commenter.
“I didn’t like what she said. You don’t deserve it?” said a separate sceptic.
“Her remarks [were] wrong,” another hater harped, in part.
“It’s [giving] backhanded compliment,” another naysayer repeated, to which Ms Davis responded, saying, “It wasn’t meant to be. I just did not tell the story right.”
In a subsequent post, Ms Davis explained that Winfrey’s comments were meant to uplift, not belittle buffs of her broadcast.
“When the show was over, the audience was full of people just crying and very emotional about what we had all just experienced of being gifted the car,” said Ms Davis.
“There were a lot of people saying, ‘I should sell my car and give the money to my kids,’” she added, noting that folks were overly humbled by Winfrey’s benevolence.
Ms Davis continued, “Oprah overheard some of that talk and said, ‘Let me stop you right there. You don’t deserve this, and if you feel like you don’t deserve this, that’s valid. But I want you to feel worthy of it. I want you to accept it. I want you to leave here with the car and not feel bad. Release any guilt you feel about being gifted this car.’”
For more clarity, Ms Davis said of Winfrey, “She meant it in a really sweet way. It wasn’t a backhanded compliment.”
Elsewhere, the woefully misunderstood mother explained that each audience member was able to choose the colour of their 2012 Volkswagen — which, at the time of the giveaway, wasn’t even on the market.
And once the cars were ready for pick-up, she and her fellow beneficiaries were able to retrieve their individual rides, each wrapped in a big red bow, from their local dealerships.
In a follow-up post, Ms Davis — who confirmed online that she’s kept her cherry red Volkswagen Beetle in decent condition over the past 12 years — showcased the other posh loot she scored from the high-end giveaway, including a Le Creuset cookware, a burgundy Coach purse, sequin Ugg boots, pear drop diamond earrings and the car key fob Winfrey’s production staff handed out during filming.
“It was [all] really fun to keep,” she said.
This article originally appeared on NY Post and was reproduced with permission