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18th March, 2010
Talk show host and media magnate Oprah Winfrey is expected to spend two weeks defending herself at trial in a defamation case linked to the sex-abuse scandal at her girls school in South Africa.
A federal judge this week refused to dismiss the suit filed by Winfrey’s ex-headmistress, paving the way for a March 29 trial in Philadelphia.
The billionaire talk show host, as a named defendant, must be in court and has rearranged her TV production schedule to do so, her lawyers said in a recent court filing. She also appears likely to be called as a witness.
After the abuse complaints surfaced in 2007, Winfrey said she had “lost confidence” in headmistress Nomvuyo Mzamane and was “cleaning house from top to bottom.”
A dormitory matron who worked under Mzamane was later charged in South Africa with abusing six students.
The judge found that Winfrey made both Mzamane and the dormitory parents appear “culpable” by telling parents, “I’m going to find a new head of the academy for the school. ... Dorm parents are gone, (Mzamane) is gone.”
The statement suggests Mzamane had a role in the mistreatment of the students, “which clearly would tend to ‘blacken’ plaintiff’s reputation or injure her in her profession,” U.S. District Judge Eduardo Robreno wrote in a 128-page opinion issued Monday.
Winfrey was in South Africa on Tuesday visiting the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, near Johannesburg, according to her production company, Harpo Productions. She opened the $40 million school for impoverished girls amid great fanfare in January 2007 and recruited Mzamane, a Lesotho native, from a private school in Philadelphia.
Winfrey’s lawyers sought to dismiss the suit on grounds the remarks she made at an Oct. 20, 2007 meeting with parents and at a Nov. 5, 2007 press conference reflected only her opinions.
But Robreno said a listener could infer she based the comments on facts gleaned from the school’s internal investigation.
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