"All Patricia wanted was the truth," an insider tells me. "She wasn't interested in selling her story even for a million dollars. She just wanted to know who she was, where she came from and if she had any brothers or sisters. She had no idea when she started this search she would end up being Oprah Winfrey's half-sister."
Oprah Winfrey promised to reveal a huge family secret on her show, and she didn't disappoint. The queen of all media introduced Patricia in an emotional and jaw-dropping hour of television. Patricia and Oprah share a mother, Vernita Lee, who had kept her pregnancy with her third daughter a secret all these years after giving up Patricia for adoption when Oprah was only 9 years old.
Confusingly, Oprah's other half-sister, who died in 2003, was also named Patricia, but her mom said she did not name the daughter she gave away.
Resourceful Patricia started the process of finding out her family history after seeing her then-unknown mother in a TV interview detailing facts that Patricia knew matched her birth mother. A DNA test finally confirmed Patricia was in fact Oprah's half-sister. This was in 2007. Since then, Patricia tried and tried to contact Oprah, but being the highly private person she is, this proved difficult until November of last year. They met, fittingly, on Thanksgiving Day.
"No one knows what the future holds for the family. Patricia doesn't want a dime from Oprah and certainly wasn't going to take money from a tabloid whose offers are now pouring in," an insider tells me.
And what really would an interview with Oprah's half-sister be worth? "The starting point would be 1 million," one influential tabloid editor tells me.
Patricia, you did the right thing. Who needs a million when you have the golden goose?
