Oprah Winfrey is closing the school she founded for girls in South Africa after two decades, a decision that will see the facility handed over to local authorities. The academy produced more than one thousand graduates over its twenty-year history, yet the move has raised questions that the official explanation does not fully address. The campus in question is the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, a boarding school built at a cost of roughly 40 million dollars. It was designed to serve young women from impoverished backgrounds who otherwise had almost no access to quality education.
The facility includes dormitories, classrooms, staff housing, and extensive grounds. According to the official account, the academy will close at the end of the 2027 school year. The campus will be transferred to South Africa’s local education department, and the school will cease operations under Winfrey’s management. Her team has framed the change not as an ending but as a transformation, saying they plan to expand into a larger scholarship program that reaches more young women across the country rather than only those at a single location.
That explanation has met with skepticism, largely because of the academy’s history. Winfrey has publicly described the school as one of her proudest achievements, and she invested her own money and name in it for years. A sudden handover of a facility of this scale, with this level of success, is unusual. The timeline of earlier problems at the school has come under renewed scrutiny.
In 2007, a court case involved a dormitory matron, one of the staff members entrusted with the safety of the girls at night. In 2009, seven students, all fifteen years old, were suspended. They were accused of assaulting other students, engaging in inappropriate touching, and pressuring fellow pupils to lie to investigators. Around the same period, a former dormitory matron, then twenty-seven years old, was arrested.
She faced charges of assault, indecent assault, and soliciting minors to commit indecent acts. She had worked inside the dormitory, in daily contact with the girls. A darker discovery followed in February 2011. Police found a newborn baby wrapped in plastic and hidden under a pile of clothing on campus.
The infant belonged to a seventeen-year-old student who was rushed to a local hospital suffering from heavy bleeding. Staff members said they had no idea the student was pregnant, let alone that she had given birth at the school unnoticed. Parents had entrusted their daughters to the academy largely because of the association with Winfrey’s name. These incidents, documented in police reports, court charges, and confirmed news coverage, stand in contrast to the image of a protected, secure environment.
The same pattern appears elsewhere in Winfrey’s orbit. In 2010, she hosted a Brazilian spiritual healer known as John of God on her show in an episode titled “Do You Believe in Miracles? ” His real name was João Teixeira de Faria, and he claimed to be a medium. Born on a farm, illiterate, and unable to read or write, he said he discovered his abilities as a boy when he predicted a storm that destroyed a nearby village.
Millions watched the episode. Three years later, Winfrey traveled to Brazil and filmed a special with him under a mango tree on his property. That trip gave him enormous credibility before her millions of loyal viewers. In December 2018, Brazilian police arrested John of God.
More than six hundred women came forward to testify about abuse they said they suffered at his hands. He was eventually sentenced to more than 370 years in prison. American investigators had already looked into sexual assault allegations against him in 2010. The pattern of trust placed in the wrong people, repeated over more than a decade, has become part of the broader discussion about Winfrey’s public image.
Comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan has been among the most vocal critics in this regard. He criticized her speech at the Democratic National Convention, noting the oddity of a billionaire lecturing working-class citizens about income inequality. Rogan also discussed Winfrey’s role in making the book “The Secret” a massive success. The book promoted the idea that people could attract good luck and even good health through mental focus.
Rogan pointed out that some took this too far, including a woman with stage three breast cancer who tried to imagine herself healthy instead of receiving real medical treatment. She ultimately died after stopping conventional care. He further argued that Winfrey’s celebrity interviews often avoided uncomfortable questions in favor of emotional, camera-ready moments that boosted ratings but lacked genuine journalism. Rogan also addressed her social circle, noting her long friendship with Harvey Weinstein and her name appearing in court documents related to Jeffrey Epstein.
He acknowledged that being named in a document does not mean wrongdoing, and his broader point concerned the nature of power at the highest levels of media and politics, where philanthropy and influence often overlap. The practical effect, in his view, is that wealth and connections can build institutions that ordinary people, and sometimes even law enforcement, find difficult to question or investigate. A 40 million dollar school built under such conditions can operate for years without serious outside scrutiny. The decision to close the academy now, rather than earlier, combined with its documented history of incidents, leaves two possible readings.
Either Winfrey is genuinely shifting her approach to help more girls through scholarships, or she is quietly distancing herself from a project burdened by twenty years of confirmed controversies at a time when public attention has intensified. The official narrative presents the closure as a positive evolution, but the timing has fueled ongoing debate.
