Mel Gibson [music] had been trying to tell the world for years about Hollywood's secret agenda involving children. [music] And now it is being reported that none other than Oprah Winfrey had been in the know and seemingly even been a participant from the start. According to some, the signs were already there when Mel made the sound of freedom to expose the [music] truth to the world.
One of the most disturbing problems in our world today is human trafficking and particularly the tracking of now [music] the first step in eradicating this crime is awareness. Go see sound of freedom. According to these claims, the film is being seen by some as exposing what they describe as hidden activity among powerful figures.
Reports suggest Mel Gibson did not hold back, speaking about fears within the industry, including the idea that public humiliation is one of the biggest pressures people face behind the scenes. You can't get mad. [music] You can't let it get you because you have to have [music] you have to make a deal with everyone else.
and it's almost unspoken that you are going to be over at some [music] point by people who you may have done something nice for. The movie itself directed by Alejandro Monte Verde and starring Jim Cavazelle, Mera Servino and Bill Camp focuses on the issue of childing. The film carries a strong message aiming to raise awareness about children being taken advantage of and the dangers they face.
However, instead of receiving widespread promotion, claims suggest the opposite happened. Major platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon reportedly did not support the film, and many well-known figures in Hollywood remained silent. This lack of attention has raised suspicions among some observers.
There are claims that influential elites may have tried to limit the film's reach because of the topics it covers. These claims suggest that powerful individuals did not want certain issues becoming widely discussed. Sound of Freedom is smashing it at the box office and is being attacked continually by the mainstream.
Why are you doing it? [music] Cuz God's children are not for sale. It appears that there's a cultural thirst for a film that presents an issue that you might imagine all people would agree on is worthy of attention.
The of children appears to be more pervasive than people have previously thought and are willing to discuss. And it seems that American audiences have a real appetite to see this story told. When something like this emerges that's entrepreneurial and perhaps Christian, which is one way of looking at reality.
I know a lot of you guys are Christian and I love Jesus Christ. People attack it saying, "Ah, it's to do with Qanon. " Well, I don't know, man.
It seems like that's a little bit of a stretch. The situation becomes more controversial with reports that the film was once connected to the Walt Disney Company, but was later dropped, leading to further questions about why it did not move forward under that banner. Discussions around this have also brought up the idea of elite groups.
Some reports describe a so-called good club said to include wealthy and influential figures such as Bill Gates, George Soros, Ted Turner, and Oprah Winfrey. Attention has especially turned toward Oprah Winfrey. While she is widely known as a powerful media figure and philanthropist, claims in these discussions suggest there may be another side to her public image.
There is, for example, her well-known relationship with Harvey Weinstein. So, Rose McGawan has put Oprah on blast. Rose recently called out Oprah on Twitter over her past associations with some controversial men.
Rose wrote, quote, "From being pals with Harvey Weinstein to abandoning and destroying Russell Simmons victims, she is about supporting a sick power structure for personal gain. She is as fake as they come. " Uh, and just to refresh your memory, music producer Russell Simmons has been accused of by at least 15 women.
Last year, Oprah pulled out of a documentary that's highlighting their stories because she and the filmmakers apparently did not see eye to eye on that project. And as for her former friendship with Harvey Weinstein, Oprah had said that she did not know about the sex accusations from women, including Rose, only that she had heard he was a bully. Uh, do you believe that she has a point here or does Rose have a point?
Where do you fall? Um, I want to tread very lightly on this because I do have a lot of empathy for Rose McGowan. She is a survivor who has been very vocal, did not hold punches to speak her truth, and she was silenced and bullied and threatened.
She is like a lot of survivors, especially in light of me, too, who have very post-dated trauma that they have not been [clears throat] able to walk through and actually heal from. So, I want to be sensitive to that. However, I think that the anger is misplaced because at the end of the day, Oprah is not the end all beall of everything.
There have to be other people who are rising to the occasion and being advocates and offering support. I think the idea that Oprah would have been able to take down this very strong patriarchy um and all of the power structure as a black woman coming up in media especially during that time is a bit ridiculous no matter how much power Oprah is seemingly has. So I think the conversation needs to be had.
People need to be held accountable. Weinstein had long faced criticism over his behavior and reputation in Hollywood. Despite that, Oprah remained publicly close to him, which many critics pointed to as a serious red flag.
Reports also claimed she encouraged and at times pressured actors to work with him. These claims fueled accusations that she was indirectly tied to his misconduct involving colleagues. For many observers, this seemed to clash with Oprah's public image as a supporter of women's empowerment and social causes.
Critics described it as a double standard, raising questions about whether her actions matched her message. But the controversy didn't stop there. Oprah also faced backlash for featuring Joan Terra Dearia, widely known as John of [music] God, on her show.
At the time, he was presented as a spiritual healer. However, he was later charged with multiple serious crimes and eventually sentenced to decades in prison. So, this woman, she's losing her eyesight and she'll do anything to get it back.
So, one day she hears about this famous spiritual faith healer in Brazil and she thinks maybe he can heal her eyes. So, she travels to Brazil with some friends and they get there and she meets this faith healer and she has a session with him and he has her sit down in a chair and he tilts her head back and then he pulls out a scalpel and he starts cutting right into her eye. Now, the woman, let's call her mother-in-law because she's my actual mother-in-law, but we'll get to her in a second.
First, let's talk about the faith healer. So, the faith healer, his name's John of God, and this dude claims that his God or whoever will heal people through him if he like does his hocus pocus and touches them. Of course, he has no formal training in medicine.
He's never been to med school. In fact, he dropped out of elementary school in the second grade. But regardless, he considers himself a healer.
And one day, he just decides to travel around Brazil and tell people, "Hey, look, I can heal you. " And people fall for it. In fact, they're really into it.
And over time, he slowly builds a following. And his following becomes so big that he eventually builds a spiritual healing center in the middle of this small town to accommodate all of his visitors. And there, John of God becomes known for performing what he calls psychic surgeries, which is exactly what it sounds like.
He uses no anesthesia, no sterilization, and he does these medical techniques on people that just don't make any damn sense. like he shoves surgical forceps up people's noses to heal them or he'll scrape the white of someone's eyeball with a scalpel in order to heal them. It's weird.
Like someone will come in with back pain and he'll be like, "Let's scrape your eye with a scalpel. That'll heal you. " But anyway, he claims this works.
He claims that he's cured people's cancer. He claims that he's healed multiple sclerosis. He claims that he's helped people walk who couldn't previously walk.
And while he's doing all this, he allegedly doesn't take any payment for all these healings, but he does of course accept donations. And he sells things to his followers like special healing pills that are just placebo. And he also sells, and I'm not making this up, bottled holy water.
And so by doing all this, Jon is starting to get really popular in Brazil. In fact, he gets so popular that ABC notices and they do a 1-hour special on him. and they treat him not as if he's a con man, which he is, but they treat him as if he's actually healing people.
The connection shocked many viewers. Critics questioned how someone with Oprah's influence could give such a platform to a figure who would later face those kinds of charges. Some argued that her endorsement helped boost his credibility and visibility, giving him access to a wider audience.
I wasn't sure would ever happen. One of the [music] most famous spiritual healers in the world, rarely talks to anyone on camera. John of God agreed to sit down with me under a mango tree on the grounds of the Casa.
A group of his patients gathered to watch. John of God [music] speaks only Portuguese, so Heather [ __ ] helped translate. Ready, guys?
You describe yourself as a spiritual medium. What does that mean, a medium? as a medium.
He's a spiritualist. He believes a great deal in God and he practices this mission already 55 years. Born on a farm to a family who rarely had enough to eat.
Joera Dea was the youngest of six children. His father was a tailor. [music] His mother a housewife who also ran a small hotel to make ends meet.
left school when he was seven [music] to work in his father's tailor shop. To this day, he cannot read or write. As a boy, says he [music] realized he was clairvoyant when he predicted a terrible storm that destroyed a neighboring [music] village.
This event began his journey as a spirit. Public reaction was strong. Some people said they were beginning to see a pattern, while others warned viewers to be cautious about figures promoted by powerful media personalities.
Oprah later expressed support for victims, but critics argued that the initial exposure had already caused lasting damage. [music] Alongside this, attention turned to the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa. The school was originally presented as a safe place for young girls from difficult backgrounds, but over time, serious concerns began to emerge.
Several students accused a dormatory staff member, Virginia Makopo, of she was arrested in 2007 and later faced multiple charges involving inappropriate conduct with underage students. The case drew international attention and raised serious questions about how such incidents could happen inside an institution meant to protect vulnerable girls. A former dormatory matron at Oprah Winfreyy's South African Girl School looked nervous and sullen as her trial got underway.
Tiny Virginia Makopo is charged with aing 16s and a fellow 23-year-old dorm matron, but the 28-year-old denies the charges. Her plea was that she denies all the allegations against her and she declined to give any plea explanation any def she did not raise any defense. and she they are reserving her defense.
The opening session Tuesday was public, but the rest of the trial expected to last all week will be private and the judge is allowing the teenagers to testify through closed circuit TV so they don't have to confront their alleged attacker in court. Winfrey, a victim of child abuse, has promised to overhaul the $40 million school. The Chicago based talk show host said school officials tried to hide the allegations from her.
I was, needless to say, devastated and and really shaken to my core when I first heard this news and I spoke to all the girls personally and I encouraged all of them, any of them who had had actually been harmed to please come forward. Winfrey opened the school last year to fulfill a promise she made to former President Nelson Mandela. The school gives girls from deprived backgrounds a quality education.
It also grooms them for leadership positions in a country where schools are struggling to overcome the legacy of white minority rule. Ed Donahghue, the Associated Press. The situation escalated further when the school's head mistress, Lorato Nomuyo Zaman, filed a defamation lawsuit against Oprah.
She claimed Oprah had suggested she was covering up the legal battle did not go to trial and was intriguingly settled privately. Just one week before trial was set to begin, Oprah Winfrey has settled a defamation lawsuit with one of her former employees. Lawyers say Winfrey and the woman who once served as the head mistress at her South African school met and resolved their differences peacefully and to their mutual satisfaction.
The lawsuit was filed following a scandal at Winfreyy's All Girls Academy in 2007. A dorm mother has been accused of students. And the head mistress claimed she didn't know anything about the allegations.
That time, Winfrey said she had lost confidence in the head mistress and that she would be cleaning house from top to bottom. The former school official claimed the talk show host defamed her and she had trouble finding a job after those comments. She asked for more than $250,000 in her lawsuit.
Court papers suggest she is now working at another school in Africa. Even after that, more claims began spreading online. Some social media users alleged that multiple girls had gone missing from the academy.
These claims spread quickly, though no official confirmation or denial was ever clearly established. Oprah and her team did not publicly address these specific rumors, which only added to the speculation to talk about Oprah Winfrey School in South Africa. There have been reports all over the years of some [music] maltreatment and abuse happening in Oprah Winfreyy's school.
And of course, her name is connected to it because she's it's under her leadership. There have been so many suspicious activities happening, but recently there have been reports that girls have been going missing. It's been news on social media and there hasn't been any concrete evidence, but it has just taken social media by a storm of the missing girls that's been rumored to be coming from Oprah Winfreyy's school and they people on social media are demanding that they look for these girls and bring them home.
South Africa has seen a huge spike in childing and in the last few months. Civil organizations are worried that the country is losing its fight against the menace. Our reporter Ken Angmu has filed the story.
Over the past few months, several posters like these have been circulating on social media with pleas to help find these missing children who have been allegedly kid. Communities and civil society organizations believe that the issue of kidnapping is getting out of hand. According to the South African Police Service Missing Persons Bureau, a child goes missing every 5 hours in South Africa.
A nonprofit group, Missing Children South Africa, says the country is losing the fight against the rising number of child. Unfortunately, South Africa has seen an alarming increase in the number of kidnappings being reported in our country in the last year. We currently dealing with over a thousand kidnappings being reported monthly in South Africa.
We've got different types of kidnappings that we are dealing with. We've got opportunistic kidnappings, family and parental abductions, ransom demands, robberies, hijackings, kidnappings for traditional medicine purposes, and then also human traffing. South Africa has also been declared as a human traff.
As these incidents added up, some voices began linking them back to the larger narrative surrounding Hollywood power structures. They claimed that influential figures continue to shape which stories gain attention and which ones are ignored, pointing again to the limited promotion of sound of freedom as part of that pattern. The controversy surrounding Oprah Winfrey did not slow down.
New claims continued to surface, adding more fuel to an already growing fire. Reports began circulating that Oprah had attended parties hosted by Shaun Diddy Combmes, events that have often been described online as secretive and exclusive. In fact, Oprah has long been associated with none other than TD Jake Jakes, Diddy's alleged PR pastor.
Before we go, I have a very special gift that I want to give to this little girl. You going to try to break me down right now? Seriously.
Seriously, it's from my heart to you. Okay. So, come on.
Come on. Come on. You got to get up.
Got to get up. Okay. So, come over here.
Come on over here. And we're gonna stand here and I'm gonna hug you. It's from my heart to yours.
Okay. Dear Oprah, you have inspired an entire generation, [music] informed us, exposed us, and challenged us. You took us places that we would have never been able to go to meet [music] people we would have never been able to meet.
You brought them into our living rooms. We could [music] barely straighten up the house quickly enough before company arrived. Oprah, you resisted the gravitational pull to reduce your brand to the trivial salacious just for the triumph of high ratings.
You bucked the trend and endured the ridicle of lesser lights. As Michelle Obama would say, when they went low, you went high. So, I invited you here to say happy anniversary.
You made us forfeit the dismal waters of mediocrity to experience the blissful wine of becoming the highest expression of ourselves. While I challenged the sacred, you brought hope to the secular. Who is all a CEO?
Absolutely. An acclaimed actress and producer without question. A savvy business woman that's indisputable.
But the reason that the public loves you [music] so much is that we knew when our children were in trouble. Our marriages in crisis and our cities in ashes, you'd find a way to use what you've been given to give back to us. And you did it without abandoning your humble beginnings.
Nor did you acquies to the pressures around you. Instead of responding, you were too busy shattering ceilings. How do you feel about these rumors surrounding, you know, Diddy and TD Jake?
Man, what I think about it is this. You know, when I grew up in the church, the sinners was not supposed to have the same atmosphere with the saints. You had to be able to se separate the two.
[music] So I'm looking at him as a saint going to a party that ain't nothing but sin, drinking, maybe fornication, man on man, woman on woman, he on she. But maybe he there to lay some hands on somebody. Maybe he there to save some souls.
I know he got a contract with Revolt. So, I'm just like it it's just real strange that he would be found at any kind of Diddy party or any kind of uh place with Diddy unless it's in a business atmosphere. So now what he's doing is he's making he he man he making the Christians look real bad right about now.
All of this brings us back to the same point. Hollywood and some of its biggest figures [music] like Oprah may have been corrupted a long time ago by forces even bigger than them. Mel Gibson warned us and the world didn't pay attention.
First time I really [music] came over here, you know, I had a whole bunch of weird paranoid suspicions about what the hell was going on [music] because there was a lot of stuff I couldn't understand. Right. Um and nobody was really bothering to explain it to me.
They don't. [clears throat] And it it and I formed [music] a bunch of opinions about the town and about the people in it that were like surely that couldn't be because a whole place can't be like, you know, weird town, you know, where [music] the stranger wanders in and and all the people are in the bar and they all shut up when he looks at him and and they tell you don't go out of the house on the hill. It's like that.
Mhm. And then you go away and you think, "No, that's I was wrong. I mean, that's insane [music] thinking.
I'm paranoid. I imagined that stuff. That couldn't be the reason for why so and [music] so was acting like could it?
" And then you find out later on the track that you are exactly on track with a lot of this stuff. Not specifically on track, but that you could uh that some of your worst nightmares were real at the time. I mean, you think now this is what I mean by actually starting to swim [music] up or downstream with the rest of the salmon.
You know, eventually if you stay here long enough, yeah, you'll find yourself doing that.
