Oprah Winfrey drops bombshell about Barbara Walters' sneaky maneuver

Oprah Winfrey recently revealed that famous journalist Barbara Walters “swooped in” and took the interview she had lined up in 1999.

For the unversed, the 71-year-old American host and television producer’s interview with Monica Lewinsky aired on ABC’s 20/20 and became one of the most watched TV interviews ever.

It was Lewinsky’s first time speaking on television after the scandal with Bill Clinton. Before that interview happened, Winfrey was supposed to do the interview with Monica Lewinsky.

In the new ABC documentary Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything, which came out on June 12, 2025, on Hulu, Winfrey opened up about why her interview with Lewinsky was cancelled.

She said, “We have an agreement with Monica Lewinsky’s team. And then Barbara swooped in and said to Monica Lewinsky: ‘I can give you a better deal. I can not only do a Barbara Walters primetime special, but I can offer you Nightline. I can offer you Good Morning America.”

“And I just had The Oprah [Winfrey] Show. So, I didn’t like that,” The Color Purple star added.

Notably, Winfrey went on to admit that it did not surprise her when Walters did the famous interview “because Barbara had been number one, she had been it, she had been the madame for so long, that she saw that as her rightful place in the space.”

“And if there was something that deserved a special one-on-one interview, I think she felt like she was the one who was supposed to have it,” she noted.