The Most Notable Part of Oprah Winfrey’s <em>After Neverland </em>Special

In a November 2010 episode of her eponymous daytime talk show, Oprah Winfrey invited 200 adult men, all of whom had said they’d been sexually assaulted as children, to join her studio audience. The opening shots of the episode panned across the room, to the men holding photos of themselves at the age when they said they were first abused. A harrowing chorus rang out as some of the men described their experiences in the sequence that followed: I was 6. I was 12. I was 7.

After the episode’s introductory montage, Winfrey interviewed the mega-producer Tyler Perry, who had shared his own account of childhood sexual abuse on her show weeks earlier. Together, along with the trauma psychologist Howard Fradkin, they spoke candidly about the long-lasting effects of sexual abuse and the specific stigma .