Oprah Winfrey clears rumors concerning alleged 'secret son'

NEW YORK, Oct. 30 (UPI) -- Television mogul Oprah Winfrey set the record straight in regards to the rumors regarding her alleged "secret son."

In an interview with Entertainment Tonight the Emmy award-winner and former talk show host set the record straight about their past encounter, adding how this experience inspired her to open the Leadership Academy for Girls in 2007.

The man who approached Winfrey was Calvin Mitchell, whom Winfrey says she met in the early 1990s when she was filming There Are No Children Here. Winfrey says she felt compelled to help Mitchell, a teen at the time, and his family when she found out they where living in the projects.

She enrolled Mitchell in a private school and moved the family to a better home. However, she was disappointed to hear that Mitchell had been missing classes. The family said it was because they had no clocks in the house, making it difficult to wake up early to take the boy to school.

"We realized they don't have any clocks in the house," Winfrey soar in the interview. "We went out, Stedman and I, went to K-Mart that moment, got a bag full of clocks, came back to the house, taught them how to set the alarm and all that."

Despite her efforts, Mitchell still wound up getting expelled from the school. But that still didn't stop Winfrey from extending another helping hand.

"I had a long conversation with him about how disappointed I was but I was going to give him another chance," said Winfrey. "I found a school in Mississippi that was a private boarding school because I thought if I could remove him from the environment that he'd been accustomed to growing up in, that maybe that would be helpful to him."

Mitchell, however, told Winfrey that he felt the teachers didn't like him and he was uncomfortable in the environment.

According to People magazine, Winfrey cut ties with the teen after Mitchell sold his story to the tabloids She recalls the moment she had with Mitchell when leaving The Late Show.

"As I left, and he was looking so forlorn, he was like, 'Can I speak to you?' So I said to somebody on my team, 'Will somebody get Calvin's number so I can contact him later," Winfrey said. "When I realized the whole thing was a setup, I was no longer interested in speaking to him."

Winfrey said she was not hurt by the experience, but admitted feeling disappointed by Mitchell's actions adding that this had been quite the learning experience.

"I learned from that experience, if you really want to change somebody's life, you gotta be able to spend enough time with them to change the way they think about what their life can be," she says. "It isn't enough to give a person a new life or money or a new car, you have to teach them how to fish themselves."