Composite image, left to right: Maureen Callahan, Oprah Winfrey and Megyn Kelly. Callahan and Kelly are shown reacting during The Megyn Kelly Show, while Winfrey appears during her interview on The Mel Robbins Podcast. Video stills cropped and combined by TheZeal.

For decades, Oprah Winfrey has occupied a remarkably protected place in American celebrity culture, immensely wealthy, enormously influential and treated by much of the media with a degree of reverence afforded to very few public figures.

But there comes a point when even Oprah's brand of grandiose self-help becomes difficult to swallow.

Megyn Kelly and Maureen Callahan reached that point long ago, and Oprah took them there again this week.

During The Megyn Kelly Show, Kelly and Callahan turned their attention to Winfrey's September 17 appearance on The Mel Robbins Podcast, where the 72-year-old reflected on her life, her purpose and, most importantly, herself.

Only minutes into the interview, Winfrey became emotional while describing how extraordinarily “blessed” her life had been. She then explained that, despite everything she had acquired, what mattered more was the person she had become.

Kelly was having none of it.

Rather than seeing a profound moment of reflection, she saw a spectacular exercise in self-congratulation, complete with tears.

Kelly suggested the moment could have been about gratitude toward the millions of ordinary viewers who helped build Winfrey's extraordinary career. Instead, she argued, the focus remained firmly on Oprah herself.

Together, Kelly and Callahan were merciless in their mockery. The show's own description characterises the segment as covering Oprah's “narcissistic fake crying” and “smug performative advice.”

And that is where their criticism lands.

There is something particularly jarring about one of the world's wealthiest and most successful entertainers offering sweeping lessons about fulfilling your life's purpose to people worrying about mortgages, sick relatives, difficult jobs or simply getting through the week.

Winfrey's latest appearance includes advice about becoming your true self, finding purpose and recognising what she calls “10-gallon people” trying to get “10 gallons worth of love” from “pint-size people.”

To admirers, it may be uplifting. To anyone whose tolerance for celebrity enlightenment has worn thin, it can sound suspiciously like extremely comfortable people explaining life to everyone else.

There is also some uncomfortable history behind the almost saint-like public image Winfrey has cultivated.

Perhaps the starkest example is Brazilian faith healer João Teixeira de Faria, better known as “John of God.” Winfrey travelled to Brazil to interview him in 2012 and called the experience “inspiring.” He later faced accusations from hundreds of women and in 2019 received his first prison sentence of 19 years and four months after being convicted of raping four women.

Other past associations have also looked considerably less comfortable with hindsight. Winfrey interviewed Sean “Diddy” Combs for O, The Oprah Magazine in 2006 and had a professional relationship with Harvey Weinstein during the years when he wielded enormous influence in Hollywood. Winfrey later acknowledged that she had been friendly with Weinstein professionally while saying she had no knowledge of his sexual misconduct.

Other controversies have chipped away at the immaculate image. In 2023, Winfrey and Dwayne Johnson committed a combined $10 million to the People's Fund of Maui, then faced backlash after asking the public to contribute. Johnson later acknowledged why the appeal had landed badly with people living paycheck to paycheck.

An unauthorized 2010 biography by Kitty Kelley alleged that Winfrey had exaggerated the poverty of her childhood to make her life story more dramatic, although that claim remains disputed and independent accounts have long documented real poverty and instability in her early life. Her Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa was also rocked by abuse allegations against a dormitory matron soon after opening in 2007; the matron was acquitted of all charges in 2010.

None of this establishes that Winfrey knew of wrongdoing later alleged or proven against the men mentioned above, that disputed claims about her childhood are true, or that she was responsible for alleged misconduct at her school. But the controversies and uncomfortable associations complicate the near-saintly image constructed around her and give critics reason to look beyond the polish.

That contrast has not escaped the internet. Among critical netizens, the particularly cutting nickname “Oprah SINfrey” has circulated online.

For Christian readers inclined to that criticism, 2 Timothy 3:5-7 offers an uncomfortable parallel. The King James Version warns:

“Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.”

The passage then speaks of those who “creep into houses, and lead captive silly women,” before concluding:

“Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.”

The language is more than 400 years old, and “silly women” is the biblical wording rather than a description TheZeal would apply wholesale to Winfrey's viewers. But the wider imagery is striking.

For decades, Oprah quite literally entered millions of homes through television, cultivating an audience particularly strong among women while presenting an evolving mixture of self-help, spirituality, personal fulfilment and emotional transformation.

Scholars have even examined The Oprah Winfrey Show as a form of female-centred New Age spirituality. One Oxford Academic chapter describes Winfrey as creating a “female-centered ministry” for a largely female audience by translating New Age spirituality through her particular cultural and personal lens.

The Mel Robbins appearance feels like a modern continuation of that formula. The television set may have been replaced by podcasts and YouTube, but the message remains familiar: discover your purpose, listen to your intuition, heal yourself, find your authentic power and continue searching for a better version of yourself.

The episode itself is titled Oprah Winfrey: How to Find Your Unique Purpose, Authentic Power, and Calling In Life. Later in the conversation, Winfrey even describes gratitude as “the religion that I practice.”

For Oprah's Christian critics, that makes the final words of 2 Timothy 3:7 particularly pointed:

“Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.”

Isaiah 5:20 offers another biblical warning that fits this line of criticism:

“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”

The criticism is moral and spiritual, not merely aesthetic. To those critics, the danger lies precisely in leading people astray while speaking in the language of goodness, enlightenment and self-realisation. Read through that lens, the biblical warning is not an argument against celebrity or wealth in themselves, but against mistaking polished spirituality, cultural approval and the appearance of wisdom for truth.

Kelly and Callahan don't merely disagree with Oprah's latest performance.

They do something legacy media are unwilling to do: they laugh at it.

And in this case, the ridicule may be considerably more entertaining than the sermon.

Watch: “Oprah's Completely Empty Narcissistic Fake Crying” by Megyn Kelly, with Maureen Callahan, host of The Nerve.