Oprah Winfrey doesn’t want to catch two right-wingers’ MAGA cooties — even if she’s responsible for making them famous.
The media mogul finally addressed unleashing Dr. Phil McGraw and Dr. Mehmet Oz, the current Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator, upon the world by inviting them on to her former, and extremely influential, talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show.
“People criticize me for Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz, because of their politics or their views,” Winfrey told Emmy Magazine in an interview published Tuesday. She later added: “Everybody has their own path in life, and it has not one thing to do with me, and I don’t have one thing to do with them.” But she sure as hell gave them a platform.
McGraw (who is not a medical doctor) first appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1998 after he helped her prepare for a libel trial in 1996 when the cattle industry came after her for claims she made about mad cow disease on her show. McGraw quickly resonated with Winfrey’s audience and received a weekly slot as a self-help expert. He got his own show in 2002.
“Dr. Phil, he was so practical, so down to earth, so real,” Winfrey told Emmy Magazine. “And he would ride in the car with me every morning on the way to trial, where I’m literally sitting on trial for six weeks. I felt that he was so instrumental in helping me. I thought, ‘Oh, you could help a lot of people. You should come on my show.’”
Winfrey told Emmy Magazine her close friend Gayle King, a CBS Mornings co-host, introduced her to Oz. “He explained practical things like colon cancer and bowel movements,” Winfrey told the outlet. “I thought he had the language for explaining medical things in a way that was helpful to me. I thought it would be helpful to many other people. And that is how they ended up on the show.”
She concluded, “At the time, the reason and intention behind me giving them their breaks was I thought they had valuable information to share that had been meaningful to me.”
Many critics of the two men would argue they’ve been anything but valuable or meaningful since.
McGraw pressured the parents of troubled teens who appeared on his show to go to Turn-Around Ranch, a treatment facility in Escalante, Utah, that works with kids. The facility has since been plagued by lawsuits and allegations of abuse by former participants and families. He is accused of exploiting the late actor Shelley Duvall on his show while she was having a mental health crisis, and later reportedly harassed her when he received blowback.
Oz has a more official place in the Trump administration, serving as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. He has said people should have to “prove that you matter” to get Medicaid coverage, and has made the baseless claim that Medicaid was going to lazy, able-bodied people who watched TV all day and just didn’t want to work.
Oz is also known for spreading medical misinformation and selling weight-loss supplements with no scientific research supporting their efficacy.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
