Oprah Sister Secret Sparks Skyrocketing Ratings

That Oprah’s just full of surprises — too bad every daytime talk show titan can’t have a secret sib!

Oprah Winfrey scored her best ratings in nearly six years with Monday’s broadcast, during which she revealed that she has a half-sister she never knew existed.

Winfrey teased the big reveal on her show last Friday promising a “shocking family secret” that she said “literally shook me to the core.” That was enough to get folks to tune in…big time!

Monday’s “Oprah’s Family Secret” episode drew The Oprah Winfrey Show’s highest ratings in nearly six years, attracting 9.6 million viewers, up from a low of 3 million in June. The last time O scored an audience that large was for her post-Oscar party on Feb. 28, 2005.

Oprah revealed that she has a younger half-sister, Patricia, who was given up for adoption in 1963 by their mother, Vernita Lee. Oprah, nine, at the time was living with her father in Nashville at the time and never even knew that her mother was pregnant. Of course, this isn’t the first time Winfrey’s spilled the deets has unveiled on her groundbreaking show. She previously revealed that she was molested by a cousin as a child and became pregnant at 14.

Patricia, 47, is now a single mother of two living in Milwaukee. Explaining how she found out Oprah was her half-sister, Patricia said she had initially seen Vernita discussing her three other children on a TV interview in 2007 and began to work out her place in family history after her son Andre went online and found the birthdates of his mother’s siblings.

“We realized that Oprah could be my sister.”

Not only did Patricia keep the secret of her background under her hat for nearly four years, she’s reportedly snubbed seven-figure offers to sell her story to an assortment of tabloids.

The TV mogul acted against the advice of bestie Gayle King and longtime beau Stedman Graham with the broadcast. They never wanted her to go public with her family secret. “Neither Stedman nor you [Gayle] wanted me to go public with it. I kept saying ‘Well, I don’t want this story to be ruled by the tabloids,’ and he [Stedman] was saying, ‘So what, nobody believes the tabloids,’ I go, ‘But it’s true!’”