In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Oprah Winfrey opens up about how she doubled down on rooting for her bestie Gayle King following her widely applauded interview with R. Kelly as well as the repercussions of the media mogul's involvement with the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland.

Following the March interview with the reputed sexual predator on CBS This Morning, Winfrey said she gave her BFF some timely advice on renewing her contract with the network: "Get exactly what you want because now’s the time. And if you don’t get what you want, then make the next right move.” Winfrey even called King's lawyer, Allen Grubman, and told him that King should get what she wants.

"And Allen goes, 'What the F do you think I’m doing here? I said the same thing to her!'” Winfrey said. "The negotiation was already happening before her R. Kelly interview."

Winfrey's proud with how King handled the interview where the R&B singer claimed he didn't commit any of the sexual abuse crimes of which he's been accused.

"I sent her a text saying, 'Jesus looooves you.' But [the R. Kelly interview] could not have been better if I had done that myself. I think every interviewer thinks, 'What would you have done in that moment?' And what she did was absolute perfection."

Winfrey also spoke on her controversial role as host of the After Neverland special, a follow-up to the HBO documentary that features Wade Robson and James Safechuck who allege they were sexually abused as children by the late Michael Jackson. Winfrey says she got involved after she sent HBO's former chairman Richard Plepler a text.

"I didn't even have to be in it," Winfrey told writer Lacey Rose. "I didn't have to take on all that. I said to myself the other day, 'Why did I do that?'" 

"I really wanted to talk to not just the guys but other people who were seeing it because I knew that people were going to be triggered by it," Winfrey said in her interview. "I knew that there would be people who would be re-traumatized by it and would see themselves in it, and I thought, 'I can help thread the needle of what is actually happening here.' "

The blowback was real. Winfrey says she became the target of racist and vile slurs. She got called a "n****r," a "slut," a "hoe"; she was even told to "Go back to Africa."

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"I mean, you name it. Similar to the Michael Jackson thing. I happened to be on Twitter for something, and somebody had said, 'Oprah Winfrey is a disgrace to the race' or something. Yeah, the whole race. I decided, you know what? This isn't going to be healthy for me, so I just didn't engage with it," Winfrey said. "Oh, the hateration? Honeeeeey, I haven't had that much hateration since "The Puppy Episode" with Ellen."

Still, the talk show mogul doesn't regret the special. 

"No, I don't regret it. It wasn't really regret, it was just … actually, I was having dinner with friends and they were saying, "We saw you were in that." Like, "Why did you do that?" This is what happened. I saw it, and I was shaken by it. I wasn't even shaken by the fact that it was Michael Jackson, I was shaken by the fact that [filmmaker] Dan Reed had done a really good job of showing the pattern, and for years, I had been trying to show people the pattern. I'd been trying to say it's not about the moment, it's about the seduction," Winfrey said.

"The first thing I said to Gayle [King] when we watched it was, "Gayle, you've got to get those guys [on CBS This Morning]." She Instagrammed about it, and I go, "No, you shouldn't Instagram, you should just get those guys."

Winfrey, now 65, also admits that acting doesn't feed her anymore.

"I think to be really, really good at it, you’ve got to do it a lot. You’ve got to work at it. And it’s got to be something that you have true passion about," she said. "I don’t think it’s something you can dabble in. It was fun to be Mrs. Which, and I did that because I wanted to go to New Zealand and wear the costumes. But no, it doesn’t feed my soul anymore."

Winfrey appears on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter's first-ever Empowerment in Entertainment issue. She covers a variety of other topics, including the 2020 election ("Right now, I’d probably want to sit down and talk to Butta" [Pete Buttigieg]), advice she gave to Barack and Michelle on beginning their production company and why she recently left 60 Minutes.

Check out the rest of the interview here.

Now, check these out:

Oprah Said She's 'Thinking About' Opening An All-Girls School In The U.S.

Gayle King Speaks Out On R. Kelly Meltdown: 'I Thought I Might Accidentally Get Clobbered'

Oprah Finally Tells Us How She Felt About Her White Guest's Million-Dollar Seasonless Chicken

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