The estate of the late Whitney Houston has hit back against Oprah Winfrey’s claims that the troubled singer fell off the stage on her eponymous talk show because of her drug use.
As reported by The Guardian, Winfrey spoke at the Cannes Lions conference in France on Tuesday (June 23), and claimed that Houston, who struggled with drug use in the latter years of her career, took a fall off the stage of The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2009 because she was “back on drugs.” In her appearance on the show, Houston spoke about her journey to sobriety and her time in rehab.
“She fell off of the stage,” Winfrey said, noting that she asked the audience of her talk show not to take any photos of the incident.
“I knew that if that story got out … she would be destroyed by that. And so even though the audience was there and the audience had cameras, I begged them not to put those pictures out because it would ruin her life, and they did not. That would not happen today, I can tell you,” she added.
Houston’s estate has since responded to Winfrey’s remarks, saying the singer “fell from the stage” but disputed that the fall was due to drug use.
“It was during a sound check and it was due to the darkness of the area and her unfamiliarity with the stage,” reads the statement from the Houston estate shared to Instagram. “She was absolutely not high.”
They admitted that Houston “faced personal battles,” but added it was “inaccurate and unfair to attach that struggle to every performance or every chapter of her life.”
“What the studio audience witnessed on stage was the result of discipline, talent, and commitment not the assumptions others project,” the statement reads. “Whitney’s humanity included triumphs and struggles, but on that day, she showed up as the professional and gifted artist she always worked to be. We owe her the dignity of telling the truth not repeating myths.”
Houston died in 2012 after she accidentally drowned in her bathtub at the Beverly Hilton hotel. The autopsy revealed that her drowning was the result of “effects of atherosclerotic heart disease and cocaine use,” and she had several drugs in her system at the time she died.
