The real story of the woman behind Oprah’s amazing speech

WHEN Oprah took to the Globes stage, she had one woman’s name on her lips. And her true story is even more incredible than Oprah let on.

When Oprah Winfrey took to the stage to accept the Cecil B DeMille Award at the Golden Globes yesterday, she had one woman’s name on her lips: Recy Taylor.

So who was Recy? And how did she become the unwitting star of a speech so inspirational it has led to calls for Oprah to run as president of the United States?

Recy was just 24 years old and living in Abbeville, South Carolina, in 1944 when the unthinkable happened. As she walked home from church, hurrying back to see her husband and three-year-old daughter, Recy and her friends were accosted on the side of the road by seven armed men travelling in a green car.

They forced Recy into the car at gunpoint, drove her to a nearby wooded area and ordered her to strip. She begged to be set free and allowed to return to her husband and toddler, but was ordered to “act just like you do with your husband or I’ll cut your damn throat”.

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Six of the seven men raped her, with the seventh abstaining because he knew Recy (but apparently didn’t feel strongly enough to stop his mates from gang raping her).

After the assault, Recy was blindfolded and pushed out of the moving car onto the side of the road, where she was left for dead.

Fortunately, her father — who had been told about Recy’s abduction and was out looking for her — found her quickly and called the local sheriff.

Recy Taylor aged 91 in 2010. Picture: Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP

It turned out there was only one green car in the county and when the sheriff contacted its owner, Hugo Wilson, he admitted having sex with Recy and named his five accomplices, Herbert Lovett, Dillard York, Luther Lee, Willie Joe Culpepper and Robert Gamble.

The men denied rape, claiming they’d paid Recy for consensual sex. Recy contradicted this claim but her attackers were sent home without punishment.

Recy’s ordeal was far from over. Reporting her assault to the police made her a target, and her house was repeatedly set on fire by white supremacists. Eventually Recy and her family moved in with her father, who would stand guard outside their house all night with a shotgun to protect her.

That’s when fate stepped in — the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People sent a rape investigator out to investigate Recy’s claims. Her name was Rosa Parks.

Despite Rosa’s best efforts, the rapists weren’t charged or even arrested. News of the injustice spread across America, and some of the biggest civil rights activists of the day got behind Recy’s campaign.

The Governor of Alabama caved to pressure for another official investigation but yet again, the men escaped without being charged, despite one of them admitting the sex was not consensual, saying: “She was crying and asking us to let her go home to her husband and baby”.

Recy died Thursday, December 28, 2017. She was 97. Picture: Susan Walsh/AP

Recy never got justice. She died in Abbeville last month. Sunday, the day of Oprah’s momentous speech, would have been her 98th birthday.

The last time she spoke about her attack was in 2010, when she was still questioning why those men did what they did to her all those years ago.

“I was an honest person and living right,” she said. “They shouldn’t have did that. I never give them no reason to do it. I didn’t get nothing, ain’t nothing been done about it.”