Pat Houston, Whitney Houston’s sister-in-law and executor of her estate, is firing back at recent claims Oprah Winfrey made about the singer’s drug use.
During an appearance at Cannes Lions where she received the LionHeart Award, Winfrey recently claimed that Houston had relapsed when she appeared on her talk show for the final time in 2009.
“I had such trust from the Oprah show audience that Whitney did, I think, what was her last show with us. She had gone back on drugs,” Winfrey told the audience, per Variety. “The first interview I did with her when we’d gone behind stage and I asked about her intentions, she was clean. But the day she came to my show to perform in front of the audience, she was not, and she fell off of the stage.”
Houston gave an emotional performance of the the Diane Warren-written song, “I Didn’t Know My Own Strength,” which appeared on her final studio album, “I Look to You.”
Winfrey said she “begged” the audience not to leak that Houston had fallen. “I knew that if that story got out that she’d fallen off the stage, that she would be completely destroyed by that,” she said. “Even though the audience was there and the audience had cameras, I begged them not to put those pictures up because it would ruin her life, and they did not.”
Pat Houston is countering Winfrey’s claims that Houston fell as a result of drug use.
She posted a photo of the singer from the episode on Instagram and confirmed that while she did fall, it was “during a sound check and it was due to the darkness of the area and her unfamiliarity with the stage. She was absolutely not high.”
Pat continued, “Like many people, she faced personal battles, but it is 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.”
Houston’s struggles with addiction ultimately led to her untimely death from accidental drowning in 2012 at the age of 48.
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