While Oprah Winfrey is one of the most well-known and recognizable faces in North America, it seems in Switzerland that’s not the case. The billionaire media mogul was in Zurich for Tina Turner’s wedding in late July and says she was a victim of racism. Oprah went into high end store Trois Pommes and asked to see a $38,000 Tom Ford crocodile skin bag, but the sales associate refused. Oprah asked again and the woman replied, “No no no, you don’t want to see that one, you want to see this one, because that one will cost too much and you will not be able to afford that.” “One more time I tried — I said, ‘But I really do just want to see that one,’ and she said, ‘I don’t want to to hurt your feelings,'” Oprah recounted to Entertainment Tonight. The star, whose personal fortune is estimated at $2.8 billion by Forbes, left the store without making a purchase or a fuss, telling the employee, “Okay, thank you so much, you’re probably right, I can’t afford it” and walked out of the store.
The store employee recently spoke out, telling a different version of the story Oprah relayed. “I simply told her that it was like the one I held in my hand, only much more expensive, and that I could show her similar bags. It is absolutely not true that I declined to show her the bag on racist grounds,” she told Swiss newspaper SonntagsBlick. “I even asked her if she wanted to look at the bag. She looked around the store again but didn’t say anything else. Then she went with her companion to the lower floor. My colleague saw them to the door. They were not even in the store for five minutes.”
The store’s manager backed up her associate, telling CNN that the entire incident was a “200 percent misunderstanding” and had nothing to do with racism. ~Naomi Leanage
