Key Points
Paula Deen tells EW that she once missed a phone call from Oprah following her N-word scandal.
Deen recalls being out in her yard and coming back inside to find a missed call from the icon.
“I tried to call her back, but she didn’t answer,” Deen tells EW.
After she admitted in a legal deposition to using the N-word in 1987, Southern celebrity cook Paula Deen reveals to Entertainment Weekly that she received — and missed — a phone call from Oprah Winfrey at the height of the scandal that virtually ended her career.
Speaking to EW Sunday morning at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival — one day after the world premiere of director Billy Corben’s documentary about the controversy, titled Canceled: The Paula Deen Story — the 78-year-old restaurateur and former Food Network personality laments missing the call from Winfrey.
“That’s interesting that you ask that,” Deen says in response to a question about having any contact with Winfrey, clips of whom are shown throughout the documentary, as Deen was a frequent guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show throughout the aughts.
Deen continues, “I was out in the yard one day, walking around the yard, and I came back in, and I’d gotten a call from Oprah. I tried to call her back, but she didn’t answer. I will never know what she was gonna say to me.”
EW has reached out to representatives for Winfrey for comment.
She says that Winfrey attempted to call her “right after everything went away” for her, which would’ve been around 2013, when she admitted to using the racial slur in a legal deposition stemming from a lawsuit filed by a former restaurant employee. In the deposition, Deen said she used the word in a private conversation with her husband 16 years earlier after a Black man held her at gunpoint during a bank robbery.
The film charts the aftermath of the admission, with Deen losing several brand deals and contracts — including with the Food Network. Though she was one of the most famous faces in the food space at the time, her career never fully recovered from the scandal, despite a federal judge dismissing a portion of the former employee’s lawsuit that alleged racial bias at the hands of Deen’s brother, Earl Hiers, who died in 2019.
At the time, a spokesperson for Deen said, “As Ms. Deen has stated before, she is confident that those who truly know how she lives her life know that she believes in equal opportunity, kindness and fairness for everyone.”
Paul Drinkwater/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank
Paula Deen
In the movie, Deen and her sons, Jamie and Bobby, repeatedly defend her, maintaining that she is not a racist while praising her for telling the truth about her usage of the word in the past.
Deen also takes several swipes at her former detractors in the project, including fellow foodie and celebrity.land travel documentarian Anthony Bourdain, who died by suicide in 2018.
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“Anthony Bourdain did call me the most dangerous woman in America,” Deen says in the documentary, which flashes archival clips from 2011 that see journalists recounting Bourdain labeling Deen as the “worst, most dangerous person in America” over her unhealthy food recipes.
“God rest his soul. I felt like he didn’t like anybody,” Deen, who sat for several interviews for the project, says in Canceled. “Not even himself, maybe.”
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