Oprah Winfrey Reveals The Name She Gave Baby Son Who Died

Nearly 50 years after his death, Oprah Winfrey's baby boy has a name.

The talk-show guru revealed during a live appearance Wednesday that she had symbolically chosen a name for the premature baby she lost when she was 14, the Herald Sun in Australia reports.

“I did an interview with a reporter before I came to Australia and she said, ‘You should name the baby son who died,’” Winfrey, 61, reportedly told a 15,000-person crowd at Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena.

“So I have named him, I had a little boy named Canaan,” she continued, without specifying a spelling. “I did have a son. And I named him Canaan because Canaan means ‘new land, new life.’”

The media magnate, who embarked this week on a multi-city Australian arena tour of her one-woman show, also discussed her harrowing experiences with childhood sexual abuse.

“I was raped at nine years old by a cousin, then again by another family member, and another family member,” she said, adding that she’d attempted to hide her pregnancy at 14 due to the “pain and shame.”

Winfrey previously admitted that she had contemplated suicide from the stigma of having a child out of wedlock, calling the tragic loss of her son — who died before she could bring him home from the hospital — a “second chance.”

“I went back to school, and nobody knew,” she told Piers Morgan in a 2011 interview. “Because had anybody known at that time, I wouldn't have been able to be head of student council.”

“I wouldn't have been chosen as one of the two teenagers in the state of Tennessee to go to the White House conference on youth,” she added. “None of those things would have happened, and the entire trajectory of my life would have been different.

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