There’s no denying that Oprah Winfrey is a super successful one-woman brand.

To note just one of her many achievements: The Oprah Winfrey Show was one of the most successful programmes in TV history, running for 25 years, pulling in such high ratings and awards to the point where Winfrey won so many Emmys that she opted to stop submitting herself for consideration.

Which is why it comes as a surprise that disgraced Hollywood producer, Harvey Weinstein managed to bully the media mogul.

“I was in Chicago, in my own little world, but what I knew about Harvey was that Harvey was a bully and that if Harvey’s on the phone, you didn’t want to take the call because you’re going to get bullied in some way,” Winfrey told Gwyneth Paltrow in a podcast for Goop.

Calls from Weinstein usually involved him pressuring her to have certain people on her show.

“What I do question for myself is why I was willing to put up with a bullying thing?” she continued. “I was willing to put up with, ‘Okay I’ll take the call,’ ‘Okay I’ll do that’… why am I willing to put up with an a**hole? Why we won’t tolerate other things, but you can throw phones and call people jerks or whatever and do all this nasty stuff.”

Weinstein, at the time of writing, has now been accused of sexual harassment, assault and misconduct by 84 women. Another 13 – including Rose McGowan and Asia Argento – have accused him of rape. Winfrey believes the #MeToo movement, which sparked from such allegations against the producer, was a long time coming.

“It had been coming, it had been coming,” Winfrey said. “It had been coming with [Bill] Cosby and nothing happened, it had been coming with Bill O’Reilly, even with the President of the United States, where people can hear the Access Hollywood tape and yet, nothing happens. It had been coming and [Weinstein] was the moment was where it all crystallised … In order for a phenomenon to be a phenomenon everything has to line up. It means the culture, the zeitgeist, for a particular moment in time to be ready, available and open to hear that message.”

Oprah Winfrey details Harvey Weinstein’s bullying phone calls to Gwyneth Paltrow