Oprah Winfrey poses with Forest Whitaker (L) at the premiere of Lee Daniels\' The Butler in LA Oprah Winfrey says she regrets naming Switzerland as the site of an alleged incident of racism, and says the matter was \"blown up\" into a media firestorm .
Winfrey - in interviews to promote her US civil-rights-era-set film Lee Daniels\' The Butler - has said she experienced racism firsthand when she was shopping in a posh Zurich boutique last month and a sales clerk refused to show her a $38,000 purse, suggesting it was too expensive for her and offering to show her similar models that were priced lower.
The Swiss tourism office publicly apologised to Winfrey for the slight and the store\'s owner categorised the incident as a misunderstanding.
\"I think that incident in Switzerland was just an incident in Switzerland. I\'m really sorry that it got blown up. I purposefully did not mention the name of the store. I\'m sorry that I said it was Switzerland,\" Winfrey told The Hollywood Reporter.
\"I was just referencing it as an example of being in a place where people don\'t expect that you would be able to be there,\" she said. \"I\'m in a store and the person doesn\'t obviously know that I carry the Black Card, and so they make an assessment based upon the way I look and who I am. I didn\'t have anything that said, \'I have money.\' I wasn\'t wearing a diamond stud. I didn\'t have a pocketbook. I didn\'t wear Louboutin shoes. I didn\'t have anything. You should be able to go in a store looking like whatever you look like and say, \'I\'d like to see this.\' That didn\'t happen.
\"It\'s not an indictment against the country or even that store,\" she said. \"It was just one person who didn\'t want to offer me the opportunity to see the bag. So no apologies necessary from the country of Switzerland. If somebody makes a mistake in the United States do we apologise in front of the whole country? No!\"
The Trois Pommes sales assistant said over the weekend that she felt \"powerless\" and in the grip of a \"cyclone\" after Winfrey went on TV in America to make the claim.
\"I wasn\'t sure what I should present to her when she came in on the afternoon of Saturday, July 20, so I showed her some bags from the Jennifer Aniston collection.\"
The shop assistant however denied ever saying to Winfrey: \"You don\'t want to see this bag. It is too expensive.  You cannot afford it.\"
She added: \"This is not true. This is absurd. I would never say something like that to a customer. I don\'t know why she is making these accusations. She is so powerful and I am just a shop girl.\"
Source: UPI