Did the daytime diva use the FBI to plug a leak at Harpo?

'DEVASTATED' Winfrey's reported reaction to secret tapes

Last December, a 36-year-old retail-store manager named Keifer Bonvillain made headlines around the world when FBI agents arrested him in Atlanta on extortion charges. The case itself was a run-of-the-mill white-collar crime investigation: According to an FBI affidavit supporting his arrest warrant in Chicago, Bonvillain secretly taped embarrassing conversations with an employee of a "Chicago-based company" owned by "a public figure" and had threatened to release the contents of the recordings to the media. The representative of the "public figure" contacted the FBI, which set up a sting operation. The feds nabbed Bonvillain as he arrived at an Atlanta hotel to pick up the alleged hush money.

"I was able to get that interview that no one else was able to get"What made the story newsworthy was the alleged victim: Oprah Winfrey. Though the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago (run by Scooter Libby-prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald) declined to confirm Winfrey as the target, her name was leaked to the press. In subsequent coverage of the incident, most papers, including the Chicago Sun-Times, portrayed Bonvillain as a small-time huckster who demanded money and threatened to release "potentially damaging audio tapes he'd publicize if he wasn't paid off." But Bonvillain, who has come forward for the first time since his arrest to speak exclusively to Radar, tells a different story. He vigorously insists he was set up, and that he explicitly and repeatedly told his alleged victim that he didn't want to extort anybody. It was Winfrey's attorney, says Bonvillain, who browbeat him into accepting $1.5 million for his silence, despite Bonvillain's fears that the transaction might be illegal. Oprah, Bonvillain claims, used the FBI and U.S. attorney's office to plug an embarrassing leak in her notoriously airtight organization, Harpo. Now Bonvillain faces a grand jury investigation into his dealings with Winfrey and up to two years in prison and a $500 fine if he's indicted and convicted.

Keifer Bonvillain is no Boy Scout. There are plenty of reasons to doubt his credibility—he admits to secretly recording phone calls, he refuses to name some people who might corroborate his version of events, he speaks occasionally in grandiose terms, the only other principal who would speak to Radar on the record about this story disputes his account, and he did agree to sell his silence to Oprah. He has been accused in the past of secretly taping phone calls to a lawyer and selling the tapes to a firm the lawyer was suing (he denies the charge). Whether he is guilty of extortion or not, it is clear that his motives when it comes to Winfrey were to some extent mercenary: He hoped to profit from information that he had obtained through apparently dishonest means. Still, his case—and his treatment by Winfrey's attorneys—offers a window into the lengths to which Winfrey will go to squelch a potential attack on her reputation.

Bonvillain provided Radar with audiotapes of conversations that back up key elements of his account. At the very least, they're proof that this is not an open-and-shut case of blackmail but a muddy affair in which Winfrey's attorney deftly lured Bonvillain into a trap that the FBI had laid. At one point on the tapes, Winfrey's attorney unequivocally states that he doesn't feel he is being blackmailed. Bonvillain was arrested three days later.
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