Wendy Kaufman, best known as the “Snapple Lady,” revealed in a new interview that she battled coke addiction for nearly a decade before landing the biggest job of her life. Watch her emotional story in the clip above.
Kaufman, 58, made the revelation during an episode of Oprah: Where Are They Now? on Saturday, October 1. “I did try coke, and I loved it. I started to do cocaine in 1980, right after I graduated college. By 1989, I could press my cheek and blood would come out of my nose. I was so sick that it really did bring me to my knees,” Kaufman said. “I said to God, on my knees, hysterical crying, ‘Either kill me or please, please help me get well. I cannot live like this for one second longer.'”
“People just loved me and I remember crying, literally, like, ‘What did I do to myself? What did I do to myself for all these years?'” she continued. “So, the addiction was great because, in a way, it made me really look at myself and re-evaluate everything.”
Kaufman almost didn’t land the gig, though. “It was definitely controversial,” she recalled. “There were fights in the main office. ‘How are you going to take the fat girl from the order department and put her on national TV?!'”
Despite those doubts, Kaufman went on to be a Snapple spokesperson for 17 years. Leaving it behind in 2008 was tough, but she now works at her husband’s patio furniture business in Massachusetts.
“How do you separate when everybody says, ‘Oh my God, it’s the Snapple Lady’? I didn’t even have a brand, so I’m the Snapple Lady without being the Snapple Lady,” she said. “I had to embrace that the personal part of me was far greater than the Snapple persona and that it was time to move on.”
Watch Kaufman on Oprah: Where Are They Now? in the video above.
