Billionaire talk-show host Oprah Winfrey appeared genuinely distraught yesterday when discussing abuse at her $40 million school for South African girls. But if the October editor's letter of her eponymous magazine, O, is any indicator, the timing of the assaults lined up perfectly with Winfrey's month-long, pan-Pacific vacation—the one she describes as, "Dedicated to myself, for myself ... To regroup. Rejuvenate. Restore my soul."

On Monday, the publicly big-hearted ladymogul said she wept for an hour and a half after finding out that one of the dorm matrons at her Leadership Academy for Girls outside of Johannesburg had been charged with 13 counts of indecent assault and criminal injury. According to the school superintendent, the alleged transgressions by the matron, Tiny Virginia Makopo, span a four-month period and include at least three "serious" cases of indecent assault. In one incident, she's accused of grabbing a student by the throat and throwing her against a wall—the alleged abuse led to the student running away from the academy. (Makopo is expected to plead "not guilty" when she appears in court on Dec. 13.)

Oprah claims she didn't hear of the abuse until October. Yet Reuters reports that grumblings at the school, which opened amid much fanfare in January, began in March, when parents complained that the school was "too strict," and its restrictions of visits, calls, and e-mail contact were "comparable to rules in prison." In May, other parents chimed in that their children were not allowed to eat junk food, and that that parents had to go through a security gate just to visit the school.

In July—within the four-month time frame of the alleged abuse—Oprah was "feeling so exhausted, I was numb," she writes in the autumnal issue of her mag. It's a letter extolling the virtues of pampering oneself. "Making the decision to look after yourself is the ultimate in health care," Oprah writes. So she headed out to her Hawaiian estate and spent four weeks munching on "golden flaxseed ... grilled fish ... and mangoes from my neighbors' tree," boasting of how the problems of the world melt away when you're watching "28 consecutive sunsets ... wrapped in a blanket on the back of a friend's boat off Vancouver Island sipping a glass of wine ... watching the whales swim by." Well, maybe not all problems.