Jerry Springer was a very popular talk show that started in the 1990s. The show, hosted by Jerry Springer, ran for twenty-seven seasons. Despite its initial poor rankings, it eventually performed very well due to its outrageous guests and topics of conversations. Issues such as cheating, nudity, physical altercations, and other scandalous encounters fueled the talk show. However, one incident took things too far. So far that it caused the Jerry Springer producer to quit after he saw something behind the scenes that changed him forever.
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'Jerry Springer': Turns Out It Is All True
I will admit, from the few episodes of the show that I watched when I was younger, I thought it was fake. There is no way people could be that outrageous and do that level of scandalous activity. It is easy to stomach when you think it is all for the cameras. However, the new Netflix documentary, Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, revealed some horrifying truths.
First and foremost, it is real. Jerry Springer producer, Toby Yoshimura spoke out against the show. He shared how for the many years he was working on the show he was responsible for finding the shocking guests. He admitted that the job was all consuming. Daily Mail shares that Toby practically lived at the office. "Working 12 to 14 hour days, six days a week." All because he felt an insane amount of pressure to deliver these scandalous guests.
The show was so haunting to Toby that it forced him to turn to alcohol and drugs to cope with the madness. He admitted that "Sometimes the stories went to far," and he would desperately find ways to deal with it. He admitted, "They only way that I could deal with it was, I was s**t-faced hammered for four days." However, eventually even the alcohol wasn't enough. He continued, "And then the tequila would stop working...cocaine's right on the heels of it."
Additionally, working with these egregious people strained Toby's relationship with his father. His father claimed that what Toby was doing was not considered real television, and the messiness of it all caused the pair not to speak for four years.
The Behind The Scenes Moment That Made 'Jerry Springer' Producer Finally Quit
Working for the show for years, Toby was no stranger to horror and scandal. So what was the final straw that caused the Jerry Springer producer to quit? It was a behind the scenes moment that caused his undoing. He had found his next guest for the show. A woman who was being forced to have sex with her father.
In the documentary Toby explained, "A woman called the show because she wanted to tell her dad to stop ordering her at the website that she's a hooker on." While I think most of us would have walked away right there, this is what the show was made for so Toby pushed forward. He further explained that this atrocity had been happening since the woman was 16-years-old. Because he ordered her through the site, her company would send her, and she would need to perform the task she was assigned.
The Daily Mail shares that Toby admitted he never thought the man would agree to come on the show. Perhaps that is why he even entertained the idea of pursuing this guest for the show. However, to everyone's disbelief the man agreed to appear. Finally, the day of filming arrives. The father and daughter were kept in separate hotels, under false names so that neither would know where the other was.
The Breaking Point
Toby decided to check on the woman before filming began, to ensure she was doing alright. That is when he encountered the behind the scenes moment that would be his final straw. When he knocked on the woman's door, her father answered in nothing but a towel. The woman was standing embarrassed behind him. Tony needed no further explanation for what had just happened in that room.
He stated, "It was like putting two barrels of a shotgun to my head and pulling the f**king trigger...And that was the f**cking end for me. I quit the show, I didn't tell anybody." After that traumatizing incident, Toby packed his things, got in his truck, and fled. He refused to answer calls and now had to deal with how to heal after being broken for so long.
