It was classic Jerry Springer: sex, pain and public humiliation. But just hours later a guest was found dead, her body badly battered. And two others had disappeared. Could it be time to pull the plug on "reality" talkshows, asks Julian Borger
The show was billed as "Secret Mistresses Confronted!", hinting at all the vital ingredients of the Jerry Springer Show: sex, humiliation, pain and sensation. Life lived by exclamation mark, until the strain was too much to bear. The show's schedule promised: "Eleanor says her husband's ex-wife, Nan, won't take no for an answer. Nan has stalked them so severely that they had to go into hiding. Today, Nan will learn that her ex-husband is actually married to Eleanor!"The self-styled "ringmaster", Jerry Springer, has frequently been accused of staging its dramas, but Nancy Campbell-Panitz seems to have had no idea what was waiting for her when her former husband, Ralf, called her from Chicago in May to ask her to appear on the show.
After three years of fights, breaking up and making up, often punctuated by violence, Nancy apparently believed she was going to get Ralf back. They slept together the night before the show and she went to the studio confident that the other woman, Eleanor, was in for a shock.
She was wrong. When Nancy walked on to the stage, she was jeered by the audience, to whom she had been portrayed as an unhinged, jealous stalker. Worse was to come. Ralf and Eleanor announced the news of their own marriage and took turns centre-stage taunting the jilted 52-year-old.
"I want you to leave us alone. I want a normal life," Eleanor said.
"No, you don't. Neither does Ralf. He loves the excitement," Nancy retorted, reasonably enough in view of the setting. In desperation, she pointed out that it was she, not her rival, who had shared a bed the previous night with the 40-year-old German-born painter whom they both coveted.
Springer, ever the voice of reason, asked why. Ralf replied that he wanted to keep Nancy "illusioned", to ensure that she would appear on the show.
"I thought she might be humiliated enough to realise it was over," Ralf said.
"You can't humiliate this woman," Eleanor joked.
Springer turned to Nancy and stated the obvious: "He's telling you he doesn't want to be with you."
"That's fine. Bye," Nancy said, and - to the cheers of the studio audience - stomped off the stage, out of the world of television, until Monday night, when her name came up on the Florida state news. Only hours after the Jerry Springer episode was screened, dissecting her miserable private life for the world to see, Nancy Campbell-Panitz's badly beaten body was found on the kitchen floor of her home in Sarasota. Ralf and Eleanor were nowhere to be found.
The case has all the hallmarks of thousands of other sad and squalid tales of domestic anguish, except, of course, it had been screened before an audience of millions. The Sarasota police have yet to issue charges and are still looking for the missing couple, but Campbell-Panitz's death has already raised renewed questions about the morality and sanity underpinning high-octane talkshows such as Springer's, which almost every day set unhappy people in dysfunctional relationships at each other's throats.
It is the second known murder directly linked to a talkshow in recent times. Last year, the Jenny Jones Show - which shares studio space with Springer's programme, was ordered to pay $25m in damages after a former guest killed another one who had revealed that he had a homosexual crush on him in front of a scandalised, excited audience in 1995.
Scott Amedure had described a formerly private fantasy involving his neighbour, Jonathan Schmitz, a hammock, whipped cream and champagne. Schmitz, who had a history of mental instability, sat and listened, clearly in shock. But the show's producers sent the two men home together, claiming that they appeared to have reconciled their differences. Three days later, Schmitz shot Amedure dead.
"It's not my intent to embarrass the guests," the show's hostess insisted at the trial. With a similar display of shock and disappointment, Jerry Springer's publicist yesterday put out a short statement expressing regret at the "terrible tragedy" involving Campbell-Panitz.
But embarrassment and tragedy are the very stuff of the "reality" talk-shows. They often seem to be staged, but when they are real, they leave wreckage in their wake. So much so, that Jamie Huysman has launched a therapy business, called AfterCare, specifically to treat talkshow guests. He has 500 patients on his books. "The people who go on these talk-shows have got to be pretty intense, in pretty heinous situations," says Huysman. "These things have been kept private for many years, but they get seduced by the camera. It seduces you in an incredible way."
"Then when the show is aired, all the stigma and shame, which was a private factor becomes a public factor. The public exposure becomes a huge issue."
Huysman says he is not calling for the Jerry Springers and Jenny Joneses to be taken off the air, but he has appealed to them to provide some sort of counselling when a show is broadcast and afterwards when the full impact of public humiliation sinks in. What actually happens is that guests are coddled and treated like stars before a show is taped and then abandoned to deal with the fallout on their own afterwards. "We had hoped against hope that the industry would police itself. But nothing was done, despite the findings in the Jenny Jones case," says Huysman. God knows how many murders have to happen before anything is done."
The Jerry Springer show has been under pressure before to tone down its content, and two years ago, the producer-distributor, Studios USA, announced it would "eliminate all physical violence from the series", suggesting the brawls which had become the show's signature would be broadcast no longer. The announcement left television commentators wondering what, if anything, would be left to screen. But the declaration was soon forgotten.
The brief ceasefire over, the show does not attempt to hide what drives it. Richard Dominick, the co-producer, boasted to the Daily Telegraph magazine: "If I could execute a criminal on the air, I would do it.
"If a serial killer is gonna die and Huntsville, Texas, says you can kill him on your show, I would kill him on our show," Dominick said, apparently chuckling.
Springer, born in London in 1944, the child of Holocaust survivors, was unavailable for comment yesterday. Scott Yonover, a lawyer for Studios USA, said he could not even remember the Panitzes. "If the guy was 300 pounds maybe I'd remember him, or if he liked to be thrown up on, but no," Yonover was quoted as saying. The name meant nothing to him.
Should the case go to court - which seemed likely yesterday after Nancy's children approached Geoffrey Fieger, the lawyer who took Jenny Jones to court - Jerry Springer will be able to point out that the Ralf, Nancy and Eleanor Panitz triangle had a track record of violent fights long before they appeared on his programme. Ralf and Nancy, in particular, had been in and out of Florida's courtrooms arguing over who threw what at whom and who had threatened to kill whom.
They finally divorced in February 1999, but Nancy knew nothing of Ralf's marriage to Eleanor in March this year. In June, a month after the Jerry Springer show was recorded, she even bought a house for her and Ralf to live in. And Ralf did move in, followed soon afterwards by Eleanor.
The ménage à trois lasted only a few days before rows turned into fights and Nancy moved out. On the day of her death she went to the Sarasota County judicial centre to get a restraining order against Ralf and reclaim possession of the house. "He's frequently violent," she said at the hearing.
Earlier this month, she testified: "He had chased me with a knife and made threats about taking my life, the way he was going to torture me. He spent a couple of hours . . . telling me how he would kill me and my whole family, and he was trying to think of a way to do it."
Nancy went to her lawyer's office and then to the house she had just bought in the hopes of rekindling her marriage. At about 6pm, a neighbour heard a man shouting from the pool behind the house. The witness, Greg Miles, said he saw Eleanor standing in the street saying: "Ralf, please don't do this".
She seemed startled to see Miles and walked away. Ninety minutes later, the police were called after another neighbour spotted Nancy's body lying on the kitchen floor. By the time they got there, she was dead.
But her image lived on. Yesterday's television news showed clips from the Springer show repeatedly through the day.
Nancy sits on the stage in a navy dress, smiling. Ralf is smiling too. So is Eleanor. The crowd is cheering and Jerry Springer, the ringmaster himself, stands among them, beaming.
Crimes and the confessionals . . . talkshow disasters
The Jenny Jones Show
In 1995, Jenny Jones's 24-year-old guest, Jonathan Schmitz, was told that he was about to meet someone who had a secret crush on him. Schmitz expected his admirer to be a woman. When Scott Amedure, a young man he knew slightly, emerged from backstage to confess his crush, Schmitz was mortified. Three days later, he went to Amedure's home and shot him dead. As a mark of respect the Secret Crushes On People Of The Same Sex episode will not be aired.
Jerry Springer
In December 1998, two teenage brothers in Miami were charged with sexually molesting their eight-year-old sister. They claimed that a Springer show on incest had inspired them.
In 1997, a 16-year-old boy filed a law suit after a post-show fight left him with a broken jaw. His lawyer claimed that the show "created a dangerous environment".
Kilroy
In 1997, 35-year-old Rita Wilding was jailed for three years for taking revenge against a council housing officer who appeared on Kilroy. In 1992, Wilding had pushed Gerald Bunting down a flight of stairs, causing injuries that led to his premature retirement. When he subsequently appeared on the show to talk about violent women, Wilding took offence even though he did not name her and subjected him to a relentless campaign of telephone threats. At one point she visited his home saying: "We've come to burn you," and sprayed him with a liquid he believed to be petrol.
Forgive and Forget
This year, pregnant 17-year-old Charlene Burkey appeared on Forgive and Forget with her boyfriend, Larry Kieper. During the episode called You're 17, Quit Making Babies, Larry provoked Charlene into slapping him on the air. Three weeks later, Charlene was found shot in the head. Two of Larry's friends were indicted for murder and Kieper was also arrested when the police discovered there was a warrant out for him for a previous felony charge. Charlene died the day her appearance on Forgive or Forget aired.
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