'Jerry Springer Show' Producer Reveals the Heartbreaking Storyline That Finally Made Him Quit
The Jerry Springer Show producer Toby Yoshimura has opened up about the devastating storyline that led him to quit the controversial talk show.
In the new Netflix documentary Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, Yoshimura reflects on the emotional toll of working on the show and the shocking moment that finally pushed him over the edge.
"I wasn't doing well," Yoshimura confesses of the time he was on the show. "Emotionally, the pressure of that show was kicking my a**. Stuff starts to grate at you, of stuff you ask people to do in the name of entertainment. At the end of the day, my pressure was to please Richard."
That would be Richard Dominick, the show's executive producer, who acted as both a mentor and father figure to Yoshimura. Regardless, the intense demands of the job still led Yoshimura down a dark path, as PEOPLE reported.
"The only way I could deal with it was I was s**t-faced hammered for four days," Yoshimura admits. "Then tequila stopped working."
But the final straw for him came when a woman called to share her story of her father trafficking her since she was 16.
"She wanted to confront her dad on the show," Yoshimura recalls. "I thought, 'This story won't go anywhere.' But then the dad agreed to come on."
Yoshimura describes a chilling moment when he was visiting the participants' hotels before filming. "I knocked on the woman's door, and her dad opened it in a towel," he reveals. "She came to the door embarrassed — they'd just had sex. It was like putting two barrels of a shotgun to my head."
The disturbing encounter convinced him to walk away. "I packed my stuff and just didn't come back," Yoshimura says. "Richard called me and said, 'You're not coming back, are you?' I said, 'I can't.' And I couldn't stop crying. I was broken."
While Yoshimura briefly returned to the show in 2006, he left for good in 2008. His story highlights the behind-the-scenes challenges of creating controversial television.
Springer himself died at 79 in 2023. The two-part documentary Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action is now streaming on Netflix. Watch the trailer below.
