'Jerry Springer Show' producer reveals horrific story of guests that made him quit the show

vt-author-image

By James Kay

Article saved!Article saved!

A producer who worked on the Jerry Springer Show has revealed which story on the programme made him quit his job.

The Jerry Springer Show was a widely loved TV show that ran from 1991 to 2018.

It saw many people air their grievances with others, often their loved ones, on national television.

While it was successful, it was not without controversy as people's real-life issues would often be trivialised for entertainment.

GettyImages-157471071.jpgJerry Springer was a popular TV personality. Credit: Stephen Lovekin/Getty

A new two-part Netflix documentary, Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, dives deep into the chaos behind the scenes, including the intense experiences of producer Toby Yoshimura.

In the documentary, Yoshimura reflects on the overwhelming pressures of producing the infamous talk show, cited by Yahoo! News.

“I wasn’t doing well. Emotionally, the pressure of that show was kicking my a**. I mean, stuff starts to grate at you, of stuff you ask people to do in the name of entertainment," he admits. "But at the end of the day, my pressure was to please Richard. That was it.”

Yoshimura developed a complicated relationship with executive producer Richard Dominick, who became both a mentor and a source of stress. This dynamic ultimately led Yoshimura into a downward spiral.

“The only way I could deal with it was I was s**t-faced hammered for four days. Then I’d sober up and do my show and crawl back into a bottle," he candidly shares in the documentary. "Then tequila stopped working. Cocaine was right on the heels of it.”


The breaking point came during a particularly disturbing interaction with a potential guest. Yoshimura recounts the haunting moment: "I remember one night a woman called the show because she wanted to call her dad to stop ordering her at the website that she’s a hooker on cause they’d send her and she’d have to do the job. This had been going on since she was 16, right?"

Despite his disbelief, the woman’s father agreed to appear on the show. “I’m like, ‘I’m not gonna get this f**king story, the dad’s not gonna come, right?’ And he came. And I was dumbfounded,” Yoshimura says.

After the taping, Yoshimura visited both parties, who were being housed separately under aliases. What he discovered was devastating.

“I knocked on the door, and her dad opened the door in a towel. And she came to the door. You can tell she was embarrassed. They’d just got done having sex. It was like putting two barrels of a shotgun to my head and pulling the f**king trigger," Yoshimura recalls.

"That’s something that I don't feel I need to contribute to. And that was the f**king end for me. I quit the show."

GettyImages-1173441853.jpgSpringer passed away in 2023. Credit: Gary Gershoff/Getty

Despite his emotional collapse, leaving the show wasn’t easy. “I didn’t tell anybody. I didn’t even tell Richard. I literally packed my s**t into a truck and I was a no-show. I wasn’t responding or anything,” Yoshimura recounts.

Dominick, however, reached out to him. “I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. It was Richard. He said, ‘You’re not coming back, are you?’ I said, ‘I can’t.’ He said, ‘I understand. Take care of yourself.’ And I couldn’t stop crying. I was broken.”

Although he returned to the show briefly in 2006, Yoshimura left for good in 2008, bringing his tumultuous journey with The Jerry Springer Show to an end.

Featured image credit: Gary Gershoff/Getty