A producer who worked on the Jerry Springer show has revealed he quit the controversial program after coming face to face with a female guest at a hotel who had just had sex with her own father.
Toby Yoshimura worked on the show for many years and was responsible for finding outrageous guests, but he recalled walking away without even turning in his notice after finding a sex worker and her father together in a hotel room.
Speaking about the incident in the new Netflix documentary Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action – which will be released on the streaming service on January 7 – Toby admitted that working on the show led him to drink and use drugs.
“The only way I could deal with it was to get my face hammered for four days,” he recalls, referring to the pressure he felt to land outrageous guests for the program.
“Then I would sober up and do my show, and then get back into a bottle, pumping my body full of tequila. And then the tequila stopped working…cocaine came right behind,” he admitted.
Toby revealed the incident that actually made him quit The Jerry Springer Show, explaining, “A woman called the show because she wanted to tell her dad to stop ordering her from the website where she’s a whore.
“Because they would send her and she had to do the work… this had been going on since she was 16.”
Toby never thought in a million years they would be able to convince the man to appear on the chat show with his daughter, and admitted he was ‘stunned’ when the dad agreed to take part.
Toby Yoshimura worked for years as a producer on The Jerry Springer Show
Jerry Springer, pictured here in 1994, hosted the shocking chat show in which guests often fought physically with each other
Referring to the day of the filming, Toby said: ‘We had them under aliases in different hotels and they didn’t know where each other were.
“And I went to her hotel first to see how she was doing, and I knocked on the door and her dad opened the door in a towel,” he revealed.
“And then she came to the door and you could tell she was embarrassed. They had just finished having sex.
“It was like putting two barrels of a shotgun to my head and pulling the trigger,” he said, shaking his head, before adding, “That’s something I don’t think I need to contribute to.”
As his eyes filled with tears, Toby said, “And that was the fucking end for me. I quit the show, I didn’t tell anyone.
“I literally put my stuff in a truck and I didn’t show up, I didn’t respond to phone calls or anything. I couldn’t stop crying, I was devastated.’
Elsewhere in the documentary, Toby revealed that he practically lived in the office, working twelve to fourteen hours a day, six days a week, because he felt such pressure to get guests on the show.
He also admitted that his own father, Akira Yoshimura – who works as a production designer on Saturday Night Live – even disapproved of him for working on The Jerry Springer Show.
Toby says working on the chat show led him to drink and drugs and he often found himself working 12 to 14 hours a day six days a week.
Toby recalled: ‘One Christmas my father said, “What you do is not television, what I do is television.” I can still imagine his face and it was full of disgust. I didn’t speak to my father for four years, it was difficult.
“After that, my life revolved around the show, just keeping the balls in the air and making this the best show ever. I mean, you had to deliver.”
‘You could easily live in the office six days a week, days and nights. And such a pressure cooker was really difficult, because there were stories that probably went too far.’
Toby also claimed that producers were not responsible for anything that happened to guests after their appearance on the program.
“For months after they leave the show, are we responsible for everything that happens in their lives? That’s not us, we’re not responsible for that,” he says in the documentary.
Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action can be seen on Netflix from January 7.