The Dropped Bombshell: Talk TV Hits a New Low

A small Los Angeles production company named Ice Entertainment recently had a screening for “Peter,” a witty, satirical film about a few pretentious film students who gratuitously stomp all over a stranger’s privacy just so they can make a film about the experience.

“Peter” is fiction, a low-budget film ridiculing tabloids and other TV predators. Yet there is a beam of truth here. Just ask the real-life “Peters,” innocents whose personal lives have been invaded cavalierly by media not caring about the damage they cause in pursuit of a juicy story.

Or titillating television.

Flash back to last Wednesday’s episode of Ricki Lake’s syndicated talk show on KCOP-TV Channel 13. On the stage sits a young couple. The woman is in shock after hearing her boyfriend reveal--for the first time, Lake assured viewers--the truth about the children he has fathered with other women.

Lake really cares. Oh, boy, she aches. She’s tortured, utterly brokenhearted about having to embarrass this young woman so callously on national television. But what’s a host to do? The guest simply has to realize that this is for her own good. “We’re rootin’ for you, aren’t we?” Lake says, encouraging the studio audience to applaud en route to a commercial break.

Time to bring on the next human sacrifice.

When it comes to the nastiness of TV’s humiliation therapy, though, Ricki Lake is peanuts compared with “The Montel Williams Show.”

Williams and his syndicated talk series (also on Channel 13) are defendants in a $10-million lawsuit filed by Yvonne Porter, 33, of San Jose, in connection with her appearance on a Jan. 12, 1993, taping of that show in New York.

Among others named in the suit is Porter’s older sister, Kimberly Willis, who disclosed during the show--simultaneously to America and to a shaken Porter--that she had been sleeping regularly with Yvonne’s boyfriend of 14 years.

The suit charges the defendants with conspiracy, intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, fraud, negligent misrepresentation and false imprisonment--all of which, Porter claims, have caused her “humiliation, mental anguish and emotional and physical distress.”

The Williams show refuses to comment beyond claiming that its actions were “appropriate.”

The way a mugging is appropriate.

After being ensnared in a litigious maze for eight months, the suit recently was assigned to non-binding arbitration, meaning that a settlement may be likelier than a trial.

Yes, yes, you’re sick of the legal system getting clogged by get-rich-quick lawsuits cooked up by scheming plaintiffs and their shiny-suited lawyers. And, after all, blabbing and blubbering are the agenda of such shows. Don’t people go on them all the time and voluntarily expose the intimate details of their lives to the multitudes?

“Voluntarily” is the key word. A review of the Williams episode indicates that Porter was anything but a voluntary victim.

It all began with Willis responding to a query aired by the Williams show: “Have you ever had sex with someone because you felt sorry for them? If so, call 1-(800) . . . .” According to the suit, after hearing that Willis had slept with Porter’s boyfriend to “stop him from abusing” her sister, producer Halle Sherwin offered to fly both women to New York for an appearance on the show but instructed Willis to keep the “surprise” by not telling her sister the topic (“Mercy Sex”) or that she had slept with the boyfriend.

The suit contends that Willis persuaded her sister to take part by promising her an “enjoyable” experience that would “help her get on with her life.” The suit also claims that, on the day of the taping, Porter was kept in seclusion until her portion of the program. Producer Sherwin, the suit claims, told Porter that her segment concerned an “old boyfriend” and assured her that she would not be “embarrassed, humiliated or angered.”

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But a videotape of the episode tells all. Willis and Porter show up in the third segment. Porter looks merely embarrassed when Willis reveals that her sister allegedly has been abused by her boyfriend. Then the stunner, the moment that a great humanitarian like Williams waits for, the moment of degradation.

The camera is tight on Porter’s face as she hears her sister say about the allegedly abusive boyfriend: “I had sex with him to get him off of her back.”

Porter does a slow double take. Her mouth falls open. She’s mortified.

Williams announces that Porter is hearing this “for the very first time,” then assures Porter that her sister hasn’t done this “to hurt you, but kind of to make a public statement for her own self.”

The ungrateful Porter--not realizing that the compassionate Williams has arranged this public humiliation for her own good--shifts nervously in her seat. She lowers her eyes. She purses her lips as if seething inside.

The audience turns on Willis, who keeps adding details. Finally Porter speaks: “I didn’t know about this, OK? I had nothing . . . no idea. . . .”

After a commercial break, Willis explains that she’s come clean because it’s time “I get it out.” Porter replies: “On national TV?”

Time for the obligatory “sex expert.” Her face full of concern, psychologist Jacqueline Rose Hott leans toward Porter and asks, “How are you doing? Are you OK?”

“No,” Porter replies. Yet even before the word leaves Porter’s mouth, Hott is spewing psychobabble (“betrayal and rivalry”) about the sisters she’s just met for the first time. At one point, Hott and Willis argue across a silent, squirming, angry-looking Porter as if she were invisible. Then Williams turns on Willis, chastising her for doing this to her sister “here on national television.”

As if he and his staff hadn’t choreographed it.

Why didn’t Porter immediately get up and leave instead of subjecting herself to this torment? According to the suit, she attempted to do just that during the first commercial break, but a staff member refused to disconnect her from a microphone that ran down the inside of her clothing and was plugged into an outlet.

So Porter continued to twist like meat on a spit.

Williams had no way of knowing how Porter would take this public disclosure. What if she had a heart condition? She could have died from the jolt. What if she were emotionally fragile? This could have destroyed her.

But being reckless is Williams’ forte. Only recently, he built a two-parter around a man’s uncorroborated yarn about raping more than 90 prostitutes during a two-year period. Immediately after the taping, the man denied raping anyone.

Williams also had no way of knowing beforehand if Willis herself was being truthful. The show certainly wasn’t. Three times during the “Mercy Sex” episode, it identified Willis as having “slept with her sister’s boyfriend because she felt sorry for him,” even though Willis said repeatedly it was her sister she felt sorry for.

Obviously, doing good deeds can be a dirty business.