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2017: the year no one was safe.
Not even Dr. Phil, most notably known as the dude who launch Cash Me Ousside girl’s career, has found himself at the center of a scandal exposed by in a joint investigative report from STAT and the Boston Globe.
Dr. Phil is being accused of putting the health of show guests at risk by providing drugs and alcohol to the people he adamantly vows to help.
Todd Herzog, a Survivor winner who appeared on Dr. Phil back in 2013 while battling alcoholism, was so drunk during his appearance on the show that he needed to be carried onto the set and lifted into a chair. “I’ve never talked to a guest who was closer to death,” Dr. Phil said into the camera.
But, Herzog claims he wasn’t drunk when he arrived at the studio. Instead, he said he found a bottle of Smirnoff vodka in his dressing room and drank all of it. Then someone handed him a Xanax telling him it would “calm his nerves.”
“You know, I get that it’s a television show and that they want to show the pain that I’m in,” Herzog said in the STAT x Globereport. “However, what would have happened if I died there? You know, that’s horrifying.”
Another Dr. Phil guest claims a staffer told her to go to an “open-air drug market” to acquire heroin for her detoxing niece.
Dr. Jeff Sugar, assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Southern California, had a particularly scathing interpretation of how Dr. Phil and his staffers operate.
“It’s a callous and inexcusable exploitation. These people are barely hanging on. It’s like if one of them was drowning and approaching a lifeboat, and instead of throwing them an inflatable doughnut, you throw them an anchor.”
Martin Greenberg, a psychologist who serves as the show’s director of professional affairs, called the allegations “absolutely, unequivocally untrue.”
I wonder what my mom is going to watch when Dr. Phil gets taken off the air.
[h/t STAT]