The son of a woman killed by her ex-husband after they appeared on the Jerry Springer Show has revealed it ruined his life as well as ending his mother’s.
Jeffrey Campbell speaks out on Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action on Netflix, which goes behind the scenes of the hyped up US talk show similar to ITV ’s The Jeremy Kyle Show.
Ralf Panitz appeared on the show with his wife Eleanor and ex-wife Nancy Campbell-Panitz, Jeffrey’s mother, in 2000. But just hours after it aired on TV, Panitz beat 52-year-old Nancy to death in her Sarasota home in Florida.
Jeffrey said: “I was pretty surprised when she told me about going on the show. She didn’t like having her pictures taken much. She always had to hide her face or hide behind something, so to see her up there on the stage, just looking like a deer caught in the headlights, like what is going on here? I just wish I could go back and say ‘don’t do it’.”
Panitz and Nancy met online when she was a widow bringing up two children. He emigrated to the US from Germany and they married shortly afterwards, but there were domestic abuse issues and Nancy left him and filed for divorce. The pair were seemingly in touch again ahead of The Jerry Springer show appearance although unbeknown to Nancy, Panitz had remarried.
Jeffrey said: “My mother believed that Ralf had been deported to Germany, and that the show was going to pay for his travel back to America, and that they would reconcile, and that he would tell his new girlfriend that he wanted to be with my mother. But she was basically lied to, because that never happened.”
Instead the show was called Secret Mistresses Confronted and Panitz said on stage he had slept with Nancy the previous night but loved his new wife and was staying with her. To make things worse, Eleanor dubbed her a “red headed bitch from hell”. A humiliated Nancy left the TV stage and refused to go back out – even when producers told her they would not give her a return flight ticket to Florida if she didn’t.
Jeffrey claims his mum was “ambushed” by the show. She managed to get home after someone took pity on her at a bus station and bought her a seat home from Chicago to Florida. Amazingly after the show recorded, Nancy and Panitz got together again, although the details are unclear.
Jeffrey explained: “Somehow they got back together, she put money down at home, and then he went back to his old ways, apparently, threatened her again, and she wasn’t going to take it.” In a court case, a judge granted Nancy “sole ownership of the home and a restraining order against him”.
Panitz left the court calmly but then headed to a bar where their Jerry Springer episode was now airing on TV. After drinking and seemingly getting more angry about the show, he returned to the home and killed Nancy. Springer is shown in the documentary at the time saying: “I don’t mean to trivialize this. It was a very, very sad event, but it has nothing to do with the show.”
Former producer Tobias Yoshimura said: “Are we responsible for months after they leave the show for everything that happens in their life? We’re not. We’re not responsible for that.” Panitz, 42 at the time, was convicted of second degree murder and received a life sentence for killing his former wife on July 24 2000. The show had been recorded in May 2000.
During sentencing, Judge Nancy Donnellan said: “Ralf Panitz, Eleanor Panitz and Nancy Campbell were brought to Chicago by the Jerry Springer Show, then manipulated by producers of that show. Are ratings more important than the dignity of human life? Shame on you. Shame on you.”
Jeffrey said: “I feel like this whole situation just erased the whole middle part of my life. Now, at this point, I would hope I would have a blossoming career and be moving on. But here I am, 24 years later, still talking about it. You know, it’s had a pretty big impact and it’s hard to trust people. I don’t think they have ever been held accountable for anything. I’m sure there have been other people who have been affected, other guests we don’t know about, or people watching at home thinking ‘this is normal’. It’s not.”
In another segment of the two-part series, a former guest named Melanie recalled being given free booze to help wind them up. She says: “They gave us so many drink tickets. They were like, go hog wild, have fun. And so we got wasted. And then we got to the hotel. We kind of kept the party going. We probably stayed up until four am, maybe slept for an hour. I probably got to the green room at like, six o’clock in the morning. The producers were there from the get-go, just kind of like coaching us on what to say and how to act.”
Two ex-producers on the show back up her versions of events, and say the coaching was known as being “Springered”. Springer died in 2023 after suffering from cancer. On his X profile, Springer had jokingly referred to himself as a “Talk show host, ringmaster of civilization’s end”. In one old clip on social media he is seen saying in an interview: “I want to take this opportunity to apologise for everything I’ve ever done. I have ruined the culture.”
*Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action is available on Netflix from January 7.
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