Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [112]
At the time, Dr. Resnik said the producer agreed to issue a parental warning before the show to restrict TV access to children. “Still, I don’t think she or Oprah was prepared for such a powerful subject,” he said, “but I applaud them for having the courage to bring the issue to the public.”
That afternoon, May 11, 1988, after watching the show, thirty-eight-year-old John Holm retreated to the garage of his father’s house in Thousand Oaks, California. When his father returned home hours later from an Elks meeting he could not find his son. “The television was still on Channel 7—the channel he’d watched Oprah on,” said Robert Holm. “The garage lights were on, but the door was locked from the inside. I banged on the door, but there was no answer. I had to break in. That’s when I found his body. It was horrible. I thought John had killed himself. But when the rescue squad came, one of the workers said he knew how my son had died because he’d seen the Oprah show that afternoon. I blame the Oprah show for my boy’s death. I lost my son and my best friend in the world.”
Mr. Holm hired a lawyer to investigate suing Oprah. “Her show led to John’s death—and I will never forgive her for that,” he said. In the end he decided not to put his wife through the pain of a lawsuit. “He was our only son and a beautiful person. We can’t bring him back.”
Publicly, Oprah defended her show. “What I got afterward were responses from grieving parents: ‘Thank you for explaining to us what happened to our boy.’ They felt a lot better knowing, they said. Before, they had been torturing themselves that they were to blame.” Privately, she worried about the possibility of having to defend a wrongful-death suit.
“I got a call after the show from her producer, saying parents might sue and asking if I would serve as a witness for Oprah,” recalled Dr. Resnik. “I said I would because I believe that having information about such risky behavior is better than not having any information at all.”
Oprah was accused of triggering another death when she hosted a show called “Bad Influence Friends,” featuring a marriage therapist, an engaged couple having difficulties with their relationship, and a twenty-eight-year-old electronics technician branded by the engaged man’s fiancée as the cause of the couple’s problems. The engaged woman said that “Mike,” her fiancé’s best friend, was an ex–drug user and a big drinker who flirted with other women even though he was married. The camera zoomed in on Mike with the words Bad Influence under his face. Oprah told the audience, “Mike is married, but it doesn’t stop him from being Tom’s bad influence and keeping him out late—drinking and dancing and a little flirting, which Mike believes is all harmless fun.” Mike said he enjoyed going out with his friends without his wife. Oprah looked at her predominantly female audience, who hissed and booed. One angry woman called him a “major nightmare,” and the audience applauded. A shouting match erupted when Oprah asked Mike why he’d gotten married.
“Because I like the security. I like to come home. I like to have someone there.”
Thoroughly incensed, one woman shouted, “You can’t have both worlds, Mike.”
“Yes, I can,” he shot back.
“No, you can’t.”
Less than two weeks later, Mike’s father found him hanging from a ceiling fan in his Northlake, Illinois, home. “I know in my heart that Oprah’s show killed my son,” said Michael LaCalamita, Sr. “I believe he killed himself because he couldn’t take the humiliation [of how he came across] and the pressure [of the comments from friends and strangers after the show].… Oprah didn’t give him a chance to defend himself. She kept egging him on and on. When the crowd stopped getting at him, she would start another round of attack. It wasn’t fair. Oprah’s a TV star and he’s just a young kid. He didn’t know what he was getting into.”
The marriage therapist on the