This information didn’t seem to make a difference to Taberski. "No one is holding me in my house as a hostage." -Richard Simmons refutes recent reports in interview w/Savannah - TODAY March 14, 2016 The people that surround me are wonderful people who take great care of me."Īnd the day after that, he called into the Today show to dispel the rumors, stating, “I just sort of wanted to be a little bit of a loner for a while.” In March of 2016, the day after the New York Daily News’s story ran, Simmons told Entertainment Tonight that "No one should be worried about me. In fact, Simmons himself had confirmed his welfare a year ago. The police reported that Simmons is “perfectly fine” and “very happy” and that any rumors about staff holding him hostage were “garbage.” Just a few weeks ago, on March 9, the LAPD notified People magazine that police had conducted welfare checks on Simmons at his home at least twice since January 2015. The “mystery” of Simmons’s welfare was solved before the podcast debuted And ultimately, Missing Richard Simmons came to say more about public interaction with celebrity culture - and the question of whether Taberski, or any of us, has a right to know why a public figure seeks privacy and solitude - than about Simmons himself.
By the end, everyone from the Los Angeles police to Simmons’s manager to many members of the media had challenged Taberski’s mission.Īlthough Taberski stated amid the backlash that he planned to finish his reporting for Missing Richard Simmons’s final episode, he confessed in said episode that much of what he wanted to include, in particular a confrontation with Simmons’s housekeeper, “got the boot.” (He doesn’t explain why.) The podcast ultimately concluded with Taberski interviewing Simmons’s manager, Michael Catalano.Ĭatalano, who had criticized the podcast to Entertainment Tonight, told Taberski in the episode that he believed the project has generated “more worry and speculation” than answers. During its six-week run, the podcast generated increasing controversy as listeners and the media questioned whether Taberski’s brand of investigative journalism consisted of anything more than badgering people and stalking a man who clearly wanted to be left alone.
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1 in their release weeks on the iTunes podcast chart as Serial fans and lovers of true crime and other mystery podcasts flocked to the project.īut as Taberski’s attempts to get close to Simmons ramped up, so did serious discussions about what right the public has to intrude on Simmons’s life. Missing Richard Simmons quickly generated buzz and media attention, with its first four episodes ranking No. The final episode was released Monday, and the answer to Taberski’s quest proved to be as open-ended as everything else about the “mystery.” “Richard Simmons completely and inexplicably stopped being Richard Simmons, and I want to find out why,” Taberski states in the first of what will be six episodes. (The studio closed last fall.) Citing their personal connection and public interest, Taberski has used the podcast to try to figure out what happened to Simmons, mainly by interviewing people once close to him. The podcast’s host, Dan Taberski, is a former Daily Show producer who took group fitness classes with Simmons at the exercise guru’s Los Angeles fitness studio Slimmons in 2012. Then, last month, a new podcast called Missing Richard Simmons began digging into the “mystery” of Simmons’s sudden reclusion. The article, citing a close friend of Simmons, raised the disconcerting possibility that Simmons was somehow being held captive against his will or was being coerced to remain in his own house by a manipulative housekeeper. Almost exactly a year ago, a widely shared article in the New York Daily News alerted the world that Richard Simmons - the beloved ‘80s fitness guru whose peppy enthusiasm and flamboyance became forever associated with the decade - had not been seen in public since February 2014.
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