–Dr. Phil has famously told his guests that “We teach people how to treat us.” Which must mean that the vibe the good doctor has apparently been getting from some employees is that they’d like to be treated like absolute garbage. BuzzFeed posted a wide-ranging exposé of what a dozen current and former employees of The Dr. Phil Show claim is a truly toxic workplace, alleging that verbal abuse and outright racism are just two of the daily indignities encountered.
“Everyone was just pretty miserable,” one former staffer told BuzzFeed’s Krystie Lee Yandoli of their working conditions. “You would walk into the building and there was just a palpable dread and anxiety. Dr. Phil—the show about mental health where everybody who works on it has terrible mental health because our work conditions were really bad.”
Another employee said that the psychological damage sustained from working on the show didn’t immediately dissipate after leaving the job. “Even when I quit, I had to go to therapy for it,” they said, “which is crazy because you’re working for a therapist.”
The big question, of course, is whether or not Dr. Phil McGraw himself is or was aware of just how toxic his workplace was. According to BuzzFeed’s story:
None of the people BuzzFeed News spoke with witnessed McGraw directly engaging in the sort of toxic and abusive behavior they said they experienced from others on the set or believe that he even saw the abuse. However, two current and 10 former employees on his show said it was common to be screamed at and berated by executive producer Carla Pennington and other senior-level staffers. “How can he not know?” said 31-year-old Tiffany Clark, who was part of Paramount Pictures’ rotating page program, which included work on Dr. Phil, from 2019 until 2020.
Several of the staffers who spoke with BuzzFeed, all of whom spoke upon the condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions, also claimed that they were encouraged to manipulate guests in ways that might make for a better show. One employee in particular claimed that she was specifically instructed to make sure that one guest, with a known history of mental illness, did not take her prescribed medication before appearing in front of the cameras. “They wanted her to look unstable and quote-unquote, ‘crazy,’ for lack of a better term,” the employee said. “Obviously this girl should be on her medication and that’s what we’re trying to get her help for, but for the sake of TV they wanted her to look off the rails.”
Both McGraw and Pennington are denying “every allegation” made in BuzzFeed’s story, which you can read in full here.