The Very Public Self-Destruction of Alycia Lane

Lane expressed her misgivings about the footage — she hated to appear weak. “She didn’t want it to air,” says her sister Nicole. But Lane also knew that the station had spent lots of money to send her to L.A. Plus, if viewers saw her in this light, they might stop calling her an ice queen.

The station advertised Lane’s segment — titled “Demons of Divorce” — during CSI and Without a Trace, with Lane’s face filling the screen, that tear running down her cheek. Portions of her interview aired for two days. “I was bawling my eyes out just to see how much pain she was in,” Nicole remembers. Lane never watched it, though it aired while she was on-set. Instead of looking at the monitor, she turned around in her anchor’s chair and plugged her fingers in her ears. Even so, she got thousands of e-mails of support from viewers. People stopped her on the street and hugged her.

The Dr. Phil interview gave the station its highest Nielsen ratings of the month. It was CBS 3’s best May sweeps since 1995.





ALYCIA LANE DIDN'T realize her appearance with Dr. Phil would haunt her. Yet once she let the genie of her private life out of the bottle, there was no way to shove it back in, no matter how often she told reporters, “I don’t discuss my personal life.”

“Whenever she used to complain about the coverage I was giving her, I’d say, ‘Alycia. You went on Dr. Phil,’” says the Inquirer’s Michael Klein. “She has a very complicated relationship with the press, in that she does want publicity, and then she doesn’t.”

Two months before she interviewed Dr. Phil, she’d met a new guy in Miami. Jay Adkins, an insurance entrepreneur from North Carolina, saw her on the beach. “[Jay] came in with roses and flares. Literally,” Lane’s sister Nicole recalls. “He swept her off her feet. She said, ‘This is it. I found the guy that I’m going to spend the rest of my life with.’”

“My world stopped when I met her,” Adkins says.

The Daily News trumpeted their engagement on December 20, 2004. In pure Lane fashion, it was less than a year after the two had met. Dan Gross called in the story while on vacation; he was tipped off — presumably by Lane herself — just a day after Adkins gave her “a ‘big and beautiful’ diamond solitaire” in Miami. She agreed to fly back to Dr. Phil’s studio, with fiancé Adkins in tow, when the station suggested a follow-up interview, to give closure to the story from the previous year. It was a smart move on CBS 3’s part: A happily married gal would be far less appealing to the gossip columns than a single one. Plus, the follow-up would air during May sweeps.

For now, Lane and Adkins only saw each other on weekends, traveling back and forth between Philly and North Carolina, but the plan was for her to move south. Her sister and parents had already relocated to Raleigh to be near her, and she’d landed an offer at the number-one station in the ­market — though she didn’t much like moving from the fourth largest market in the country to the 29th. “She says she doesn’t like all the attention on her, but she ate it up,” says a source who knows Lane well.