Alycia Lane, CBS 3 and Dr. Phil: A Troubled History
The other shoes just keep dropping in the Alycia Lane saga. The Daily News’s Will Bunch reports this morning that Lane has sued the station for defamation, slander and libel. Attempting in a 40-page legal filing to show a history of callous treatment by the station, Lane highlights the circumstances around her first appearance on the Dr. Phil show in 2004, calling it “a humiliating experience … forced upon her by her CBS 3 bosses in a bid to boost ratings.”
In our February 2008 story “The Very Public Self-Destruction of Alycia Lane,” Vicki Glembocki was the first to break the details behind Lane’s appearance with Dr. Phil:
So in spring 2004, then-general manager Peter Dunn sent Lane to Los Angeles to interview Dr. Phil McGraw. To promote his new series Relationship Rescue Retreat, Dr. Phil had granted interviews to reporters in several large markets.
Lane and a cameraman sat in the Dr. Phil studio, watching as two upcoming episodes were taped. Then, with the audience gone, the interview began. It started out as a regular Q&A. But then something happened. Lane asked Dr. Phil, who knew that her divorce had been finalized in November, “Why is divorce so hard?” Her voice cracked. Her chin quivered. She wiped a tear running down her cheek. “You’re crying for the man you wish he was, not the man he was,” Dr. Phil told her. At the end, she hugged him.
Back in Philly, when people at the station watched the raw tape, they realized Lane was suffering more than anyone knew. But management was aware that other stations in Philly were having lots of success with female newscasters airing first-person stories about their own struggles. The previous fall, pregnant NBC 10 anchor Renee Chenault-Fattah brought cameras to her ultrasound. And it was May sweeps.
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.
Read the full story in our archives.
