New York – Talk-show host Keith Ablow said today that he’s “on the side of the angels,” protecting children from possible sexual predators by televising an hour-long interview with John Mark Karr next week.
Portions of the TV psychiatrist’s interview with Karr were aired today on NBC’s “Today” show with more to come in the next few days. Karr, briefly a suspect in the death of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, was freed from a California jail earlier this month when a child pornography case against him fell apart.
Karr’s creepy celebrity made him a wanted man in the ratings-obsessed television world. He chose to give his first extended interview to Ablow, a therapist and self-help book author in the first year of a show designed to compete with “Dr. Phil.” It is scheduled to air on Tuesday.
“I am baffled as to why anybody would consider this anything other than a public health or communications victory for the American people and for parents everywhere,” Ablow told The Associated Press.
It’s a rare chance to see what’s inside the mind of someone who has expressed a desire to have sexual contact with little girls, he said.
During the first three-quarters of a four-hour taping, Karr appeared completely normal, he said. “The face that emerges after three hours is somebody who makes your skin crawl,” said Ablow.
It appeared last week that ABC’s “Good Morning America” had landed the first Karr interview. A day after he was released from jail Oct. 5, he was with ABC producers in a limousine as they drove by a San Francisco school where he used to work as a teacher’s aide. Karr suddenly left the limo and approached the school, attracting police attention.
An ABC spokesman, Jeffrey Schneider, said that Karr’s behavior “gave us serious pause and ABC decided not to proceed with the interview.” With “GMA” out of the picture, “Today” decided to jump in and feature Karr. Today, Matt Lauer interviewed Ablow and showed clips of the interview, and it is scheduled to be featured on “Today” again on Saturday, Monday and Tuesday.
“I’m not a psychiatrist,” Lauer said after watching one clip.
“My take on him is this guy is more than a little off.” The “Today” executive producer, Jim Bell, was not available today to talk about why the show was doing four segments on Karr, a spokeswoman said.
Karr was not paid for the interview, said Laura Mandel, a spokeswoman for Telepictures, Ablow’s producers. Telepictures did pay to fly Karr to New York and for his lodging and meals – standard in the talk show world, she said.
Ablow denied a report in The New York Post that Karr was given alcohol before his interview. Karr asked for white wine and was given white grape juice instead, he said. He was “stone cold sober” and answered questions with no words slurred, Ablow said.
While he personally found the idea of a Karr interview “vulgar” and dismissed the idea it had educational value, New York psychiatrist Alvin Rosenfeld said he saw nothing ethically wrong with it. And he said that if he had his own talk show, he’d probably do the same thing given the pressure for ratings.
Ablow’s syndicated show has been on for a month and its ratings are roughly 25 percent lower than what was airing in its time slots a year earlier, said Bill Carroll, a syndication market expert for Katz Television. Those are the kind of numbers that put a show’s survival in doubt – unless it gets a jolt of attention, he said.
Ablow said he’s willing to debate anyone at any time about the propriety of giving Karr and his views a platform. The more people who know about Karr and what he thinks, the better, he said. To have the chance and not do it, his show “would have been complicit in any abuse suffered by a young girl in the future at his hands,” he added.
“I believe that there’s karma in the world and when you do the right thing you’re rewarded for it and when you do the wrong thing you have to pay for it,” he said. “We’re on the side of the angels on this one.”
