Why Do They Do This? : A look at what motivates seemingly normal people to tell their secrets to Oprah, Phil, Geraldo, Sally, Joan and the whole world

“The last year that we were together, there was no sex. I knew there was something going on. He would leave at 7 a.m. and I followed him finally and I saw him with this girl.”

Those words were spoken by an emotional Jackie Santos, a Bangor, Me., resident whose husband of 29 years left her for a younger woman. Personal? You bet. Spoken privately to a good friend, a therapist or support group? Not exactly.

Santos, like a seemingly endless supply of real-life folks suffering real-life traumas, shared her particular pain in front of millions of people. She was a guest last year on “The Joan Rivers Show,” which, like the other morning and afternoon talk shows, seems neither to run out of exceedingly private topics . . . nor people to talk about them in public.

“I’ve done this kind of show for eons,” says Larry Ferber, executive producer of the Rivers show, “and it still never ceases to amaze me that people come on to talk about these things.”

Call it telecatharsis. Call them televictims. They are either lured by clever and shmoozy producers, or volunteer themselves, to sit with Phil, Oprah, Sally, Geraldo or Joan and discuss why their husband left them, why they sold their child, why they accidentally killed someone, why they won’t date women with children and so on.

Clearly, since the letting-it-all-hang-out philosophy of the ‘60s and the human potential movement of the ‘70s, it’s become OK, even healthy, to express emotions and share them with others. That openness--fused with a media boom that has almost come to mean that if something didn’t happen on TV, it didn’t happen--has given us this current phenomenon in which it seems we have lost our ability to be embarrassed or keep a secret.

“I refuse to be cynical,” says Sally Jessy Raphael. “I don’t believe these people who come on our shows think they’re going to get rich . . . or get a book. Most just feel something has happened to them and they want desperately to find some validity in their experience.”

Aside from this sense of validation, people go on talk shows for a variety of reasons (none of which is money, as many assume).

* Revenge. You’re mad at your ex so now you get to tell millions why he was a louse. “I thought, ‘I’ll finally get the last word, and on national TV,’ ” says Deborah Cosgrove of Paramus, N.J., who went on “The Joan Rivers Show” to discuss her husband’s running off with her best friend.

* A platform. You’re trying to get your kid back, or a message out, or you’re hoping a good-hearted lawyer out there will hear your story and offer to help. “I subjected myself to 300 screaming women because I feel so strongly that the American family is going down the tube,” says Anthony Nazzarro of Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., who went on “Donahue” to deride the impact of feminism.

* Fame. You’d love to get your 15 minutes worth and, let’s face it, you’re not going to end up in Kevin Costner’s next movie. “I get a kick out of being recognized after one Joan Rivers show,” says Nadine DeCarlo, a Ridgewood, N.J., woman whose clothesline of underwear got her into a nasty feud with a neighbor. “For weeks, people were stopping me and saying, ‘Keep that clothesline up!’ ”

* Benefiting others. This is how the shows usually snare their prey, and there is a nice feeling in knowing that by sharing your plight, you may be helping others. “I was convinced that telling my story would help other women seek help, to let them know there is a place for them,” says Santos.

* Therapy. It can simply feel good to finally unload your tale of woe, especially to someone you’ve come to feel you know. “It didn’t change my situation or my life,” says New Yorker Linda Gillen, who was part of the feuding neighbors show. “But it felt good to vent my frustration after seven years--and even my psychiatrist thought it was good for me.”

Those are some answers to everyone’s first question: Why would a normal person go on national TV to reveal the most intimate details? But there are other, more troubling questions: How does one person’s need for a good talk or a good cry mix with someone else’s need for a good show? Can telecatharsis, in fact, be harmful? Are good and vulnerable people being exploited or abetted by these shows?

Talk to those involved with the real world of therapy and most feel that televictims walk a very fine line once they get on these shows. First and foremost, they say, a tendency to become star-struck may lead them to confuse the talk show host with someone who can really help them long-term.

“In our society, TV talk shows have taken on the aura of the therapy group,” says Dr. Jill Harkaway, a Cambridge psychologist. “People have the illusion that Oprah and Phil are friends they know and can talk to.”

Adds Woodland Hills and Pasadena psychotherapist Ken Kaufman, “These people create a fantasy level, thinking their hosts will understand them immediately. But in real therapy, it takes a while to develop a rapport.”

Still, many seem anxious to reap the benefits of instant psychotherapy with a host who has become familiar to them. And so we get people like Stephie Van Wilgen, a young woman from New Haven, Conn., who first talked about a rape experience not with her husband or a friend or a shrink, but with Sally Jessy Raphael.

“I started watching her show and I just felt here was someone who would understand,” explains Van Wilgen. “I thought maybe my nightmares would finally end.” Van Wilgen claims she didn’t plan to go on the show but simply wrote Raphael a letter suggesting she do a show on rape victims.

The producers flew her to St. Louis to meet Raphael in person. “She told me I did not have to do the show, but the more we talked, the more I trusted her,” Van Wilgen says. “They did not coerce me but the next morning I did the show and my whole life changed.”

For Van Wilgen, relieving herself of the truth “after holding it in for 13 years” was a great relief, and whether she missed the subtle talents of persuasion around her is almost irrelevant. Hers may have been the best-case scenario of telecatharsis. The show’s producers called her when she returned home, found her a therapist and she’s gone on to work for a rape treatment center and have a child (whose godmother is Raphael).

But in most instances on these shows, there is little active follow-up for the guest after his or her story has been revealed and recorded. That’s what concerns those who heal people for a living.

“It’s very important to help put people back together again after they’ve spilled their guts,” says Harkaway, who is organizing psychologists to create an ethics code for supporting or participating in talk shows.

“I know that, generally, guests aren’t prepared well enough and there’s no debriefing, follow-up or referrals,” she says. “When I wrote an article about this, I received hundreds of letters from people relating bad experiences on talk shows. One woman said it was the second most traumatic experience of her life” (after the one that got her there, presumably).

The shows--rightly or wrongly--maintain that the guests are not their responsibility post-performance, though they insist they do try to treat and prepare them tenderly.

“Our objective is to help people, and if it’s at the expense of our guests, we’re not meeting that objective,” says Lorri Antosz Benson, senior producer of “Donahue.” “We want a good show and stimulating conversation, but we don’t want someone who’s in the throes of emotional distress.”

“I’ve yet to see an occasion when someone left a program more devastated than when they came in,” says Ferber of the Rivers show. “And we do try to prepare them and make sure they’re aware of the consequences. We did a recent program on housewife-hookers and found one in Queens. Right up until air time, we were saying to her, ‘Now, you’re sure you can do this?’ She just said, ‘Ah, my husband sleeps late and never watches the show.’ ”

Harkaway is still worried. “It sounds like it’s useful to tell Phil or Sally what you’ve never told anyone, but what about those close to you who also haven’t heard it before? We don’t know how many have gone on after their appearances to lose their job, their marriage, their standing in the community.”

One reason televictims often don’t realize the impact of their revelations on those watching out there is that they sometimes forget there are others out there. Part of this is due to the talent of the hosts, who manage a momentary intimacy with people they will likely never see again.

“It was like I just shut out the cameras, and Joan is so easy to talk to,” says Jackie Santos says of her experience on the “Rivers” show.

“They put a black curtain around me and Sally,” says Stephie Van Wilgen. “The studio was dark, I saw no people, so it wasn’t like I was doing a TV show. When we finished and I heard clapping, that’s when it hit me.”

Therein lies another concern. Media-savvy guests may know how to play to an audience but vulnerable first-timers don’t. Real therapeutic value comes from being in what therapist Kaufman calls “a protected, non-judgmental environment. I’m not sure how good it is to open up finally and have people applaud or boo.”

Speak with 20 talk show guests about their on-air experiences, and you’ll get very different reactions. Some found it fun, some interesting, some disappointing, some helpful. Some regret having done it, others would do it again. Those who’ve been most impacted are those with a cause for which they found actual, or simply moral, support.

Some got there because they were discovered by the show’s relentless and talented “bookers,” those who read beyond the first paragraph of a news story, those whose Rolodexes list things like “G” for grief, “I” for Incest. Those who, in the words of “Joan Rivers” senior producer Amy Rosenblum, “take every conversation one step further, to where we eventually ask, ‘Do you know anyone else with that problem?’ ”

Other guests called in themselves when they saw TV ads on the programs, which ask things like “Having a dispute with your neighbor? Call Amy at. . . .” The shows don’t pay guests, though they do handle travel and hotel expenses.

Complaints from guests range from the petty--they didn’t get the T-shirt they were promised--to the serious: They weren’t completely told what they were there for or how the segment would be handled.

“I would never do it again,” says Deborah Cosgrove, who went on the “Rivers” show to discuss being left by her husband. “I told them I’ll talk, because it was my way to get back at my ex-husband, but only if they left the children out of it. But that was one of the first questions. Also, at the last minute, they asked me to turn my back because they thought there might be a legal problem. I felt I had nothing to hide, but suddenly it looked like I did. I can’t say anyone was rude, but I felt very used. They’ll tell you anything to get you there.” (The show claims that the backstage personnel can’t dictate what the host will do; that people expect more than they get and that, in Cosgrove’s case, there was a threatening call from a lawyer.)

Earl Pinto, of Manhattan, who went on the “Donahue” show to discuss why he felt the feminist movement was negative, also felt misled: “ It was embarrassing. . . . It’s not that they lied about what was going to happen, it’s just (that) they understated it dramatically. They didn’t tell me who’d be on with me exactly, and there was a guy in a skirt. Suddenly, I was linked with that rather bizarre reaction to feminism, and the whole thing had a radical, frenetic look to it.” (Producer Benson of “Donahue” responds, “Maybe it happened, but I’d be extremely surprised, because we generally give our guests a good idea what they’re in for.”)

Gary Pole of Memphis went on “Sally Jessy Raphael” to discuss “getting tricked into pregnancy.” He asked for anonymity but didn’t quite get it. “They told me at first they’d put me behind a screen or scramble the image, but when I got there, they wouldn’t do it. So they put a blonde wig and aviator glasses on me and I came off looking like a sleazy playboy.”

Pole also says he wasn’t told there’d be an “opposing voice,” whom he described as a “loud-mouthed, abusive lawyer from California.” He admits he went on because he was curious what the reaction to his story would be, but he was bombarded by the heavily female audience. Robin Warshaw, of Merchantville, N.J., has been on several talk shows discussing her rape, and she’s even supplied the shows with other such victims. Now she says “no more.”

“Shallow is not a strong enough word for how they handle this issue,” she says. “Their game plan is to get victims on the air and show them struggling with their torment. The truth is, that’s not always informational or even helpful.”

She recalls one “Oprah” show last October where a few of the rape victims were not only placed alongside a rapist on the panel, but also found themselves earlier riding with him in the same limousine en route to the show, unraveling the women emotionally. “The whole show came off like a free-for-all, largely because there were also a lot of men in the audience that day,” says Warshaw. (The “Oprah” show says the incident sounds “unthinkable” to them, but others involved confirm that it happened and that they were told an intern had made the mistake.)

Yet many guests praise the treatment they received and feel they got more out of it than just a taste of the spotlight. It was a chance to unload, of course, but perhaps more importantly, to prove something to themselves.

“I was shocked I was able to do it,” says Charlotte Fishkind of Red Bank, N.J., who went on “Joan Rivers” to discuss her husband’s infidelity. “Both my psychologist and I were thrilled I was ready to go on TV and talk calmly and intelligently about something that had been so painful. I got treated very nicely and the segment was handled respectfully.”

“For me, it was like a coming out of the closet,” Anthony Nazzarro says of his “Donahue” experience. “There I was in front of hundreds of screaming women and four million people, but I was very sure about what I wanted to say. It really puts you to the test.”

“I just wasn’t sure I could talk about such a personal thing on TV,” says Jackie Santos. “I’d felt so ridiculed and humiliated by my husband leaving me that I felt this appearance would take some of the blame off myself that I’d been carrying for two years. I’d been in a kind of seclusion and this gave me a chance to respond the only way I knew how. For that, I’m really grateful to the show.”

The shows don’t deny that they have to watch the bottom line, but they insist that they try to stay responsible at the same time. “I refuse to believe you can’t do good TV and do good,” says Raphael. “I hope I do well for my company but I also hope I don’t exploit. It’s always a fine line and a matter of interpretation.”

DR, J.T. STEINY