Jenny jones show gay crush
It was sort of trial by fire — if you’ll pardon the pun. I’d been writing for Between The Lines mere months before I was sent to Pontiac to cover the retrial of Jonathan Schmitz, aka the redux of the “Jenny Jones Murder Trial.” I’d not done a wonderful deal of crime reporting at this point. And I’d certainly never covered a trial. But it was my assignment, and so I took it on with great enthusiasm.
Experience or not, I had certainly heard about the case. It was now August 1999, and the murder had occurred some four years earlier in Lake Orion. Scott Amedure, 32, who had served in the Army until he came out as gay, was a bartender there. He had the unfortunate luck of having the hots for a straight 24-year-old, the aforementioned Schmitz.
Lots of gay boys have crushes on unbent boys. It’s happened to us all. But Amedure took it a step further. He signed up for an episode of Jones’ tabloid talk reveal titled “Revealing Same Sex Secret Crush.” Now, brain you, this may not have seemed like such a big deal. But this was nearly a quarter of a century ago. “Will & Grace” had not yet premiered,
A talk show stunt led to murder. Then a sister network turned the fallout into ratings gold.
The following article is adapted from “1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times.”
(Courtesy)
Prior to a 1995 taping, “The Jenny Jones Show” put out a call for guests, asking viewers to call its 1-800 number “if you have a secret obsession you would like to reveal to a homosexual friend.” Watching the exhibit in his trailer residence 50 miles northwest of Detroit, Scott Amedure and his friend Donna Riley called in to inform Amedure’s crush on a man they both knew. Their story made the cut. They traveled to Chicago to appear on the show.
“Now which of these ways,” Jones opened the segment, “would you choose to reveal your secret crush on someone? A: Would you compose that person a letter? B: Would you inform the person in intimate in case he rejects you? Or C: Would you tell that person that you’re gay and you hope he is on national television?”
Jones couldn’t finish her segue before the studio audience erupted with woos and screams. This was 1995, a time when fewer people came out of the closet and only a fourth of Americans supported gay marriage. The prospec
Talk Show Murder: The True Story Of The Murder Of Scott Amedure
In 1995, Scott Amedure revealed on The Jenny Jones Show that he had a crush on his friend Jonathan Schmitz. Days later, he was defunct . What does that say about our obsession with tabloid TV shows?
By Christopher Turner
On March 6, 1995, Scott Amedure went on The Jenny Jones Show to reveal his “secret crush” on a vertical man named Jonathan Schmitz, who was also on the tabloid talk show. Just a few days after that, Amedure was dead, and Schmitz had been charged with first-degree murder in his death. Schmitz utilized the so-called “gay panic defense,” claiming that he had killed Amedure over embarrassment about the revelation of a same-sex crush on one of the most popular speak shows of the 1990s.
That episode of the show was shelved, although it was eventually telecast on October 17, 1996, as part of Court TV’s coverage of an ensuing civil trial against The Jenny Jones Show. But in the criminal and civil trials that followed Amedure’s murder, Jones and her show became Exhibit A in an indictment of the perceived excesses and manipulations of speak shows and tabloid TV.
Schmitz
A Michigan Department of Corrections spokesman confirmed the parole of Jonathan Schmitz, who was 24 when he fatally shot an acquaintance, Scott Amedure, 32, on March 9, 1995. The killing came three days after Amedure revealed his infatuation with Schmitz during the nationally syndicated program’s taping on the topic of “secret crushes.”
Schmitz, who was not gay, was sentenced to 25 to 50 years in prison for second-degree murder. He was initially...
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