A woman who appeared on The Jerry Springer Show three times as a teenager claims the program ruined her life. Jennifer Kreis, the daughter of late Ku Klux Klan member August Kreis III, was invited onto the controversial Nineties talk show with her father to discuss their involvement with the white supremacist hate group. Now, at 47, she accuses the television appearances of destroying her reputation at a young age while she was under the influence of her father’s hateful beliefs.
A Teenager Caught in the Spotlight
Kreis first appeared on the show in 1993 for an episode about white supremacy when she was just 14. She revisited her experience on ID’s new docuseries Hollywood Demons, where she expressed regret for spewing racist and antisemitic ideology during her appearances. “I just felt like I was a circus animal under attack, but no one knew the truth,” Kreis said. “I was a kid. What choice did I have?”
She recounted that her family moved after the episode aired because she was bullied for her racist beliefs. “I was 14 years old, just trying to come into my own as a teenager, and I was already dealing with the backlash of his beliefs in school,” she explained. “I was threatened on a daily basis. I had to start carrying mace to school. They tried jumping me, a handful of times. I just had to deal with it.”
Allegations of Exploitation
Kreis said she attended rallies and marches with her father before they were invited on the show, but she never wanted to go on television. She alleged that the show never obtained her mother’s consent for her appearances, despite a joint custody agreement. She also claimed that the show paid her father $1,000 per appearance, although production for The Jerry Springer Show denied any compensation to guests.
During her first appearance, Kreis threatened to kill Springer’s daughter for being Jewish. Watching the footage back during the docuseries, she began to cry and said she felt “embarrassment, anger and sadness that I was ever put in that position by all the adults.”
Returning to the Show
Kreis and her father were thrown off the show during their second appearance, but they returned a third time when she was 17. “I think, by that point, I was starting to get really mad because I did not want to be there,” Kreis said. “I didn’t want to be saying these things. I didn’t want anything to do with it.”
She added: “The Jerry Springer Show destroyed my life, and I’m sure many other people’s as well. It was horrible. I hated it. It wasn’t me at all.”
Life After the Show
Kreis left home at age 18. Her father died in prison in May 2025 while serving a 50-year sentence for child molestation, according to the documentary. In a 2022 interview on the Beyond Barriers Media podcast, Kreis said it was “freeing” to reclaim her experiences and apologize for her past behavior. “I’m very sorry for hurting people,” she said. “At the same time, grant me the grace that you can wrap your head around and understand that I had no choice. It was about survival, for me. I lived surviving. I wasn’t living. I was surviving.”
