Now that Mike Richards is officially out at Jeopardy! as both host and executive producer, some of his former employees are speaking out against their ex-boss. Per The Hollywood Reporter, more than a dozen former staffers accused Richards of “dismantling” the workplace culture at The Price Is Right, where Richards held several high-level positions—co-executive producer, executive producer, and showrunner—from 2008 to 2019.
In the THR report, former staffers—many of whom chose not make their claims publicly for fear of retaliation—described Richards as a wannabe game show host who fell into a co-executive producer role after auditioning to replace longtime host Bob Barker. After he got the job, they told the outlet, Richards ushered out employees from the Bob Barker era and replaced them with younger staffers loyal to him. Richards also changed the show’s shooting schedule in a way that negatively impacted his staff, instituted budget cuts and loss of benefits to employees, and was the subject of at least two H.R. complaints to CBS and production company Fremantle,.
“I was shocked that after treating Mike Richards as kindly as I did during the Bob Barker replacement auditions, that he came in as executive producer just months later and showed complete disdain for me,” said Rich Fields, an announcer who had been with The Price Is Right for seven years until he was let go shortly after Richards joined the series. “There was a dismantling. Anybody who worked with Barker was cleansed from the show.”
Richards’s conduct with the models on the series was also called into question. As has been previously reported, Richards was implicated in multiple bias lawsuits involving models during his tenure running the show. (One wrongful termination lawsuit was thrown out in 2012, while Richards was removed as a defendant in another. A third such suit was settled in 2016.) Multiple sources alleged to THR that Richards would “parade models around the stage during rehearsals as he polled employees about their attire and gave preferential treatment to some.”
While Richards certainly has his detractors, a few people from that time period have publicly stood by him. Price Is Right host Drew Carey defended Richards’s treatment of the models, tweeting that Richards was “great” and that he hoped he’d get “to be the next Jeopardy host too.” Former Price Is Right model Gwendolyn Osborne defended him to THR, saying, “The show had a routine with how to choose wardrobe for the models before Mike arrived, and we continued with that routine until Mike made some changes to it.” The outlet noted that Osborne had been connected to THR via Richards’s P.R. team.
Richards was also accused of trying to scale up the show’s prize department, substituting brands that targeted The Price Is Right’s core middle-class demographic for higher-end companies like Ralph Lauren, Tiffany, and Christian Louboutin. Per THR, when luxury brands chose not to provide products to the show in exchange for airtime (which is standard practice), Richards would ask the prizing staff to find the items at various outlet stores. “We started getting cease and desist letters from those companies. We were getting those left and right. Our department didn’t want to do that, but this was his directive,” said a former member of the prize department. According to THR, Richards ultimately cleaned house at the prize department, hired his own team, and made leftover prizes available for purchase by employees (including himself).
Richards declined THR’s request for comment, but his publicist, Edmund Tagliaferri, did provide a statement from current Price Is Right employee Ron Lane, who began working on the show in 2004: “If I was asked if I witnessed any combative behavior from Mike to others in my department, the answer is no. Mike was incredibly patient, creative, and collaborative in every meeting and discussion that I was in attendance.”
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