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‘I was 14’: KKK member’s daughter says Jerry Spring Show appearances ‘destroyed’ her life
A woman who was featured on The Jerry Springer Show three times as a teenager claims the talk show ruined her life.
Jennifer Kreis, the daughter of late Ku Klux Klan member August Kreis III, was invited on the controversial Nineties show with her father multiple times to discuss their involvement with the white supremacist hate group — but she is now accusing the TV appearances of destroying her reputation at a young age while she was being influenced by her father’s hateful beliefs.
Kreis, who first went on the show in 1993 for an episode about white supremacy when she was 14, revisited her experience on ID’s new docuseries Hollywood Demons, where she spoke about her regret for spewing racist and antisemitic ideology in her appearances.
“I just felt like I was a circus animal under attack, but no one knew the truth,” Kreis, now 47, said. “I was a kid. What choice did I have?”
She said that her family moved after filming the episode 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 said. “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.”
Kreis said she attended rallies and marches with her father before they were invited on the show, but that she never wanted to go on television. She alleged that the show never obtained her mother’s consent for her to go on the show, despite a joint custody agreement.
She also alleged that the show paid her father $1,000 for each appearance, although production for The Jerry Springer Show denied any claim that guests were compensated.
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During Kreis’s first appearance on the show, she threatened to kill Springer’s daughter for being Jewish. When she watched the footage back during ID’s 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.”
Kreis and her father were thrown off the show during their second appearance. 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 continued: “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.”
Kreis left home at age 18. Her father died in prison in May 2025 while serving 50 years in prison 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 on the show. “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.”
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