09:21 AM EST on Friday, January 21, 2005

BY BRYAN ROURKE
Journal Staff Writer

Jonathan Baker is a 42-year-old Hollywood movie director whom much of the nation now knows as the husband who repeatedly mistreated his wife verbally and physically while they were contestants on The Amazing Race.

AP photo

Jonathan Baker and Victoria Fuller says The Amazing Race producers chose to depict Baker as abusive.

"People in Providence think I should be wearing a wife-beater T-shirt and eating out of a tuna fish can," Baker acknowleged in a phone interview yesterday from a Manhattan hotel room.

But Baker maintains that the real story is that CBS is an abuser of reality TV.

Baker, a former Providence resident, and his wife, Victoria Fuller, 32, were eliminated Tuesday night in the ninth episode of the prime time show that features pairs of race contestants competing for a $1 million prize. The competing couples follow clues as they dash from country to country, with the last-place finisher being eliminated most weeks.

It's the show's fifth episode everyone remembers. Baker and Fuller came in second in that episode, but could have won had Fuller not stopped to pick up her husband's backpack. (Finishing first would have won them a prize, usually a vacation, and a head start on the next leg of the race.)

Afterward, a camera showed Baker push his wife.

Domestic violence organizations protested. Two weeks ago, Ester Soler, president of the Family Violence Prevention Fund, called Baker abusive and dangerous, and criticized CBS for not condemning his conduct.

This week, CBS responded. Nina Tassler, president of its entertainment division, said the shoving incident didn't warrant disqualification but contestants might be disqualified in the future for bad behavior.

Baker admits that shoving his wife was a very bad thing.

"I am apologetic for it," Baker said. "I didn't like what I saw on the screen. I was really upset, as was the rest of the country. CBS should take some responsibility for their storyline and editing."

Not only did the network choose to air what Baker calls "The Berlin Shove," (the incident took place in Germany), the couple alleged it also actively worked to bring about such incidents. The show subjects contestants to unrelenting stress, according to Fuller, who has been married to Baker since 2001, and known him for eight years.

"You're with someone you've known for eight years," she said. "You're together 24 hours a day. You can't be more than 20 feet from each other or the camera. They don't let you sleep and eat, and they set things up so you're tired and irritable."

Raw, uncharacteristic emotion, Baker said, is exactly what the show's producers want, and get. Then, he said, producers selectively edit hundreds of hours of video to depict people as they wish.

"Reality television is not reality television," Baker said. "It is a scripted form of reality."

Baker and Fuller live and work in California -- he as awriter and director, and she as a pop artist/model. (She was a Playboy Playmate in 1996.)

They said yesterday that they spoke with the show's producers for four months before filming began about how their characters would be portrayed. They maintained that there was a clear understanding: they'd be the villains.

"We knew we were going to give the other teams a hard time and shake things up," Fuller said. "We didn't know they were going to put such a negative spin on our relationship."

Most of the time, the program showed Fuller and Baker yelling and screaming at each other. Others couples not only did that, they said, but also engaged in some slapping, too.

But, they said, CBS chose not to show that.

"We gave them the good, the bad and the ugly," Baker said. "They chose only to show the ugly."

If you go to www.CBS.com, you can see the incident from episode five of the show. Baker and Fuller are walking side by side away from the camera. They've just finished a disappointing second.

"It's stressful," Baker said. "It's a race. It's a competition. Everyone's screaming at each other. You could lose $1 million. But when you watch it on TV, it's about relationships and how people react to each other."

Baker reacts badly. He admits that, and apologizes for it.

"I take responsibility for my actions," Baker said.

The video shows him push the back of Fuller's left shoulder, making contact with her backpack, causing her to step sideways to stay upright, and dropping a paper in the process.

Fuller wants you to notice the background. A camera crew is visible. This is not something you'll see in any other scene in the entire series, according to Fuller.

That, she said, indicates the show was willing to make a stylistic exception to include material that might help ratings.

"It shows this decision had to go way up the line," Fuller said.

Producers, Baker said, never asked him to "tone it down." In fact, Baker said, they implicitly did the opposite.

After coming in second in Berlin, feeling tired, stressed, disappointed and bothered by his behavior, Baker said he withdrew from the competition, until producers convinced him not to.

"They said 'you are the greatest reality character of all time. If you quit, you'll never forgive yourself,"' Baker said.

Baker, who calls himself a romantic, said he is not abusive, to which his wife agreed. But Baker has gotten quite a reputation, which he's now trying to correct, conducting 250 phone interviews over three days.

Some of reality TV's biggest villains -- Richard Hatch of Survivor and Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth of The Apprentice -- have called him.

"They said, 'Thank you. You made me look like an angel,"' Baker said.

Baker said he has also received about 100 calls from people he knows in Providence, wondering what happened to him.

"Everyone thinks I'm beating the hell out of Victoria," Baker said. The Amazing Race does involve an abuser, Baker said, but it's not him.

"It was CBS who pointed the gun at Victoria." Then, he said, "it took no responsibility for what it showed."