JONATHAN Baker – the foul- tempered, world-trekker on “The Amazing Race 6” who has scandalized fans with his berating abuse of his wife on the streets of Berlin – was so out of control producers told him to “chill out” before last week’s infamous shoving episode.
“I had many conversations with him,” executive producer Bertram van Munster told The Post yesterday. “I told him you’ve got to tone it down, you have to stop this kind of stuff, it’s not cool – until then, I’d never given advice to a reality show player before to chill out.”
On last week’s edition of the show, Baker, 42, shoved his wife, former Playboy pinup Victoria Fuller, 32, in anger, and yelled at her as she tearfully struggled to carry both of their heavy backpacks across the finish line during a challenge. As a result, they came in second.
The Internet has lit up with talk among outraged fans who have turned Baker into the kind of reality-TV villain that hasn’t been seen since bad-girl Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth turned up on “The Apprentice” last spring.
“I would have never believed anything could happen like this,” says van Munster. “I had warned him over and over again, but if he doesn’t want to listen, there’s nothing I can do about it.
“I told him the camera can be used in many ways – it’s a dangerous instrument and there comes a point where you can’t change [what it sees] – I’ve been very fair with him.”
Because the Bakers have not yet been eliminated from the series, fans of the show will find out tonight how low the husband might stoop.
“I had a very firm talk with him that night,” van Munster says. “But he keeps on being Jonathan, although there’s no more pushing and shoving, I can tell you that.”
“The editing wasn’t kind to me, was it?” Baker said in an interview with the Providence Journal last month. “Victoria and I are like any married couple, we fight sometimes, but not like that. . . . We do love each other. But the way we’re represented, I’m abusing her.”
“All of us have our faults,” Baker wrote this week on his personal Web site. “Unfortunately for me, millions of viewers are getting to see mine each week. I do not abuse Victoria, what you see is a heightened version of stress and obsession mixed with medication for a sickness called Sarcoidosis.”
Sarcoidosis is a rare disease that causes inflammation of the body’s tissues and one that affects different people in different ways.
“We were not aware of it and whether this is fact or fiction I don’t know,” says van Munster.
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