On July 18, 1995, Howard Stern invited regular guest Chaunce Hayden onto his radio show for an episode dedicated to the late Debbie Tay, who’d died from a heroin overdose a few months earlier. Tay had been a member of Stern’s famous Wack Pack and became known for her stories about communicating with aliens. Hayden was close friends with Tay and was given a portion of her remains by her family. At Stern’s request, he brought them with him to the studio that day.
It wouldn’t be long before Stern asked Hayden to open up the urn and let him take a look inside. “Hey, wait, Debbie wants to say something,” Stern joked, while holding Tay’s bone fragments up to the microphone and shaking them. Both Stern and co-host Robin Quivers also picked through the remains and speculated as to which parts of Tay they were holding. “Let me see if I can piece her together,” Stern quipped at one point.
But despite Hayden’s insistence that Tay would’ve loved what they were doing, her brother and sister were far from amused by what went down during her on-air memorial. The following year, they filed an $8 million lawsuit against Stern, Hayden, and Infinity Broadcasting, claiming that the episode caused them emotional distress. A lower court initially dismissed the suit, but an appellate court reportedly reinstated it two years later.
Howard Stern Once Shook a Dead Woman’s Bones on the Air. Then Came the Lawsuit.
After some legal wrangling, Tay’s siblings were prepared to accept $60,000, but Stern’s lawyers weren’t looking to shell out more than $30,000. An out-of-court settlement was eventually reached in April 2000. The terms were confidential, but Tay’s relatives were said to have been smiling when they walked out of the courthouse.
You can check out the footage from the infamous memorial show for yourself below.
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