Ricki Lake Admits She Would Have Done Talk Show ‘a Decade Longer’ If It Wasn’t for September 11

Ricki Lake was riding high with her talk show, but quit and fled New York City after watching in horror as two hijacked passenger jets barreled into the Twin Towers on 9/11, leaving them to crumble as nearly 3,000 inside died.

For the first time in 25 years, the former talk star is revealing why she up and quit her super-successful TV show.

At the time, her chatfest Ricki Lake had been running since 1993 and “I could have done it for probably a decade longer,” she said on the  On Par with Maury Povich podcast, per People.

But the terror of what she’d witnessed Sept. 11, 2001, kept haunting her, she says, so she quit her job as soon as she could, packed up her two tots and left the horror behind.

“I made that choice. 9/11 was a huge trajectory shift in my life. Every aspect of my life changed from witnessing that experience that day from my West Village apartment.”

The 57-year-old still gets chills from what she witnessed from her building when she was 33.

“I was so freaked out watching that plane fly down the Hudson and hit that building,” she said. “I had a 2-month-old and a 4-year-old. So I was a lactating new mother protecting my cubs, you know?

“I mean, I just felt like the world was coming to an end that day. I had an epiphany on the roof of my building as I watched it all unfold — that I would leave New York.”

She had to wait a couple of years to finish her contract before she could leave.

About that time, she also divorced hubby Rob Sussman and moved to the West Coast, where she produced documentaries like The Business of Being Born.

Lake, whose second ex-husband, Christian Evans, committed suicide in 2017, has been wed to Ross Burningham since 2022. And she’s still proud of her talk show.

“The show was a phenomenon and I think we did so much good for young people to get conversations going, for people who were marginalized and not represented, to be seen on television,” she noted on the podcast.

“I mean, I think there’s a lot of good that came out of our show.”