It quickly went from an interview to an intervention. Dr. Phil McGraw defended his intervention with Nick Gordon on Wednesday, Mar. 11, saying an interview with Bobbi Kristina Brown's boyfriend was not possible.
"I went in to Atlanta to do an interview with Nick Gordon," Dr. Phil told Access Hollywood, "and wound up doing an intervention with Nick Gordon." When the psychiatric expert arrived for his planned sit-down, he discovered from Gordon's lawyers ("who truly have his best interest at heart," he says) that the 25-year-old was "so high, so out of control, abusing alcohol and apparently Xanax."
"They're concerned for his very life, his very well-being and so much so that the ability to sit down and do an interview with him, his ability to sit down and give an interview, [was] just not an option," Dr. Phil explained. "That was the whole purpose of going in, to talk to him about how he feels and what he thinks is going on and all of the history about this whole situation… I get there, he is not capable of giving an interview. He is out of control."
In Nick's place, his mother Michelle Gordon instead gave an account to Dr. Phil about what allegedly happened leading up to Bobbi's bathtub incident on Jan. 31. The concerned parent said her son and Brown, 22, had partied with a friend the evening before, and got into a tiff when they returned home.
"Nick walked away from the argument," she shared. "He went to another bedroom to fall asleep," while Bobbi "went up to her room and drew a bath." It was then that their friend Max Lomas found her facedown and unresponsive in the bathtub when the cableman needed access to her room. "Nicholas was able to do CPR on her for 15 minutes. The police arrived, and they didn't help him. No one helped him until the EMTs got there."
Dr. Phil gave a nod to Michelle during his Access Hollywood interview Wednesday, describing her as an "absolutely lovely woman" who is "very credible." He noted: "She is, I think, very concerned about her son."
Without confirming rumors that Gordon had punched several of Dr. Phil's employees, the TV personality acknowledged that the possible use of physical violence would not have been shocking.
"From the time I started interacting with him, he was so animated that he would be talking for a minute, and then he would jump up and run out of the room and [was] knocking people out of the way and pushing people out of the way," Dr. Phil revealed. "So I suspect he had contact with more than two people there. That wouldn't surprise me in the least."
Dr. Phil also couldn't speak to Gordon's suicide threats. "He's talked about not wanting to go on, because of his pain," he told Access Hollywood. "He says the pain that he has suffered from the death of Whitney, the situation that Bobbi Kristina finds herself in, the guilt he says he feels over letting them down because it's his job — he felt — to protect them. And it was certainly, he said, his job to protect Krissy."
At the TV intervention, which aired on Mar. 11, Dr. Phil got Gordon to check into rehab. If all goes well, Dr. Phil said he was open to conducting an actual interview with Bobbi's boyfriend. "I want him to sit down, clear-eyed, sober, focused," he shared, "and answer some very genuine and focused questions about what he knows and how he feels about it."
Watch a video clip from the special above.
