ABC is airing The Mystery of Richard Simmons: A Diane Sawyer Special on Tuesday at 9 p.m., a one-hour broadcast that returns to the question that shadowed the fitness icon for a decade: what happened when Richard Simmons vanished from public life?
The special arrives after years of speculation about Simmons, who disappeared from the public eye in 2014. Friends and journalists who tried to reach him that year were unsuccessful, and reports soon circulated that he was being held against his will by his manager and family. Simmons rejected those reports in a phone interview with the Today show.
That period was followed by a mysterious hospitalization, and his Beverly Hills exercise studio closed soon after he disappeared. The broadcast is expected to revisit that public unraveling and the questions it left behind, especially because Simmons died in 2024 and the circumstances surrounding his final years remain part of the story people still want answered.
The Los Angeles Coroner’s office reportedly said he died from complications from recent falls and heart diseases. That ending gives the special its weight: it is not only about a celebrity who went missing from view, but about how long the public was left with fragments, rumors and denials in place of a clear account.
For viewers looking to watch, ABC is available in DIRECTV’s MyNews Genre Pack, which costs $39.99 a month and includes a five-day free trial. It is also carried by Fubo’s Sports + News package, which regularly costs $55.99 a month and is offering a $10 discount for new signups; that package includes 28 channels, unlimited cloud DVR recording and viewing on up to 10 screens at once. Sling offers ABC in select markets through its Sling Select package, which includes 10+ live TV channels, thousands of on-demand titles and streaming on up to three devices at once, though it does not offer a free trial at this time. ABC is also available on Hulu + Live TV.
The special is unlikely to settle every rumor that attached itself to Simmons after 2014, but it does put the public record back in order. He disappeared, people searched for him, he denied the most damaging claims, he was later hospitalized and his studio closed, and then he died. What remains now is not whether the mystery existed, but how much of his private life the public will ever be able to reconstruct.
