Promoting the new season of the Emmy-winning “Amazing Race,” executive producer Bertram van Munster said in an interview that the series is really “all about the story. The world and the situations you put them in are just in the background. The characters and the story are in the foreground.”

Last season, that story — for nine episodes, at least — was mostly about Jonathan Baker and Victoria Fuller, a married couple from California. Their confrontational relationship during the race reached its climax when Jonathan shoved an emotional Victoria in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. His behavior outraged and horrified many viewers and critics.

Perhaps surprisingly, it also outraged and horrified Jonathan and Victoria.

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“You were appalled by it, so why shouldn’t I be appalled by it?” Jonathan asks in an exclusive two-hour telephone interview with both him and his teammate Victoria. “You know, it’s not something that anybody could be proud of, number one, and number two, it’s not something that I set out to do. And I certainly didn’t set out to take my relationship, my marriage, the person that I love, of eight years, and make her look — put her in a bad light. And that’s what I did. And that was never, never conscious. They made it happen.”

Jonathan says he went into “The Amazing Race 6” as “a really big fan of reality television” and of the series itself. And that contributes to his disappointment about what ultimately aired. “They put such nasty energy behind it, and who would like it?” he says.

“They” are the editors and producers of the show who, Jonathan says, decided to focus their story on the negative aspects of the couple’s participation, thus leaving viewers with a distorted impression. It’s not so much that the show presented the low moments, Jonathan says, but that it excluded everything else, such as his apologies to Victoria and positive interaction with people around the world.

Victoria agrees. “It’s okay that they show the negative, that’s fine, but if that’s the only thing they show on you, then that’s the only character they’re drawing from you,” she says.

Jonathan ultimately takes responsibility for what viewers did see, which included a lot of yelling and otherwise obnoxious behavior in addition to the push. “You know what?" he says "I was a jerk at times, and I know I was. I wasn’t conscious of it, and I apologize for those actions and the way they looked,” he says. “And, you know, I’m trying to become a better person by learning about myself and the things that I never want to bring out of myself ever again.”

What went wrong?
In messages on the couple’s Web site and in the press, Jonathan identified a confluence of factors from various sources that contributed to his behavior. “There were a lot of things that played into this entire thing,” Jonathan says, explaining the behavior we saw. And those reasons are what “collectively, people see it as excuse, excuse, excuse,” he says.

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Those include his new medication for a recently diagnosed condition; his decision “to be a heightened version of myself” and a “flamboyant character” in order to “have fun, and be ... outside your element”; the way he “decided to consciously to give my open and raw emotions, not knowing how that was going to look”; the producers’ “feeding me behind the scenes, [saying] you’re great, this is great, you’re making great television, this is wonderful”; and the extreme stress and exhaustion caused by the race.

Together, they led to, as Victoria says, the way “he acted like a maniac.” (In the same sentence, she notes that “we have a very loving relationship, we’re very good friends, and despite the fact that he acted like a maniac on the show, it’s really not who we really are and it’s not really how we fight, and we’re not that aggressive with each other, and he’s not that aggressive in our relationship.”)

In addition to not being the same person he is in his non-race life, Jonathan says the person we saw on television wasn’t even the same person that ran “The Amazing Race.” He refers to that as "a third person character" crafted by the show's editors.

And it is precisely this that Jonathan says has contributed to the public’s negative perception of him. He specifically blames a senior story editor who “wanted to teach me a lesson.” In addition to the focus on the negative, Jonathan points to construction of “totally fictitious” moments.

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