Richard Simmons has not been seen in public in more than three years. Credit:AP The back story: On February 15, 2014, Simmons didn't show up to teach his class at his gym, Slimmons, in Beverly Hills, California. He stopped answering emails or phone calls. He no longer sprinted out of his home to greet tour buses, delighting onlookers with his glittery costumes. After an article in The Daily News suggested last year that Simmons might not have control over his life, the mystery took such hold in pop culture that even Donald Trump weighed in from the campaign trail, promising to liberate Simmons if he became president. "We have to get him out," Trump, laughing, said in a radio interview. Simmons has not been heard from since phone interviews last March, though the Los Angeles Police Department visited him recently and said he was fine. A spokesman for Simmons said the same to The New York Times last week and declined to discuss the podcast. Taberski's storytelling and sense of wonder on Missing Richard Simmons have drawn comparisons to Serial, the podcast about a murder case that inspired a bevy of conspiracy theories and captured the country's imagination. But mostly, it is a love letter from Taberski to Simmons: He said he wanted to show Simmons that people who care about him are worried.

The disappearance of Richard Simmons has sparked a bevy of conspiracy theories. PJ Vogt, the host of Reply All, a popular podcast that explores the internet, said Missing Richard Simmons was well served by a narrator so close to its subject. "More so than in other media, podcast reporting is really filtered through the person doing the reporting," Vogt said. "Their relationship to the story feels very inescapable." Taberski spoke about the podcast in a recent telephone interview. This conversation has been edited and condensed. Q: How did you find out that Simmons had stopped showing up at Slimmons?

A: Richard and I were still friendly. We were still calling and emailing. He stopped returning my emails. I just thought: "Bummer. I guess, he's not interested anymore." Then I realised that he had stopped returning everybody's calls. Then it was just a gradual process of talking to people and reading the odd one-line news report and realising that he had disappeared. Q: How did the idea to do a podcast come together? A: Richard and I were talking about doing a documentary from the very first day we met. We met at Slimmons. I asked him if he would ever do a documentary with me. Q: Did you go to the class to work out? Or to pitch the documentary? Or both? A: I went to the class because I heard you could. I thought, "Well, I have to do this." I thought he was amazing, and I couldn't believe he was still teaching a class for $12 a class. But I was a producer for 15 years, and I was looking to do a feature documentary, and the minute I took the class, I knew that was something I wanted to pursue with him. And so we started talking about it right away.

Q: What made you decide to shift from the original intent of doing a documentary to going into the podcast realm? A: I didn't want to do a first-person documentary. I think it's really hard to pull those off without them being self-indulgent. It just didn't feel right. But a podcast is superflexible as a format, and it needs a narrator. It needs somebody to tell the story. And so it was a way for me to show that it was coming from a place of love and coming from a place of real concern, and show my point of view without making it about me. It's still about Richard. Q: The four theories of his disappearance: 1. He is being held hostage by his housekeeper. 2. He is recovering from knee surgery. 3. The death of his dog sent him into a depression. 4. He just wants out of public life. Anything I'm missing? A: The podcast explores all the possible reasons Richard Simmons would stop being Richard Simmons. And some of them are outlandish. Some of them make total sense. And some of them are a little sad. Q: What do you think is going on?

A: I'm not limited to those four. The podcast is us exploring many theories of what they are. I have my own theory, but we get to that toward the end. And it's not really something that people have discussed, and it speaks less to this sort of weird mystery that nobody ever wanted in the first place. Q: What have Simmons' representatives said? A: Richard's people say very little. But what they do say is that he's fine. Q: One theory, pushed by Simmons' former masseur, is that he is being held hostage by his housekeeper. Tom Estey, his representative, forcefully denied this claim. Is he correct? A: It's possible, for sure. I think our skepticism of the more outlandish parts of that theory are clear in that episode. It had been reported before, and others who know Richard didn't dismiss it out of hand, so we clearly needed to raise it.

But I also think Richard's friends are genuinely, deeply concerned for Richard and the eerie wall of silence around him. That is very real. And Richard's rep pretending that everything is normal - "nothing to see here" - feels a little false, too. Q: Why do you think people are so intrigued by Simmons and the podcast? A: It's people who have been reminded or are being just told for the first time that Richard Simmons is a special, important and fascinating person. And I think people feel for him. I think he's always been this way. He just exudes kindness and genuineness. Q: If Simmons truly wants to be out of the spotlight, as he told the Today show a year ago, then should you just leave him be? A: The concern is that he is not just taking time off. He's not just retired. He's not just stepping away from the spotlight. The concern is that he's cut off every person he knows. It's impossible not to be concerned about that. And every person I've talked to, every friend who's known him for years, everybody is concerned.

The New York Times