She was killed by her spokesperson, Pierre Lehu.

The Dr. Westheimer was in her 50s when she went to air in the year 1980 to answer the questions of listeners who mailed in about sexuality and relationships on broadcast station WYNY in New York. The show, which was dubbed “Sexually Speaking,” was just a 15-minute show that was broadcast at the midnight hour on Saturdays. It was a huge popular that she became a nationally-known media star and a one-woman company.

When she was at her most well-known in the 1980s she arranged live radio call-in programs and TV, written an article in Playgirl magazine, and lent her name for a game, as well as its computer version, and started rolling out sexuality guides that covered everything that ranged from educating young people to charging the old. Students from colleges loved her. the appearances on campus alone generated a significant revenue. She was in ads for soft drinks, cars shampoo, typewriters, and condoms.

She was even cast in 1985’s French movie “One Woman or Two,” which starred Gerard Depardieu and Sigourney Weaver and was released to the United States in 1987. “Dr. Ruth cannot be misconstrued as being an actor,” Janet Maslin wrote in her New York Times review, “but she has pep.”

Today, some effort is required to recollect the fact that Ruth Westheimer had a radical formula and a huge influence on social norms. Talk shows abound in the 1980s but prior to her arrival they had not dealt specifically and practically with sexuality. It was impossible to imagine that the person who carried Eros was a 6-foot-7 middle-aged teacher who had a style one that The Wall Street Journal described as “something like a cross between Henry Kissinger and a canary.”