OCTOBER 6, 2015
The New York Times uncovered the story of how comedian and actor Steve Rannazzisi lied about escaping from one of the Twin Towers during 9/11. His publicist called up Gary and said Steve only wanted to talk to one person: me. He felt our show was the place he would get a fair shake.
Frankly, it wasn’t easy for me to do the interview. I remember 9/11 very vividly. We were on the air when it happened. We had listeners calling us from near Ground Zero and reporting what they were seeing. It was absolutely horrifying. All the first responders who lost their lives, both at the scene and years later due to the toxic stuff they inhaled down there—those guys are heroes, and a lot of them were regular listeners of mine. They were part of the Stern Show family. So I had pretty strong feelings about this guy who’d made up something about 9/11 and managed to get away with it for so long. It’s just one of those lines that you should not cross, and he crossed it. I was very uncomfortable.
At the same time I felt tremendous compassion for him. I could see he was remorseful and in a lot of pain. Some might say, “The only reason he was apologetic was because he got caught.” I didn’t see him like that at all. He was really suffering. In fact, he’d been suffering before he lied. That’s what caused him to lie in the first place. He’d felt so bad inside that he needed to make something up so that people would like and care about him. The conversation is a fascinating insight into how badly we need love and acceptance, and how far we’ll go to get it.
A lot of listeners weren’t as open-minded as me. I remember reading their e-mails. They didn’t care how he presented himself. They couldn’t forgive him, but I’m glad we had him on. It was a cautionary tale: in those moments where you feel the need to tell a lie, take a breath and say, “Wait a second . . . Steve Rannazzisi.” Living with a lie, the fear of exposure, might be the most uncomfortable fate, and nothing is worth that kind of trouble.
Howard: Steve, you’re a fan of the show. You’ve been on the wrap-up show a million times. I thank you for coming in because I know it ain’t easy. I’m sure you’re nervous. I want to understand this whole thing, because I can’t wrap my head around it. Did you out yourself, or did somebody bust you?
Steve: The New York Times.
Howard: The New York Times figured this out. How did they figure out that you were lying about your experience during 9/11? Did you ever figure out how they busted you?
Steve: No. I mean, there’s videos out there, obviously, that are the sources they cited. But to be honest, it was a complete out-of-the-blue situation. I got a phone call on a Monday. It was a big week for me. I had a comedy special coming up, The League was back on—
Howard: Did you speak to the reporter?
Steve: I didn’t speak to the reporter. He just called and left me a message on a Monday, and the article came out on a Wednesday.
Howard: What was the message? “Hey, please get back to me about this. Do you have a comment about what I’m about to write?”
Steve: No, it was: “Hey, I’m doing an article about your special and The League and 9/11. Just give me a call back.” So I knew what the tone of it was. And I sent it to my publicist, and he just let me know, “This guy’s got two different versions of your 9/11 story.”
Howard: It had to be either a friend or a family member who knew you were making this story up about being in the Twin Towers when they came down. Because that’s the only way a guy would even bother investigating this, don’t you think?
Steve: Perhaps. I don’t know. I mean, it’s been fourteen years. In the beginning, it was something that I said, and then I did some podcasts a couple years later. But since then, no one has ever talked about it. I was on the show The League for the last six years, and no one had ever asked me in an interview about it. No one ever asked, you know, if it was true.
Howard: Since this whole thing went down, do you ever say to yourself, “Why?” Are you aware why you lied about being in the Twin Towers?
Steve: Absolutely.
Howard: You are aware why?
Steve: Well, I’m becoming more aware as I speak to people.
Howard: Sometimes when you make up a story like this, the easy answer is to say, “I did it for some sort of attention.” But I mean the real, deep why . . . There’s gotta be something deeply psychological about this. You want people to love you or something like that.
Steve: To be honest, I think it’s—when I moved to Los Angeles, it was about a month after 9/11. And, you know, I moved with my girlfriend, and she got a job right away and she started making new friends.
Howard: Was she in show business?
Steve: No. She got a job as a nanny and started making friends, and she was making money. And I was hanging out at comedy clubs and—
Howard: Trying to make it.
Steve: Not even make it. “Make it” was not even a thought in my mind. Just fit in. Survive, make some friends, and just try to start living a life.
Howard: It’s a hard life to break into, the life of a comedian, right?
Steve: It is.
Howard: Steve, do you think it’s like—you know these women who will hurt their child? I forget what they’re called. Munchausen by proxy or something. Is it kind of like, “If people feel bad for me, maybe they’ll like me”? Is that it?
Steve: Maybe. Perhaps. But it’s not like I moved to Los Angeles with this story, with the thought of “I’m going to go out there and trick everyone.”
Howard: Was it calculated?
Steve: It wasn’t calculated at all. It was as simple as sitting at the Comedy Store and everyone is like, “Hey, you’re from New York?” “Yeah, yeah.” “Were you just there? 9/11? You were around?” “Yeah, I was downtown. I was there.” “You worked there?” “Yeah. Yeah, I did.” And, and . . . you have, like, fifteen seconds to kind of go, “Wait, hold on. Stop. I’m sorry. That’s not true.” And if you pass that fifteen seconds, it’s sort of like—
Howard: It becomes the story.
Steve: It becomes the thing where you’re like, “Now I have to be the guy who is very strange and weird and just said I lied about 9/11.” And, Howard, I truly in all of my heart wish that I had that voice that I feel like I have now—that’s like, “Hey, man, take a breath. Relax. People are going to like you. People are going to understand who you are when they get to know you. You don’t need to lie about that. Take that back.” And I didn’t have it.
Howard: You know what’s funny? When you see a guy who’s as—you’re successful. You’re on a TV show. How many years has the TV show been on?
Steve: Seven.
Howard: Seven years. You see a guy who’s successful, and you go, “Why did he need to?” But I guess, going back in time and saying, “I felt insecure and maybe people will somehow feel something for me.” Do you think that’s what was going on? In other words, “Hey, now I’m the guy from 9/11 and I got a little thing going here.”
Steve: Well, I think it might have been like—you know, comedians are cruel people, especially in the beginning. And I kind of was like, “Maybe now people will not be as mean to me.” You know, will not make as many jokes about me because they think . . . It’s like, when you tell a couple of open-mic comedians, they talk to other people. And at the Comedy Store, you had open-mic comedians, successful comedians, and then you had stars come in. Like Pauly Shore was there all the time, and Dice [Andrew Dice Clay]. And then those guys hear it, and then—
Howard: They notice you now.
Steve: Dice will be like, “Hey, how are ya?” And he started calling me Two. A nickname. And now I’m like, “I don’t know how to ever tell anyone that this is not true.”
Howard: The story was you were in the tower. You came out on the street and you just avoided being killed. You and your wife—your now wife—avoided being killed at the World Trade Center. And the fascinating thing to me about it is that your wife went along with it too, right?
Steve: Yes, she had to. She had no choice.
Howard: Did she ever say to you, “What are you doing? We weren’t in the Twin Towers”? Or did you guys just ignore talking about it?
Steve: We talked about it, and she did say, “What’s going on here?” I mean, I was there and I was downtown and I did walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and I did witness it, as many of us did.
Howard: As many of us did.
Steve: So to me, when I took her story in a way—she worked on the twenty-fourth floor in the financial center—I just sort of put myself in her position. When I told her that, she was like, “Why would you do that?” And I’m like, “It just slipped out. I don’t know what to do now to fix it.”
Howard: So early on you had that discussion?
Steve: We did. And we just kind of like—“We are two people who have no idea what to do. Let’s just let it go away.” And it did go away for a while.
Howard: Did it resurface because you went on Pauly Shore’s podcast and a couple other places, and then it became a bigger thing again because now you were caught in a lie?
Steve: When I did the Pauly Shore stand-up special, he came to my house to interview me. And he was one of the people, like I said, who had heard the story. So I wasn’t sure he was going to ask, but I had a feeling that he might. I had a thing in the pit of my stomach. And when he did, I just told the story the way that I thought he might have heard it. And then after, I was like, “I have to ask him not to put that in, and I don’t know how to do that.”
Howard: And Marc Maron had you on his podcast?
Steve: Six months later.
Howard: And then you were like, “I still have dreams of people falling out of the buildings,” and all that stuff. The lie becomes more elaborate, right? Because you try to make it more real.
Steve: Well, to be honest with you, I did have horrible dreams. I did. And the only thing that I . . . When I read articles afterward, I knew that people had felt the shift in the building. So I knew that that was something that . . . You know, as Marc asked me questions, I knew that . . . I said, “You know what, this is something that . . .”
Steve: My parents had no idea.
Howard: That you had made up this story?
Steve: No.
Howard: They had never heard about this.
Steve: No, because they don’t listen to podcasts and they don’t go on my Wikipedia page or any of that.
Howard: Did you have any relative or friend say to you, “Hey, wait a second, this doesn’t add up”?
Steve: My brother was in college. He’s a lot younger than me. This was 2003, and I told him when I went to visit him.
Howard: You told him you lied? What did he say?
Steve: You know, “What you did was terrible. You made a terrible mistake. But I know it’s not who you are, and I know it’s not indicative of you as a person and how we were raised.” My brother’s a priest now, and we’ve spoken a lot about this. And the hurt and the pain and the nervousness that you hear now comes from because I know what I did was terrible and I know that I hurt a lot of people.
Howard: Right.
Steve: People that lost people. People that helped people survive. Those people—those are the people that I truly am sorry. That’s why I wanted to come on here, because I wanted to talk to you and your audience. Because you personify New York, and your audience—those are the people that truly in my heart I feel awful that my dumb mistake created this story that just hit a wound that should never have been touched.
Howard: I know that you had a big endorsement deal with Buffalo Wild Wings. They fired you right away, right?
Steve: Pretty much within a day or two, yes.
Howard: The TV show stuck with you, though. Were you in fear that they might just say, “We’re not going to work with you anymore”?
Steve: We were shooting our last season. We only had a couple more episodes left to shoot.
Howard: After this all comes out, is it weird then going to the set and doing the show with these people that all assumed you’re the Twin Towers guy? What is that like?
Steve: It was very nerve-racking.
Howard: Did anybody say anything to you?
Steve: To be honest, 95 percent of the people who know me now had never heard of this story. After 2009, anytime I was asked about it, I would sidestep and say, “I was downtown and it was an awful day in New York.” I always tried to move on beyond that and step away from the awful lie that I told. The day that the story broke, I e-mailed my cast members and I told them what was going on, and some of them had no idea that this was even a thing.
Howard: What did they say to you?
Steve: All of them—and I can’t thank them enough for the support—all of them said, “We know who you are. We know that this is not indicative of who you are.”
Howard: But when you hang with people now, are you thinking, “They’re looking at me differently”?
Steve: Sure.
Howard: It’s hard, right?
Steve: Sure it is. But that’s something I will have to live with and grow beyond.
Howard: Are you working with a psychiatrist now? To sort of help you unravel this whole mystery?
Steve: I am. I have been for the last couple years.
Howard: And is it helping you?
Steve: It is helping me. Because I didn’t know what codependency was before a year ago. I didn’t know what narcissism was all that well. I didn’t know a lot about myself.
Howard: I’m sure there are moments when you go, “Today is going to be a really great day! Oh, that’s right, I gotta go deal with this.” I’m sure you’re being punished enough with that. I’m sure that’s a big punishment when you go, all of a sudden, “Today is a good day . . . but, oh fuck, I’m the guy who—”
Steve: Yeah. My family is wonderful. My parents . . . I mean, when I told my mother—my publicist said, “You might want to call your parents and let them know. I don’t know how big this is going to get.”
Howard: That must have been an easy call, huh?
Steve: I was on my way to my son’s school open house. And I had to call my parents on my way there, ’cause we were in LA and they were in New York and it was too late. And I immediately got emotional, and my mom just looked at me and said, “You are my son and I love you more than anything in this world. No matter what you’ve done, I will help you.” My dad said, “I will help you.” My dad’s a volunteer fireman for over forty years. He goes, “I don’t care if I have to walk you from firehouse to firehouse and you apologize to each one of them, we’ll make it right.”
Howard: The thing that I can’t figure out is how your wife went along with it. Like, did she start to look at you in a strange way? “You started this thing; now I have to go along with it.” Was this a rub in your marriage for a long time?
Steve: I think, um . . . I don’t believe so, because my wife is—
Howard: She was loyal.
Steve: She is incredibly loyal to me and to my family and, you know, she’s the light for me. So the situation that I put her in and then having her just go along with it . . . It was . . . I don’t know. We’re going to see someone together now.
Howard: Did you have to sit down with your kids and explain it to them?
Steve: My kids are six and three.
Howard: Too young for that.
Steve: Yeah, my kids don’t know. They don’t know why daddy’s got to be in his office on the phone and why daddy’s crying sometimes. They don’t understand that. What was hurting me the most was like, “I hope that no one takes it out on them.” You know, because they just started a new school. And you can yell at me, you can scream at me, you can berate me, and I will sit there and I will listen to it. But if anyone ever took something out on my kids—they don’t deserve that.
Howard: Do you dread explaining that to them someday? You’ve got to. Because they’ll read about it.
Steve: Maybe. I dread it, but I will use it to go, “Look, this is what can happen.” The thing I want to explain to them is, you’re going to have feelings of being less than and being not accepted. And your instinct is going to be, “I have to figure out a way to become accepted.” Just take a second to have some sort of self-worth and go, “I’m better than this. I don’t need to do that.”
Howard: If I was your kid, I’d be, like—when you have to discipline one of your kids and you go, “Go clean your room,” they’re going to go, “Hey, you lied about 9/11. Go fuck yourself.”
Steve: Yeah.
Howard: Have people confronted you about this? Have you had to go and speak to families and people who were actually hurt on 9/11 or killed on 9/11?
Steve: Pete Davidson, who’s a comedian on SNL, his father died in the World Trade Center, and we spoke that day, and I apologized to him. And he was like, “Obviously people make mistakes. Because I’m twenty-one and I’m going to make a ton of mistakes. But the one thing I want to make sure is that I’m the 9/11 comedian. You’re not the 9/11 comedian. I want to make sure you understand that.”✦ But that’s why I’m here today. The reason I came in here to speak to you is, like I said, I know how affected you were. I know you were on the air. I know that your audience are people that were truly affected. The guy in Iowa or somewhere behind the computer that writes how I should kill myself and I should get my kids and we should burn alive—I apologized. I said I was sorry. That guy I don’t owe any more to. But to the people that I’ve hurt, to the people that were truly affected . . .
Howard: Yeah, look, I’ll be honest with you. I’m looking at the phone, and people still want to fucking scream at you. People are angry, and I’m angry too. This is such a horrible thing that happened in our history, and to lie about it seems so fucking wrong. But at the same time, I know you’re a human being. And I know that you probably did not want to hurt anyone. If anything, you were doing this to be accepted. Does this feel like a big relief right now off your shoulders? As bad as this is, coming here on the show—I mean, this is not why you want to be on this show. You want to be on this show because you want to be funny and that’s what you do for a career and you want to celebrate your success. But does this in some ways feel like a relief?
Steve: In a sense. Because it’s out now, and I don’t have to kind of wait and see what’s going to happen and be very cautious anymore about things. The relief is that I don’t have to live with a lie anymore. But it does come with a lot of baggage and feelings of embarrassment and being ashamed. My brother, the priest, explained this to me. He goes, “There’s a difference between being ashamed of something and having shame.” Shame means that you’re a liar and you cannot break from that path. I’m ashamed of what I did. I’m ashamed of telling that lie—that horrible, immature lie. That’s what I’m ashamed of. But I don’t have shame on me, because I know who I am, and I know who my parents raised, and I know how I’m going to raise my kids.
Howard: You feel deep down inside you’re a good guy?
Steve: I really do. I believe that. This is not going to make everybody happy. Nothing I say today is going to make everyone happy.
Howard: Nothing. There are some people who could never forgive.
Steve: Absolutely.
Howard: You know it’s too painful for them, and they don’t understand, and they don’t want to understand. Steve, I don’t know you, and I don’t know the show or anything. But I tell you what, I think it takes balls to come in here and talk about this. And I think you are asking for people’s forgiveness. And I think none of us are perfect. A lot of us have fucked up royally. Not all of us. There’s degrees of fucking up. But, look, I don’t think you were trying to hurt anybody. I don’t think you were trying to profit off this thing. I think this was someone who felt real lonely and abandoned and wanted for some reason—this is my take on it. Who the hell knows? I’m no psychiatrist. But it seems to me that you needed this in order to feel better about yourself, and I think you are doing a good job of explaining yourself, if that helps you at all. I thank you for coming in and telling us your story, ’cause my inclination would be to just fucking hide in the house and never come out again.
Steve: I thought about that for a while. And to be honest with you, my wife’s like, “I don’t think you should go on Howard. I don’t know if you should do that.” A lot of people said that. And I said, “You know, I’m a true fan, and I’ve listened for many years, and I think that he will be able to listen to me. And I know that his audience are the people I want to say I’m sorry to.”