After the revelation that comedian and The League star Steve Rannazzisi fabricated a story about escaping the Twin Towers during the September 11 attacks, the actor sat down with Howard Stern to explain how the falsehood began, and why he allowed it to spiral for years.
Speaking candidly on Stern’s radio show, Rannazzisi insisted the lie was never part of a calculated plan.
“It wasn’t calculated,” he said. “There were waves of the story. At the beginning, it was something that I said. Then I did some podcasts a couple years later. Since then, no one’s ever talked about it.”
The 38-year-old recalled that he moved to Los Angeles from New York about a month after the attacks, trying to establish himself in the stand-up scene. “I was hanging out at comedy clubs … just trying to fit in,” he explained.
“It was as simple as sitting at the Comedy Store and someone asking, ‘Hey, you’re from New York? Were you just there?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘You work there?’ ‘Yeah.’”
According to Rannazzisi, there’s a critical moment after telling a falsehood when it can still be corrected. “You have like 15 seconds to go, ‘Hold on, stop, I’m sorry, that’s not true.’ If you pass that 15 seconds … now I have to be the guy who’s strange and weird,” he said.
The lie became part of his backstory. In a 2009 interview with Marc Maron, Rannazzisi claimed he had worked on the 54th floor of the second tower and made it to the street before the second plane struck.
In reality, as The New York Times later revealed, he had been working in Midtown on the day of the attacks. Rannazzisi said he doesn’t know how the newspaper uncovered the truth, but admitted he now wishes he’d had the confidence to believe people would like him without such a dramatic story.
His girlfriend at the time, now his wife, also became inadvertently caught in the lie. “She had no choice,” Rannazzisi told Stern, explaining that she had to go along with his version of events.
The comedian, who is now in therapy, said he’s working to understand more about himself and the choices he made. While he refuses to define himself solely as a liar, he acknowledged the harm caused. “I know what I did was terrible. I know that I hurt a lot of people; people that lost people, people that helped people survive. And those are the people that I am truly sorry to. I feel awful.”
Rannazzisi also asked that his children be spared from any backlash. “You can yell at me, you can scream at me, you can berate me, and I will sit there and listen to it. But if anyone ever took something out on my kids; they don’t deserve it,” he said, noting that his children remain unaware of the controversy.
“I don’t have to live with the lie anymore,” he concluded. “I’m an idiot; I made a terrible mistake, but this is not who I am. I’m going to move on beyond this.”