The actor of 'The League' admits that the untrue information just 'slipped out' shortly after he and his family moved from New York to L.A. in late 2001.
- Oct 7, 2015
AceShowbiz - Stephen Rannazzisi explained why he told a lie that he was at the south tower of the World Trade Center during the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The actor of "The League" told Howard Stern on "The Howard Stern Show" on Tuesday, October 6 that the untrue information just "slipped out" shortly after he and his family moved from New York to L.A. in late 2001.
"It's as simple as sitting at the Comedy Store," Stephen told Howard. "And everyone's like, 'Hey, you're from New York. Were you just there? You were around?' 'Yeah, I was downtown.' 'You worked there?' 'Yeah, I did.' "
"It just slipped out. I don't know what to do now to fix it," the stand-up comedian admitted. "You have like 15 seconds, I think, to kind of go, hold on, I'm sorry, that's not true. And if you pass that 15 seconds ... it becomes a thing where now I have to be the guy who's very strange and weird and says that I just lied about 9/11."
While his wife Tracy Rannazzisi knew about the lie and "had no choice" but to go along with it, his two children were too young to understand that. "They don't know why Daddy needs to be in his office on the phone or why Daddy's crying sometimes," he confessed.
Stephen explained he wanted to appear on Howard's radio program to apologize to people who had lost their loved ones in the heart-breaking incident as saying, "The moving on process is apologizing to the people that I truly hurt." Later on, the host said, "People are angry. I'm angry too. I mean this is such a horrible thing that happened in our history and to lie about it seems so f**king wrong."
However, Howard gave Stephen points for coming on his show. He said, "I think today you said, 'Hey, I did something really f**king horrible and made up the whole f**king lie.' You came clean about it. There's something healthy about that."
