Steve Rannazzisi went on ‘Howard Stern’ to talk about his 9/11 lie

The cordial nature of Rannazzisi’s opening words were quickly diminished, however, when Stern directly asked him whether or not he thought he was a liar or insane. But the New York Times last month uncovered the truth: That Merrill Lynch had no record of his employment, and had no offices in either tower.

Rannazzisi said he reached out to the Stern show because he knew the deejay had been on the air during the attacks and had an audience that was very affected, and those were exactly the people he wanted to get right by. “You can yell at me, you can scream at me, you can berate me, and I will sit there and take it”. How could I tell my children to be honest when I hadn’t come clean about this? “Psychologically disturbed – I’m not sure if that’s the way I’d put it. I do see someone and I’m starting to figure out more about myself”. As he told Stern, “I know that I hurt a lot of people-people that lost people, people that helped people survive”. It was as simple as sitting at the Comedy Store [after 9/11], and everyone’s like, ‘Hey, you’re from New York?…

Amidst the shock and confusion that was created from the exposure of the lie, people wanted to know one thing: why would Steve lie about something like this?

‘He reached out to me and is truly sorry. Stern posits that it must have been either a friend or a family member who outed him to the Times, since the news came about so abruptly, after years (14, in fact) of it being a nonissue.

The lie didn’t truly resurface until an interview with Pauly Shore, where Rannazzisi described the experience in great detail, allowing for the public to expose the holes in his tale and leading to the destruction of his career, including being dropped from a Buffalo Wild Wings sponsorship. I think today you said, ‘Hey, I did something really f*cking disgusting and made up the whole f*cking lie. He said he has no idea how the Times figured out he lied, just that he wished he had the confidence then that he does now to know people would like him without the story.

Looking visibly shaken and emotional throughout the interview, Rannazzisi attempted to explain himself, saying that the lie was not a calculated thing and it just “slipped out” following his and his wife Tracy’s move from New York to LA in late fall of 2001.

“The relief is that I don’t have to live with the lie anymore”, he continued.

“The guy that writes how I should kill myself and I should get my kids and we should burn alive, in Iowa, behind a computer somewhere – I apologized, I said I was sorry. That guy, he’s top notch”.