Comedian and actor Steve Rannazzisi, 37, acknowledged Tuesday that he had fabricated his account of narrowly escaping the World Trade Center attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
For years, Rannazzisi, who stars on popular TV show "The League" and whose new one-hour special was set to air on Comedy Central Saturday, had told interviewers versions of a contrived tale in which he'd been working at Merrill Lynch’s offices on the 54th floor of the South Tower when the first plane struck the North Tower. He fled his building just as the second plane hit, and his close encounter with death emboldened him to pursue an entertainer's career in Los Angeles, he said.
“I was not at the Trade Center on that day,” the comedian said in a statement to the New York Times. “I don’t know why I said this. This was inexcusable. I am truly, truly sorry."
Rannazzisi had actually been working in Midtown on 9/11 and he hadn't been employed by Merrill Lynch.
At least one person has accepted his apology: "Saturday Night Live" cast member Pete Davidson, whose father died in the Sept. 11 attacks while working as a firefighter, defended his fellow comedian on Twitter.
Take it easy on @SteveRannazzisi ... He reached out to me and is truly sorry. We all sometimes lie and exaggerate a story to seem cooler ...
— Pete Davidson (@petedavidson) September 16, 2015Claims like Rannazzisi's bring to mind others who have falsely claimed to have endured a horrific historical event. His notable predecessors include:
► Alicia Esteve Head, who said that her husband was killed in the North Tower of the World Trade Center and that she herself escaped from the South Tower when the second plane slammed into the skyscraper. The child of a wealthy Spanish family, she was actually attending graduate school in Barcelona on Sept. 11, 2001. By the time the New York Times uncovered her fraud, Head had become the face and voice of the Sept. 11 survivors movement, recounting her story to the media and giving tours of Ground Zero. Her story became the subject of the 2012 documentary "The Woman Who Wasn't There."
► Binjamin Wilkomirski, who published in 1995 Holocaust "memoir" about his time spent in Auschwitz and Majdanek. Excerpts from Wilkomirski's first-person account won the U.S. National Jewish Book Award. But a historian, commissioned by his agents to tamp down suspicions of its veracity, later revealed that Wilkomirski was not Jewish and had never been interred in a concentration camp. (He had, however, lived for years in a Swiss orphanage, until a wealthy family in Zurich adopted him.) His real name wasn't even Binjamin Wilkomirski — it was Bruno Grosjeans. As critics shredded his false identity, “Wilkomirski” continued to insist on the truth of his anguished story and his Jewishness.
► Laurel Rose Willson, who wrote a "memoir" about her upbringing in a Satanic cult under the pseudonym Lauren Stratford. Willson claimed that she was a breeder, bearing babies that Satanists sacrificed before her very eyes. After investigators unraveled the threads of her falsely woven tale, Willson claimed she was a Holocaust survivor and a subject of Joseph Mengele's deadly medical experiments at Auschwitz.
