There's a very small opportunity to right a wrong. For Steve Rannazzisi, it's as short as mere seconds.
The 37-year-old The League actor sat down with Howard Stern for his first interview since the New York Times revealed in an exposé that he had not in fact been in the south tower of the World Trade Center during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—a claim he had been touting for over a decade.
The comedian owned up to the mistake as soon as it came out and has opened the can of worms again to reveal the intricacies behind his 14-year lie.
"You have like 15 seconds," the 37-year-old actor said during an interview on The Howard Stern Show on Tuesday. Rannazzisi explained that the lie did not originate as a calculated plan, but as a small flub during a casual conversation while he was doing stand-up comedy in Los Angeles.
"It just slipped out. I don't know what to do now to fix it," he recounted saying during a conversation with his wife, Tracy Rannazzisi. "We're two people who don't know what to do. Let's just let it go away." So, they did.
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.
While his wife knew about the lie from its fruition and "had no choice" but to go along with it, his two children are far too young to understand the repercussions of their father's choice.
"They don't know why Daddy needs to be in his office on the phone or why Daddy's crying sometimes," he said.
His parents were nothing but supportive, particularly his father, a veteran firefighter.
"No matter what you've done I will help you," Rannazzisi said his father told him during a phone call. "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."
Despite the havoc the scandal has wreaked on his career, Rannazzisi is hopeful to return to the stage and screen.
"The moving on process is apologizing to the people that I truly hurt."