The lawyer tried to argue that this was pretty shocking for someone who was on The Celebrity Apprentice. What? Do we believe that Donald Trump doesn’t get blow jobs from his wife? She might need a blindfold. Aubrey O’Day was on The Celebrity Apprentice and so was Miss Universe, and I found both of them naked on the Web the night I got back to my room after meeting them. People want to see them naked more than they want to see me, and they want to see me more than Donald Trump—I mean, I hope they do. So what?
So then the piss-ant lawyer got stupider. He showed my lawyer and manager some financial reports. Oops. This changes the crime. This would get the FBI agents hard enough to blow each other on camera. Then he made it clear he had my whole hard drive, which would help me figure out who his secret “client” was. It also meant that he had my files from Teller that show me how some Penn & Teller magic tricks are done. Some of our tricks are so complex, and Teller does most of the work on them, that sometimes I’ll perform my part in a trick for years not knowing how the whole thing is done. At magic conventions, I have explained our magic tricks wrong—I just didn’t know. But Teller has sent me diagrams. These are trade secrets—oops. Now the FBI is hard enough to cum in their pants without blindfolds on.
The fuckhead extortionist lawyer, from Hollywood, then told an implausible story of how his client got this information: the client had bought the laptop from a Craigslist ad the year before, and saw some files on it. He waited a few months to look at the files (a few months to see what the fifty gigs were? Not likely), saw it belonged to me and took another couple months (until the premiere of The Celebrity Apprentice) to engage a scumbag and extort me. Oh, and the lawyer said his client bought this alleged laptop in Las Vegas, Nevada—oooooooops. That’s not California. Now it’s interstate; now the FBI can fuck him hard every way they want. The FBI really loves to hate-fuck extortionists and they take pictures.
Most people who go to the FBI have already made blackmail payments and are scared to death of the blackmailer. I had paid nothing (let’s not count the thousands to the good lawyers), and I wasn’t really very worried about the stuff coming out. There was nothing even close to illegal. I knew the women in the pictures wouldn’t be happy with these out there, but I own the copyright and where would they go? Who would post them? I didn’t fuck movie stars or politicians. I fucked businesswomen and scientists. I fuck citizens. I find real people sexier than showbiz people, and that’s fortunate for me, because movie stars seem to have no desire to fuck me.
TMZ won’t pay for any sex pictures. The sites that put up sex tapes of Paris Hilton and Kim Kevorkian (is that right?) aren’t going to put up stills of my wife having sex. Who cares? Blackmail is just stock options; they are worth nothing unless I happen to believe they’re worth something. They are worth my fear and shame. I’m not without fear and shame, but I’m not overflowing with it either. I don’t have six figures worth of fear and shame.
Before I called in the FBI, my lawyers said, “You want to think about this, because you’ll be turning your whole hard drive over to the FBI. They will have everything. You’re the victim, they’re not looking to bust you, but they might see letters to your pot dealer or offshore accounts or something like that.” I don’t have anything like that. I don’t even drink, and I don’t understand hiding money. “Also, what about your wife?” I told her about all this and she said, “So what, let them put it all up. I wish they had pictures of me younger, but I look okay. Fuck them.” Some people have asked why this woman is the woman who became my wife. Have we answered that? She is perfect and so much stronger than me. If this was going to be a scandal, I supposed it could hurt Teller’s career too. I talked to him about it, but he just laughed at me. The whole thing tickled Teller pink. Anyone wondering why he’s my business and artistic partner for life?
So I turned the case over to the FBI and they got all FBI about it. They started wiring people and setting up installment payments with FBI money and handcuffs and shit. My lawyer said, “I don’t think you want to play cops and robbers.” And I said, “What the fuck are you talking about? I absolutely want to play cops and robbers—I want to be wired by Sam Waterston.” But I didn’t get to do anything. All the e-mails were written by the FBI and sent by my lawyers. All the meetings were done by lawyers. My lawyer made phone calls while she was wired. She wrote leading questions in e-mail like, “If Penn doesn’t pay, what will you do with these pictures?” And the scumbag answered all the questions by the extortion handbook. Oh, that six figure price? What the scumbag lawyer thought five pictures of Penn Jillette getting a blow job were worth? Do you have a figure in your head? Get ready. His figure was $900,000.00 cash money. Give me a list of people to whom you’d pay that much money for five blow job pictures. I’m not on it, right? If I am on it, give my manager a call—you’ll get the deal of your life.
What would happen if I didn’t pay? Would the headline in The New York Times be: “Old Fat SubStar Gets a Blow Job from More Attractive Woman with Blindfold—His Career Is Over!” I guess that could happen. If I had just been the human being that Shakespeare wanted me to be and sent the Julius Caesar quote, most likely the pictures and the story would never come out. The article you’re reading now is all you would have ever heard of it if I had done nothing. When this book comes out, I might get disgusted and set up “Penn’s Blackmail Page” and put the pictures up myself and be twelve feet tall and bulletproof for the rest of my life. Fuck blackmail.
My children were five and six years old at the time. If they had been fifteen and sixteen, this would be a whole different issue. They could be embarrassed in school, but I still can’t imagine giving those scumbags even six figures of dimes. It would just be some gossip with the MILFs and the teachers and it wouldn’t filter down to my children. By the time they’ll care, my blow job will have blown over. They have much more to be embarrassed about by me. Look at my haircut, for Christ’s sake—who wants to be dropped off at school by an elderly hippie magician dad?
As it turned out, after all the phone recording and cat and mouse, the FBI just showed up at the scumbag lawyer’s office (in his home, what a fucking loser) and said that they were conducting an investigation into stolen material and they were watching him. The lawyer said he didn’t know that and he was dropping his client right away. He wasn’t going to even call him. A few weeks later, I got the laptop FedEx’ed back to me, and the whole thing was over. Maybe the fuckwad kept a copy in case I do end up running for mayor, but after the FBI said it was stolen, he might just want to not have any blow job pictures of me anywhere around him. My legal fees were five figures, and that sure seems a stupid amount to pay for nothing, but they did a good job. So, some asshole cost me tens of thousands of dollars because I had some pictures of myself getting a blow job. If you want to hear the sound of Teller’s voice, listen carefully; you can probably hear him laughing from where you are now.
All this waving my cock around makes it sound like I didn’t care at all, but the truth is I did care. No matter how much I try to pretend I don’t care about this, I do care. I can write here about everything I’ve done, but I don’t like someone else threatening to tell people. My whole system shut down. I got physically sick. I cried. I cried to my wife. I left my office to get hugs from her. I didn’t feel sexy. I did nothing wrong. Nothing. I wasn’t even in danger. I suppose if it had all come out in the worst way possible on a slow news day, it could have hurt ticket sales at the Rio’s Penn & Teller Theater, or hurt book sales, or TV deals, but it was just as likely to help those, right? There’s no such thing as bad press. I think Lee Harvey Oswald said that. So, I was an innocent man who was not in danger, and I was attacked by an impotent dick, and I got sick. It’s amazing. Even being right can’t make me as strong as I’d like to be. I’m no Julius Caesar.
I don’t have the self-control to say, “I’m in the right and I’m out of danger—fuck them.” I could tell someone else to do that, but I can’t tell myself. And that makes me feel weak. Everyt
hing conflates—I had an ear operation, I was on The Celebrity Apprentice, we were putting a new trick in the show—and everything just ran together. I didn’t know what I was feeling. I couldn’t tell if I was depressed about the blow jobs, Clay Aiken, or an ear infection and those are way, way different things, you know, except for the last two.
I didn’t want the FBI to put the asshole in jail. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life dealing with the fact that someone was in jail because of me. I just wanted them to stop bugging me and they did. I knew when I took those pictures that anything on your computer can go public, and I found out what that feels like. I’m stronger now. If there’s any advice I can pass along from this experience, it would be that if someone tries to blackmail you, go right to the FBI. They’re smart, they’re tough, and they’re fun to talk to. You know when your mom told you to go to the police if you were in trouble? She was right.
I was flying to Burbank just before this book went to press. Porn superstar Ron Jeremy was on my flight. I got close to him and tried to change my voice a little, which is stupid, I always sound like me, and I said, “Hey, show me your dick.” I thought it was the kind of thing a stranger would say to Ron and the kind of thing I wish strangers would say to me. He looked up, saw it was me, smiled, and we chatted a bit.
Before I got to asking him who he’d been fucking lately, Ron said, “Hey, this porno press agent asked me for your number a while ago. He wanted to get in touch with you. He told me why. I thought it was bullshit, so I didn’t give him your number.” (Do you love that Ron has my number?)
“Good thinking.”
“Yeah, he said it was some pre-emptive thing. He said he had pictures or videos or something that you might not want out there. Like sex shit. I told him that you didn’t give a fuck, as long as your dick looked big enough, right? You don’t fucking care. Right?”
“Right.”
“Hey, you want the asshole’s name? I have his name, I can give it to you. He’s a bottom-feeder.” A guy who got famous blowing himself has met some bottom-feeders. I got the name from him and we did a Web search, and that name shows up with the name of a dirtbag lawyer who was able to get my number through my lawyer. Ron’s analysis of the situation was perfect, instantaneous, and completely free. So, let me change my advice some: If you’re ever blackmailed, either go right to the FBI, or ask Ron Jeremy what to do.
Similar weird bad shit has happened to me once before. In one other instance I’ve been totally innocent and was ripped apart with guilt. I had a radio show and I made some jokes about Mother Teresa. They weren’t good-natured jokes. Not at all. They were mean-spirited. I said that Paris Hilton was too moral to play Mother Teresa and that Mother Teresa’s “kink” was suffering. Previously when I talked about Mother Teresa on Bullshit, I called her “Motherfucking Teresa” but this was CBS so I couldn’t. I didn’t know anything about it, but some local DJs (I don’t even know how many or where), commented on my show and offered money to have me killed and said they’d pay more if I suffered. I didn’t even know about it until my boss called up right before my show and said, “We want you to know we take death threats very seriously.” I said, “Good thinking, but why are you telling me this?” He said, “Oh shit, you didn’t know.” He explained and I went directly on the air and did a radio show. It’s shocking, but the DJ worked for the same company I worked for. We had the same boss. The next day the DJ and his crew were fired.
I didn’t want him fired, I just wanted him to shut up. My daughter was a year old at the time, and I didn’t want headlines saying, “DJ fired for offering money to kill Penn Jillette.” I didn’t want “Kill Penn Jillette” to be the first thing that popped up on a Google search when you typed “Penn J—” This time I didn’t call in the FBI. I just wanted it to go away. My father-in-law called me and asked me what the fuck I was doing getting death threats when I was supposed to be caring for his daughter and granddaughter. He was right. I had armed guards at our house around the clock and Rio security walked me from the Penn & Teller Theater to my unmarked Penn & Teller car after every show. What the fuck? We managed to keep it pretty quiet and none of the death threats (and there were a few like this) hit the national media, and we finally got rid of the guards, but we still have a pretty good security system at our home. If this gives you ideas, I believe the guy’s withdrawn his offer. And he’s flat fucking broke anyway, so don’t bother.
But this story gets weirder. The DJ who was fired sued me for getting him fired. Here’s the position I was in. It seems like I had a right to ask to have him fired, since he threatened on the air to have someone kill me, but I didn’t. Right after my show, I called the big cheese and asked him not to fire the guy. I thought if they kept him on payroll, they could keep him under control. Tell him he was no longer allowed even to say “pen” or “Gillette” again, let alone my name. I thought if they fired him, they would have nothing to hold over his head. My strategy was to keep him working and shut him the fuck up. The DJ found out about my phone call, but not the content and claimed that I had called to have him fired and sued me for that. He also thought that I’d have more money than CBS Radio. I sure wish I had the money that people who want to attack me think I have.
I ended up having sixteen hours of depositions where an elderly Christian lawyer asked me questions about Mother Teresa and how much money I had. I was supposed to follow rules and never help him at all, but after he asked me if I was familiar with Dave Carlin’s “ten words you shouldn’t say on TV” or something that far off, I finally said, “You mean GEORGE CARLIN’S SEVEN WORDS YOU CAN’T SAY ON TV?” My lawyer said that was wrong—I should have made him work for it. Jesus Christ. He also didn’t believe that I’d never heard his client’s comments about me and that I didn’t want his client to be fired. Everyone in the office heard the MP3 of the DJ threatening me, but I didn’t want to. And I didn’t want my wife to hear it. Would you want to hear someone offering money to have you killed?
I had nothing at risk. I was completely innocent. CBS was paying all the legal fees and they were signed to pay any damages. I was facing nothing at all. But I was in the system with people attacking me and I felt sick and depressed. There’s a line by Sly Stone in “Family Affair”: “You can’t cry ’cause you’ll look broke down, but you’re crying anyway, ’cause you’re all broke down.” That’s how I feel at these times.
In both of these cases, I had no reason to be worried. But the system is set up to make a person feel danger. It’s impossible to feel safe and innocent, at least for me. I’ve heard that really bad people thrive in this situation, but I don’t. I way don’t. I’m happier when I’m completely separate from the United States Justice System. I don’t want to sue anyone. I don’t want to be a victim or a perp. I just want to stay away.
I was talking to my senior adviser, Lawrence O’Donnell Jr. LOD and I were talking on the phone about how safe and innocent I was and how shitty I felt. This is what came to me. This is the self-help portion of the book.
I think you just have to take sick days. I always tell people when they’re going through a romantic breakup that “It’s just the flu—give it a week to ten days and you’ll be better. There will be some diarrhea and vomiting, but you’ll be fine. Just accept that you’re going to be sick and get through it. Don’t fight it. Don’t try to be happy and well. Go with the sickness—just get through it.”
I guess that’s what to do with blackmail and death threats too. Just take some sick days. Throw up, bundle up, drink plenty of liquids, take an analgesic for relief of pain and fever, and wait for time to pass. You’ll be fine. That’s my advice.
Now, wanna see some pictures of me getting my cock sucked? I’ll make you a deal.
Listening to: “Family Affair”—Sly and the Family Stone
What would this picture be worth to you?
APRIL FOOLS’ DAY
OUR MOVIE, Penn & Teller Get Killed, is about two guys, named Penn and Teller, played by Penn Jillette and Te
ller, who play practical jokes all the time and—this isn’t more of a spoiler than the fucking title—those practical jokes end up killing Penn & Teller, and depending on how you read the ambiguous ending, maybe those jokes end up killing everyone in the world. Our movie was not the first movie starring people using their own names as characters who die in the movie. The Monkees’ movie, Head, stars Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones and Mike Nesmith playing characters of the same names and they all die at the end (also not a spoiler, the end is shown at the beginning).
Penn & Teller Get Killed was directed by one of the greatest directors of all time, Arthur Penn, and he made exactly the movie we wanted. The movie we wanted was not the exact movie the audience wanted, and now it’s called a “cult film.” I’m pretty proud of it. I’m happy we did something that nutty for our movie. Nutty made me proud and ended our movie career.
The movie would have been better art if it had been popular. I’m fascinated by the difference between characters and real people in entertainment. I’ve spent most of my life playing a character that has my real name and many of my real-life personality traits. I try to make that character as close to my real self as possible, but that’s still quite a distance. The Penn who lives with his family doesn’t always feel like doing those tricks onstage every night in Vegas at nine p.m. But the Penn who works at the Rio wants to put his suit on and walk onstage every night at the same time, in the same mood, and perform those same miracles. The real me, the I, always feels like being onstage when the other Penn is supposed to be, but if I were totally myself, I might not leave my children to drive into the theater and put a suit on. Once we’re onstage, doing those tricks, we’re pretty much the same guy.
Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! Page 15
