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Steve Rannazzisi breaks silence about his surviving 9/11 lie on Howard Stern Show

A comedian who fabricated a story about surviving the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001, is coming clean for the first time.

For years, Steve Rannazzisi had spoken in great detail about his experience during the attack, telling various podcasts and other media outlets that he had escaped from the World Trade Center.

Last month, the New York Times uncovered that none of that story checked out. The backlash came fast and hard – the star of the sitcom “The League” not only lost respect from his colleagues and fans but also an endorsement deal with Buffalo Wild Wing.

Earlier this week, the comedian went on Howard Stern to speak frankly about why he chose to invent such a story.

The tale began to spin when he was hanging out at a comedy club, shortly after moving to Los Angeles from New York, when the attacks were still fresh in people’s minds. When other comedians asked if he’d been in the area of the Twin Towers, he told them he had.

“You have like 15 seconds to go, ‘Wait, hold on, stop, wait, I’m sorry, that’s not true,’” he told Stern. “And if you pass that 15 seconds, now it becomes a thing where you’re like — 'Now I have to be the guy who is very strange and weird and just said I lied about 9/11.”

A visibly nervous Rannazzisi admitted that he knows the gravity of his mistake and has been working in therapy to understand why he’d do such a thing. He believes it has to do with codependency and wanting to be accepted.

"I know what I did was terrible,” he said. “And I know that I hurt a lot of people. In my heart I feel awful that my dumb mistake created this story that hit a wound that should never have been touched.”

This is the first time the comedian has spoken out about the controversy. He’d initially apologized on twitter.