Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!

SICK DAYS

HOW MUCH WOULD YOU SPEND, right now, cash money, for five photographs of me getting a blow job? There are a lot of sex pictures in my collection, but only five of them are clearly me. It’s my fifty-year-old, 6′7″, 300-pound body standing there with an attractive, red-headed woman, a good friend of mine, and she has my proportionate-but-no-more penis in her mouth. I’m enjoying myself. She’s enjoying herself. She’s wearing a blindfold, so one of my personal sextortionists billboarded it as “Hardcore S&M.” At the time the pictures were taken, both of us were single, and so was the person taking the picture. I don’t remember her birthday, but she was just under thirty. There might have been a twenty-year age difference, but I’m so wicked old that she was still double the legal age in some farm states. Someone who used to work for me sold a laptop without wiping it really clean. Someone else got hold of it and went to a lawyer who specializes in extortion. That asshole lawyer got in touch with my groovy lawyer, who specializes, at least with me, on death threats against me for being an atheist. The asshole wondered whether I might be interested in keeping these pictures from going public. This is known as extortion. Or blackmail. The only unusual thing about it is that it was happening to me.

How can blackmail happen to me? What’s to blackmail me on? I wrote a bestselling book that included a chapter on my visit to a gay bathhouse, possibly with “Patient Zero” and trying to have gay sex. In the same book I wrote about group sex and having a fat Elvis impersonator piss on me in public. I’ve written about dropping my cock in a blow dryer and fucking a famous model underwater. I once had a CNN cameraman shoot my poisoned bleeding balls. There are pictures and stories of me wrestling naked with a little person, a man, both of us naked, in wet cornstarch. To use incorrect terms, there are pictures of me butt-naked wrestling a butt-assed-naked dwarf. We got rough, he was choking and he almost died. I came close to being the perp in naked homosexual dwarf murder. Isn’t that a little kinky? Even in the twenty-first century, that’s a little kinky, right? I’ve been to the Fetish and Fantasy Halloween Ball dressed as a leather daddy. I did a show called Penn & Teller: Bullshit!—available on iTunes, YouTube, and Netflix—where I’ve been naked and surrounded by naked people and have talked about and cheered for all kinds of sex. I also used every obscenity you’ve ever heard and I may have been the first to say “cunt pickle” publicly. I did a movie called The Aristocrats that was banned by a whole chain of theaters just for the graphic verbal descriptions of perverse sex acts. You can go to YouTube right now and watch me dance naked in Zero-G on the Vomit Comet with my cock flapping around. I have a United States patent on a female masturbation device that I demonstrated with nude models for Playboy. Bill Maher listed a bunch of “perversions” on his show and I said, seriously and honestly, “I’ve done all those.” Howard Stern talked to me about my sex dungeon in my home being used as a nursery when our children were young. I’ve attended the Adult Video Awards and felt Nina Hartley’s and Carrie Fisher’s breasts almost at the same time in public. At that same convention, I slipped behind a curtain with a porn star for an embarrassingly short time. I dropped my pants at a TSA checkpoint and was detained for indecent exposure. I’ve never done a drug in my life, never had sex with anyone who is underage (since I was underage myself), never committed an act of bestiality (mostly because I just don’t like animals), never coerced anyone into sex and I have no secrets from my wife. She sees every picture and she knows every woman who walks by in Starbucks who I find attractive and that’s most of them. I don’t lie to her. Unless there’s a surprise party coming up (that might include wrestling a naked dwarf), we have no secrets. How can blackmail scare me? But it made me sick for weeks. It fucked up my life.

What was your number for the five pictures of me getting my cock sucked? The extortionists started at “six figures.” When bad douche bags are stealing money, and they say “six figures,” that doesn’t mean $1,000.29. They don’t put the decimal point in. Their jive-ass six figures start at $100,000.00. Let me tell you right now, if you’ll pay six figures even with the decimal point for a picture of me getting a blow job, my wife and I are happy to oblige and you can run the camera yourself. Hell, you’re welcome to join in. My wife and I sometimes have sex just for fun, sometimes for no figures, and not for procreation and not to sell on the Internet.

When the sleazy extortionist lawyer got in touch with my super-expensive honest lawyer and laid out the threat, I had the odd feeling of being innocent and guilty at the same time. I knew I had done nothing wrong. If there were something I would feel guilty about, I wouldn’t do it. I believe very much in privacy, but I don’t keep much private. I get interviewed and I answer questions that others just say “no comment” to. I try to be a little cagey about what I think of Criss Angel, but people see right through me on that, and I don’t even try to be cagey about sex. I should be blackmail-proof, but when my lawyer called and explained that someone had my private pictures and were threatening to make them public, I almost threw up. Later, I did throw up. I got real, no kidding, sick. I ended up in the hospital and I’m sure stress was part of it. I don’t want to make comparisons with other sex crimes that are much more serious, but it is true that something that one gives up happily and for free can feel awful when it’s taken without permission. I felt awful.

I asked Teller, “Who the fuck would want pictures of a fifty-year-old fat guy getting his cock sucked?” He answered, “Apparently you do, and that’s the mystery.” Teller always has the right answer. As funny as that is, it’s also true. It was his way of saying “no one,” but why the fuck did I have those pictures on my computer? Why the fuck did I want those pictures? What was I thinking? I understand why I have thousands of pictures of women (and a few men) that I took or had sent to me, I love naked pictures, but why pictures of me? I don’t even look in mirrors. I don’t brush my hair. I hate photo sessions. Why was I posing with my cock out? Well, I was thinking it was no big deal. We were playing around, there were three of us, one had a camera and the pictures were hot to us. They weren’t hot compared with SpankWire and Hamster or any of those professional porno sites, but they were hot to us because they were us. They wouldn’t mean shit to you. I’m not a sex symbol. I’m not attractive, but the wonderful thing about humans is that we can find people who find us sexy, and I’ve been very lucky. We had a really fun evening and took a few pictures so we could remember it and maybe rub a few more out to those same memories. It was efficiency as much as anything. It saved energy. We did it for the planet. I think others do this too. My politics and theology are certainly weirder than my sex life. I think I’m pretty much in the American sex pocket. I’m not a big deal. I’m not blackmail material.

If I were a piece of ass, like Tom Cruise, or I was anti-ass like Rick Santorum, it seems a lot of people would want to see these pictures, and you could probably get six figures without the decimal point, but Penn Jillette? Who cares? No one cares, and I was still vomiting.

If I were the person I’d like to be, I would have told my lawyer to throw the letter away. No answer is the answer that was deserved, or I should have told my lawyer to just quote Shakespeare: “There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats: For I am arm’d so strong in honesty That they pass me by as the idle wind, Which I respect not.” That’s the person I’d like to be. The person I am threw up.

There was a sickening fear. Maybe it’s the sickening fear I feel every night when Teller points a gun that can’t hurt me at my face. A blackmail letter is scary. Was it possible there were pictures I didn’t know about? When the first e-mail came in, they didn’t say they had all my pictures. I thought they might have someone else’s pictures. I don’t know of anyone else’s pictures, but what if there were some? What difference does that make? It’s the same fat guy. The same cock. I’m used to my cock. I’ve accepted my cock. I’ve used my cock. What’s the difference who took the fucking picture? But I wasn’t strong enough. I threw up and I chattered in fear to my lawyer while her clock was running.

My lawyer and manager met with the extortionist lawyer. I didn’t want to feel like prey—I’d rather feel like the predator—so I engaged the lawyer who helped out David Letterman with his blackmail case. You may remember, Dave was embarrassed and the bad guy was incarcerated. Dave won. My new big-cheese blackmail lawyer told my manager and my regular super-lawyer to push hard when they met with the asshole lawyer. They were told to say pretty much what I said in the first paragraph of this article: Penn lives his sex life in public already, we know he fucks and fucks hard and has pictures of it all—now shock us. You better have him fucking a dog or a young boy. My guy is a fucking bad-ass. Shock us. Make us sick.

This is a goofy situation. It’s like the thief inviting my manager and lawyer to his house to see the Ferrari he stole from me. As soon as he shows my pictures, he’s admitting to a crime. It’s bugnutty. The dickwad led with a picture of me and Liberace. Sadly, both of us fully clothed and not even kissing. He followed that with a picture of Gilbert Gottfried and me with a stripper on my lap. I think the stripper had claimed that she was Dolly Parton’s cousin and fronted that claim with a couple of similarities. My manager said, “That picture hung in our office for sixteen years.” Then my manager was shown the pictures of me getting a blow job from a woman in a comfortable blindfold and the extortionist pointed out that that woman was married (she was married five years after the pictures were taken, but why quibble) and she had a job she might worry about losing. Wouldn’t it be more embarrassing to have a homeless woman blowing me? He then showed them some video of my wife fucking and having sex, and yes, my wife knew the camera was running. I was running the camera and I told her that the red light was on. It would embarrass my wife in front of her mom and dad, but even if it was on SpankWire, her mom and dad would at least fast forward through the good parts. So what?

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. Everything 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.