Why would Steve Rannazzisi or anyone lie about surviving 9/11?
Without tears or theatrics,
Rannazzisi went on to explain that he was working on the 54th floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. He felt the impact of a plane ramming into the first tower and ran outside to see what was happening. When the building began to crumble, "I just started f_ing booking it," he told Maron. He stopped just in time to turn around and see the second tower collapse.
When he and his fiancée — who was supposed to be working in the towers but was still on the subway when the planes hit — got home, they decided to leave the city for Los Angeles, a decision Rannazzisi often credited with jump-starting his career.
"How much did it f_ you up mentally?" Maron wanted to know.
"I still have dreams of like, you know those falling dreams," Rannazzisi said.
Though actual victims of trauma often struggle to talk about their experiences, there is no lack of pretend survivors eager to tell their tales. False memoirists have written for years about drug addiction, child abuse and Holocaust survival. In
one famous case, an American woman claimed to be a survivor of both the Holocaust and abuse by a Satanic cult.
Rannazzisi isn't even the most famous person to have publicly pretended to have survived 9/11.
In fact, to Angelo J. Gugliemo Jr., Rannazzisi's account sounded a lot like one he had heard from his friend
Tania Head, the former president of the World Trade Center Survivors' Network. Like Rannazzisi, Head spoke of working for Merrill Lynch on the morning of 9/11. Like Rannazzisi, she said she had a fiancé who worked in the towers (though he was killed in the attacks).
Why would Steve Rannazzisi or anyone lie about surviving 9/11?