The Slatest

Actor From The League and Buffalo Wild Wings Commercials Lied for Years About 9/11 Escape

Steve Rannazzisi in a recent Buffalo Wild Wings commercial.

Screen shot/Buffalo Wild Wings

This is crazy: A highly recognizable actor/comedian from the popular FXX fantasy football sitcom The League, Steve Rannazzisi, has admitted to the New York Times that he’s been lying publicly for years about escaping from the World Trade Center on 9/11. The comedian, 37, also appears in a series of Buffalo Wild Wings commercials that run often during sporting events and has a standup special scheduled to debut this Saturday on Comedy Central. He’s apparently been telling a made-up version of events for years to explain how his career got started: 

In elaborate detail, Mr. Rannazzisi, 37, has described working at Merrill Lynch’s offices on the 54th floor of the south tower when the first plane struck the north tower … He fled to the street just minutes before another plane slammed into his building, he said, and decided that very day that life was too precious to waste opportunities. So he abandoned his New York desk job to pursue a career as an entertainer in Los Angeles.

But:

Confronted this week, though, with evidence that undermined his account, Mr. Rannazzisi, after a day of deliberation, acknowledged on Tuesday that his account was fiction. Actually, he had been working in Midtown that day, and not for Merrill Lynch, which has no record of his employment and had no offices in either tower.

Buffalo Wild Wings told the Times it is “re-evaluating” its relationship with Rannazzisi, who, according to the paper, also has erroneous information on his personal website about where he went to college. For much more detail, you can read the whole story here. (And you can click here for a story about the seemingly related phenomenon of memoirs by writers who made what turned out to be fraudulent claims about their experiences during the Holocaust.)