Four years ago, in a highly publicized incident, Mel Gibson was arrested for DUI, an incident during which he became belligerent and made anti-Semitic remarks to the police officer, who was Jewish. Many fans who had embraced Gibson for his fine movie The Passion of The Christ were in turn disgusted by his behavior. Gibson’s later divorce and affair with a much younger woman – with whom he has fathered a child – didn’t endear him to audiences much either.
So when Dean Richards of Chicago’s WGN-TV simply asked Gibson if he thought fans had “moved on” from those past incidents, Gibson – who certainly should be prepared for such questions – got visibly agitated and said, “Well, I certainly hope so. That was a while back, and I’ve done all the necessary mea culpas, so … let’s move on, dude.” Richards thanked him for the interview, and, thinking he was off the air, Gibson said into a live microphone, “A–hole.”
Gibson later said the remark was directed at his own publicist. Hmm.
Richards later blogged his impressions of the incident, noting, “The true measure of a person is how they act when they think no one is looking. More than the content of the interview, here we get a crystal clear view of a man who claims to be sorry for his actions and claims to be a changed man. Apparently, that’s only if he thinks that no one can see the ‘real’ him.”
