Liveblogging the Mel Gibson interview.
Sawyer: “Was that anti-Semitic?”
Gibson: “Oh, yeah….but that’s not me.”
Said he was worried his mugshot would look like Nick Nolte’s, so he tried to clean himself up before it was taken.
Gibson said he went home after his arrest, saw his kids there, “it was kind of a rough morning” so he “put down a few cold ones.” Right there? asked Sawyer. “Oh yeah. It was kind of unbearable. So I said this was it but I needed to get through the morning.”
Gibson: “I’ve apologized more than anyone I know, so it’s getting old.”
Gibson on drinking: “The risk of everything–life, limb, family–is not enough to keep you from…that’s the hell of it. You are indefensible against it. You will sacrifice anything. So you must keep that under arrest. But you cannot do that of yourself….It’s God. You gotta go there. You gotta do it.”
He sees it as a blessing: “I didn’t hurt myself. I didn’t leave my kids fatherless. So that’s a blessing. Sometimes you need a cold bucket of water on yourself…some people need a big tap on the shoulder. In my case, public humiliation on a global scale.”
Gibson denies he was speaking from the heart, or “in vino veritas,” when he abused the police officers: “Those people, they don’t know what they’re talking about. Or they don’t have the problem.”
Bottom line: It was not exactly a portrait in contrition. He’s clearly very angry with himself, though.