Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!

(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