I was on drugs
Kerry Smith joins an extremely long list of people who have had their behaviour unluckily impaired by intoxicants in the bloodstream. In 2006, after Nicole Richie was stopped for driving the wrong way down a freeway in Los Angeles, she let it be known that she had been taking Vicodin and (ahem) marijuana as a treatment for menstrual cramps. Another side effect of weed was discovered by the rapper Method Man, who smoked so much that he forgot to pay his taxes for four years. Charlie Sheen was perhaps unluckiest of all when “an adverse allergic reaction to some medication” caused him to be taken to hospital after reportedly being discovered naked, drunk, on cocaine, in a trashed hotel room with a porn star.
I was drunk
Some might scoff at the idea that a few drinks can turn you racist, but it happened to Mel Gibson too. After his arrest for drink-driving in 2006, he explained very pointedly that “the disease of alcoholism” was behind all the antisemitic crazytalk (“the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”) that he “blurted out in a moment of insanity”. John Galliano had the same trouble in 2011, when his “triple addiction” to alcohol, Valium and sleeping pills caused him to praise Hitler in a Paris bar.
I was on drugs because I was drunk
The direct approach, as pioneered by the former mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford. When asked last year if he smoked crack cocaine – considered very poor form for an elected politician – he admitted that yes, he had done so “probably in one of my drunken stupors, probably approximately about a year ago”. To his great surprise, that did not the end of the matter.
I was acting
Far more embarrassing than being caught shoplifting in 2001 was the excuse that Winona Ryder gave at the time. “At one point she was explaining that she was getting in character for a role as a kleptomaniac,” the arresting officer told the court at her trial for stealing thousands of dollars worth of clothes from Saks Fifth Avenue in Los Angeles. “She wanted to see what it was like to shoplift.” If so, she found out.
I’m wearing someone else’s clothes
It’s easy to do. You’re under a court order to submit to regular drug testing. You arrive one day to give a urine sample. Suddenly the probation officer notices that you’ve brought in a hollow prosthetic penis attached to a bottle of drug-free urine, and immediately you know what’s happened. You must have put on somebody else’s underpants – somebody who had bought this device (“the Whizzinator”) in order to pass their drug test. This was the argument that the actor Tom Sizemore offered to a judge in 2005, without success. Now clean for real, Sizemore has since admitted to his Whizzinator use, which relies on bored observers not noticing. “Nobody wants to look at three hundred dicks a day peeing in a cup,” he explains in his memoir. By comparison, Lindsay Lohan’s claim in 2010 to be “wearing a pair of borrowed jeans from a friend/assistant” (in order to explain the cocaine allegedly found in them) seems mundane.
I was going bald
The emotional effects of hair loss should never be underestimated. Yet the effect it had on the former LibDem MP Mark Oaten is still hard to believe. According to an article he wrote in the Sunday Times in 2006, Oaten’s hiring of a male prostitute with whom he had a longstanding relationship outside his marriage was part of a midlife crisis that had a lot to do with his hair. “I became more and more obsessed by its disappearance,” he said. “For me it was a public sign that my youth had ended.”
I was hacked
We may be hearing a lot more of this excuse in the years to come, but it will probably always be associated with the former congressman and New York mayoral candidate, Anthony Weiner. After all, how else would you explain the photograph of a man’s erect penis straining the fabric of his underpants that was sent from Weiner’s Twitter account to a young woman in May 2011? “Anthony’s accounts were obviously hacked,” his spokesman told the media afterwards. “He doesn’t know the person named by the hacker, and we will be consulting on what steps to take next.” Soon Weiner was even joking about other machines ganging up on him, and perhaps being “attacked” by his kitchen blender. Sure enough, however, it emerged that Weiner was indeed both the photographer and sender of the picture, and many, many more.
That’s just the way I sit
According to the Republican Senator Larry Craig, he was the victim of a mighty misunderstanding in the toilets at Minneapolis Airport in 2007. Sitting down to use one, he spread his legs apart – so far apart in fact that he touched feet with the man sitting on the toilet in the cubicle next door. Unfortunately, that man was a police officer, and touching feet in this way was considered soliciting for sex. “I’m a fairly wide guy,” Craig explained after his arrest. He later pled guilty to “disorderly conduct”.
I fell over
Everybody falls over sometimes. It was just bad luck for Luis Suarez that when he fell, during a World Cup match against Italy in the summer, it happened to be in the direction of Giorgio Chiellini. And that he himself has very prominent teeth. And a record of biting people. “I lost my balance and ended up falling on my opponent,” he told Fifa’s disciplinary committee. “At that moment, my face hit the player leaving a small bruise and sharp pain in the teeth.” Sadly no one (at least no one outside Uruguay) believed him. Later he issued a masterful non-apology by saying, “my colleague Giorgio Chiellini suffered the physical result of a bite in the collision he suffered with me”. He is still being tested for traces of remorse.
