*Penn Jillette has come forward to back a claim from Omarosa Manigault Newman that tapes of their “Celebrity Apprentice” host Donald Trump using racist language on set does indeed exist. And he is sure of this because, “I was in the room,” he told Vulture in an interview posted Tuesday.
Half of the magician duo Penn and Teller (who appeared on “Celebrity Apprentice” in 2012) told Vulture that he personally witnessed Trump saying “racially insensitive things that made me uncomfortable.”
Despite Trump tweeting Monday that he got a call from “Celebrity Apprentice” producer Mark Burnett who assured him that no such tapes exist, Jillette says he knows for a fact that Burnett has tapes of Trump saying disparaging, racist remarks while working on the show.
However, he will not get in to the specifics of what Trump said because now that Trump is president, the “stakes are really high.”
“Nothing I can say here hurts my career. But for the world the stakes are higher,” he told Vulture. “And what I’m trying to do here is tell you the story emotionally without telling you specifics. I would not feel comfortable talking about what I felt I saw in that room — because when I was on that show I was sleeping four to five hours a night. I was uncomfortable. ‘Stress’ is the wrong word, but I was not at my best.”
Jillette added that Trump would also make sexual remarks about women that made him uneasy.
“He would ask one castmember if he’d rather have sex with this woman or that woman,” he said.
And yet, Jillette would not budge on specifics because “I am an unreliable narrator. What I do, as much as anything, is I’m a storyteller. And storytellers are liars. So I can emotionally tell you things that happened racially, sexually, and that showed stupidity and lack of compassion when I was in the room with Donald Trump and I guarantee you that I will get details wrong.”
As previously reported, Omarosa claimed to have heard the tapes herself, which allegedly include Trump using the N-word during production of the NBC series.
