How Mel Gibson defends himself

Mel Gibson doesn’t blame you for hating him, said Allison Hope Weiner in Deadline.com. But he insists that he’s not really the angry madman heard on the infamous audiotapes, yelling racial slurs and physical threats at ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva. “I’ve never treated anyone badly or in a discriminatory way based on their gender, race, religion, or sexuality—period,” Gibson says. “I don’t blame some people for thinking that, though, from the garbage they heard on those leaked tapes, which have been edited. You have to put it all in the proper context of being in an irrationally heated discussion at the height of a breakdown, trying to get out of a really unhealthy relationship. It’s one terribly awful moment in time, said to one person, in the span of one day and doesn’t represent how I’ve treated people my entire life.” Nonetheless, he says he deeply regrets “the humiliation’’ he’s caused his children, and is resigned to the fact that his career—already badly damaged by his drunken, anti-Semitic rant during a 2006 DUI arrest—may be over. “I don’t care if I ever act again. It’s not a problem.”

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