Pee-Wee Herman creator Paul Rubens still claims he is not guilty of the public indecency charges he was accused with in 1991, and in court he would have won.
Rubens pleaded no contest to accusations he had been caught masturbating in a Florida theatre, as he just couldn’t face public trial. However, he claims the officers arresting him had the facts all wrong.
In an interview about the scandal, Reubens tells Playboy he had several witnesses and experts on his side that would have cleared him of all accusations.
He says, “Had we gone to trial, we had ready and expert from the Masters & Johnson Institute who was going to testify that in 30 years of research on masturbation the institute had never found one person who masturbated with his or her non-dominant hand.
“I’m right-handed, and the police report said I was jerking off with my left hand. That would have been the end of the case right there, proof it couldn’t have been me.
“(But) did I want to have all that revealed in court and then to listed to Jay Leno and Arsenio Hall and others for another two weeks? So I pleaded no contest and all I got was community service.”
The scandal forced Reubens to undergo therapy and he is now a shock recovery expert: “I was in shock. There was a feeling like, ‘You’re going to wake up from this and it’s going to turn out to be a bad dream…’ As a result, I now know everything there is to know about scandal and shock – how you move through the first 12 hours, the first 24 hours, the first six weeks… and so on. I know how to navigate all this hideous, s**tty, horrible stuff you go through.”
He was also involved in another scandal in 2001, when the funnyman was mistakenly accused of possessing child pornography.
