Geraldo Rivera attempted an explanation of his nearly naked self portrait on his syndicated radio show yesterday. In a nutshell, he said there was alcohol involved, that he had no one to talk to and he was amazed by his 70-year-old body.
Television personality Eric Bolling and former New York governor Eliot Spitzer called into Rivera’s show and tried to get to the bottom of the accidental twitpic.
Bolling asked, “Of all the people that should know better, it should be you. What were you thinking?”
Rivera explained, “There I was, 2:30 in the morning on Sunday morning. You know, I do the show Saturday night, I did a great show on black-on-black crime and race relations and the Trayvon Martin fallout and federal charges … and I get home and there’s no one to talk to, everyone’s asleep.
“And you just sit around, I had a drink and, you know, I had taken that picture Saturday morning and I was looking at it, just going through and I said ‘you know, I gotta tweet this thing. I look pretty good for a 70-year-old.’
The longtime journalist continued about how he thought no one would take the photo seriously.
“And I think because I’m so old people will cut me some slack, they won’t take it took seriously. And I just pushed the trigger,” he said.
Spitzer (who knows a thing or two about public shaming) quipped, “The public will not only forgive you, they will say ‘move on.'”
Bolling quickly rebuffed, “You’re one of the smartest people I know. What you did is one of the dumbest things a smart guy could possibly do.”
Rivera shocked his followers by tweeting a photo of himself wearing a low-slung towel, tinted glasses, and nothing else early Sunday. The photo has since been removed from his Twitter feed, but clearly the image is still floating around the Internet.