Earlier this week, one of our reporters caught up with provocative director Vincent Gallo at the Andres Serrano party at the Bowery Hotel. While she was interviewing him, Gawker operative Molly Friedman approached and joined the conversation, without telling Gallo she was a reporter. And after he harassed her for smoking cigarettes (“You look like you’ve been smoking for 40 years,” he said — Friedman is 24), Gallo began to discuss Sarah Palin and her family. Friedman wrote about the exchange on Gawker, and claimed that Gallo called 17-year-old Bristol and 14-year-old Willow “hot.” According to Friedman, she asked Gallo if that made him a pedophile, and Gallo said, “I’ve been called worse things.”
After Gawker published their version of the exchange, Gallo found a different reporter from New York and protested the blog post. The Brown Bunny director argued that he never said anything sexual about Palin’s underage daughters. He also wrote a lengthy comment on Gawker, in which he called Friedman a “fucking cunt,” among other pretty terrible things.
Well, because we’re nosy bitches, we tracked down the tape and we’re publishing that section of it here. We spoke with Friedman, who said she spoke to Gallo for “five to ten minutes.” The entire tape of this conversation with our own reporter lasts 26 minutes, and Friedman is around for only about the first ten, so we’ve edited it down to the Palin section. In it, you can hear Gallo indeed tell our reporter that Sarah Palin is “the prettiest girl in the world” and that he’s “in love with her.” (Our gal is the one who speaks more loudly because she’s closer to the tape recorder.) Gallo says that the Palin “family is beautiful” and extols the hotness of Ma and Pa Palin, but not of their teenage daughters. He calls the youngest daughter, 7-year-old Piper, “cute.” (For what it’s worth, he later calls Hillary Clinton a “pig.”)
Notably, Gallo does not shrug off accusations of being “a pedophile.” When we asked Friedman about the discrepancy between her report and the tape, she said: “I simply struck up a casual conversation with Gallo while with my friends. I found the fact that he called the Palins ‘the best looking family’ and commented on the daughters’ appearance in such a candid way to be funny, so I told a friend at Gawker. I’m not the first girl Gallo has called the C-word, but I may be the first not to care.”
We think that pretty much wraps it up.
Earlier: At Y-3, Vincent Gallo Explains His Attraction to Palin Daughters [Cut]
