MEL GIBSON CAMEON HOWARD’S SHOWMANY TIMES.THEN HE SAID”THE JEWS ARERESPONSIBLE FORALL THE WARS.”TO A JEWISH COP.

Mel Gibson appeared on The Howard Stern Show multiple times throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Then in July 2006 he was arrested for drunk driving and unleashed an antisemitic tirade at a Jewish police officer. Howard Stern — who is Jewish — went on air and said everything he needed to say. This is that story, told from the fan’s side of Howard’s microphone.
There is a version of this story that the media has told many times. The drunk driver. The arrest on Pacific Coast Highway. The tirade. The apology. The comeback. The controversy that keeps coming back. Mel Gibson’s fall and partial rehabilitation has been documented, analyzed, and debated for nearly twenty years.

But there is one angle that almost never gets told — the angle from Howard Stern’s microphone. Because Howard Stern is Jewish. And Mel Gibson had been a guest on his show. And when the arrest report came out on July 28, 2006, and the world read what Gibson had said to the arresting officer — “F—ing Jews. The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world” — Howard Stern had something to say about it that went beyond the standard celebrity-scandal script. This is that story.

I

Before the Arrest — Gibson on Howard’s Show

Through the 1990s and early 2000s, Mel Gibson was one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. Lethal Weapon. Braveheart. The Patriot. An Oscar for Best Director. A persona built on charisma, physical presence, and a kind of rough-edged masculinity that played enormously well with the same demographic that made Howard Stern the most-listened-to radio show in America.

Gibson appeared on The Howard Stern Show during this period as part of his standard press circuit — the kind of appearance that every major Hollywood star made when they had something to promote and wanted an audience that didn’t just applaud on cue. He was charming, funny, willing to engage. Howard’s listeners liked him. Howard, by most accounts, liked him too. He was, in the parlance of the Stern Show universe, a good guest.

None of that context, it turns out, meant anything when the night of July 28, 2006 arrived.

II

July 28, 2006 — Pacific Coast Highway. What Gibson Actually Said.

L.A. County Sheriff’s Deputy James Mee pulled Gibson over on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu on the night of July 28, 2006. Gibson was drunk. When Deputy Mee informed him he was being detained, Gibson — according to the arrest report — said, apropos of nothing and to no one in particular:

Gibson’s publicist issued an apology statement the following day. Gibson himself apologized in a written statement, calling his words “despicable” and saying he was “deeply ashamed.” He asked the Jewish community for forgiveness. The ADL’s Abraham Foxman said at the time: “We’re glad that he owned up that what he said was not only offensive, but bigoted.”

Deputy Mee later alleged that his supervisors pressured him to remove the antisemitic remarks from the official arrest report — and that after he complained about those requests, he was subject to religious discrimination and passed up for promotions. The system, in other words, tried to make the worst part of this story disappear. It didn’t work.

III

Howard Stern’s Response — From the Jewish Side of the Microphone

Howard Stern is Jewish. He has never been especially religious about it, never made it the centerpiece of his identity the way some public figures do. But his Jewishness is real, and it has surfaced at specific moments in his career with unmistakable force. The Gibson arrest was one of those moments.

Howard went on air and said what he thought with the directness that has always defined him at his best. He was not performing outrage for ratings. He was not calibrating a response for political effect. He was a Jewish man reacting to a famous person — someone who had sat across from him in that studio, someone his audience had liked — revealing, in the back of a police car, what he apparently believed when he was drunk enough not to manage it.

Howard’s position, stated on air and repeated over subsequent days: Gibson’s apology was noted. His history with antisemitic remarks — stretching back years, including comments from his father Hutton Gibson who had publicly questioned the Holocaust — was part of a pattern, not a single incident. The alcohol did not create the belief. It removed the filter that was keeping it hidden.— Howard Stern’s sustained on-air response, August 2006

This is the distinction Howard kept returning to — and it matters. Drunk driving is a choice made by a sober person who decides to drink and then get behind the wheel. But the specific words Gibson used, the specific belief those words expressed, do not emerge from nowhere because of alcohol. They come from somewhere. The alcohol is what removed the management. Howard understood this. He said it clearly. And he didn’t move on quickly.

IV

“I Find It Annoying.” — What Mel Said Ten Years Later.

The story did not end in 2006. In 2010, audio recordings surfaced of Gibson screaming racist remarks — including using the n-word — at his then-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva, who also alleged physical abuse. In 2019, Winona Ryder publicly recounted a time in the 1990s when she recalled Gibson making antisemitic and homophobic remarks — calling her an “oven-dodger,” a reference to the Holocaust. Gibson denied her account aggressively, calling her a liar.

And then in 2016 — promoting Hacksaw Ridge, the World War II film that brought him back to Hollywood’s good graces — Gibson went on Variety’s Playback podcast and said something that landed with an almost breathtaking lack of self-awareness:

He finds it annoying. That the Jewish police officer he said those words to has to continue living in a world where those words were said to him — that is apparently not the part Gibson found relevant. That Jewish people in the audience who had bought tickets to his films, who had liked him, who were now being asked to simply move on because a decade had passed — their continued memory of the event was the problem, not the event itself.

Howard Stern did not find it annoying. And neither, for the record, did most of the Hollywood industry professionals who quietly continued to distance themselves from Gibson even after Hacksaw Ridge received Oscar nominations. The comeback was real and partial. The reckoning never fully arrived. In January 2025, Gibson appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast — the latest in a series of attempts to reframe his legacy through friendly long-form conversation. Howard Stern’s show was not on the itinerary.

V

Why This Story Matters From Howard’s Side

Howard Stern spent his entire career being called things. Shock jock. Pervert. Racist. He earned some of those labels honestly, in his earlier years, and has since acknowledged it. He apologized for wearing blackface in an old skit. He has, through decades of therapy and public reckoning, tried to account for the person he was at the peak of his controversial years.

What he has never done is tell the people he hurt that their continued memory of it was annoying. That distinction matters. It matters that Howard is Jewish and that a man who sat across from him in that studio revealed in a police car what he thought about Jewish people. It matters that Howard said so, clearly, on air. It matters that Gibson’s rehabilitation has largely bypassed any accounting for the specific community most directly targeted by what he said.

As a fan of Howard Stern, watching this story play out across twenty years, what stays with you is not the arrest or even the specific words — as shocking as they were. What stays is the 2016 interview. Because Howard Stern’s career is defined by saying the uncomfortable truth, not managing it. And Mel Gibson, in 2016, managed what had happened in a way that suggested the lesson learned was about public relations rather than the thing itself.

Howard Stern’s show has always been a place where what you actually think eventually comes out. It came out in that police car in 2006. And what came out was not a one-off mistake born of tequila. Howard knew that. He said so. His audience knew it too.