His fans may call him “different” or “freaky,” but actor Paul Reubens, who rose to fame as kids’ television show host Pee-wee Herman, wants people to know he is neither a pedophile nor a child pornographer.
In his first interview since pleading guilty earlier this month to possessing obscene material after a two-year criminal probe targeting him, Reubens told Entertainment Weekly magazine that nude photos seized from his home were “kitschy, funny stuff from the 1940s, 50s or 60s.”
“Ninety percent of anybody off the street who looked at the stuff would burst out laughing and say, ‘You’re kidding me,”’ he said in the magazine’s issue that hits newsstands Friday.
“You can say that I’m different, that I’m freaky, that I’m weird. You can say lots of stuff about me. But you can’t say I’m a pedophile. That’s just not part of who I am. I am not a child pornographer,” Reubens said.
From star to punchline
Reubens, 51, became a major star in the 1980s as the geeky, grown-up kid who dressed in a gray suit and bow tie and ran a “playhouse” filled with imaginative characters like Jambi the Genie and Captain Carl. His sharp wit and sarcastic tongue made him a hit with adults and kids, and along with his TV show, Reubens made several movies based on the Pee-Wee character.
In July 1991, however, his star fell to Earth after he was arrested in Florida for exposing himself in an adult movie theater. He paid a fine, but his career faltered.
By the late 1990s he was rebounding, and his arrest for indecent exposure had become “a punch line to a joke,” he told Entertainment Weekly.
But in November 2001, police raided his house and seized 30,000 images they deemed to be sexually questionable. Reubens said they are part of his vintage photography collection.
“There were nude pictures ... a lot of it is erotic or sexual. But I don’t view my collection as dirty in any way. I view it as art,” he told Entertainment Weekly.
Eventually, the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office built a case of possessing child pornography based on 170 of the 30,000 images. On March 19, Reubens pleaded guilty to the lesser misdemeanor of possessing obscene material. He paid a $100 fine and was sentenced to three years probation.
“I didn’t want to spend a million dollars and put myself in the poor house,” he said of his reason for reaching a plea deal.
Reubens said his instinct was to fight because he didn’t believe the material was pornographic or obscene.
“But separate from that, as I learned firsthand, two people can have completely different opinions of what’s obscene,” he said.
The comic actor said he is working on a few television and movie ideas, and that Hollywood, he hopes, hasn’t seen the last of Reubens or his altar-ego, Pee-wee.
“Does anyone come back from this? I don’t know the answer to that,” he said. “but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let this destroy me.”