Shatner Rules

draw. Bang. Bang and bang.
    It’s a strange thing to stare into the eyes of such a figure, one who really hasn’t aged much since his time in the spotlight, and have him draw a gun on you and pull the trigger. And he’s a man who has no remorse about what he did.
    And he kept doing it, whipping it out of his waistband, pulling the trigger, aiming the gun at me, the cameramen, people standing around. It was almost childlike. I said to him, “People kid around with pistols like that, do that fast draw, like we did as kids. But you fast drew, and actually fired a bullet.”
    “Yeah . . . so?”
    And that “so” is the difference between people like Bernie Goetz and you and me. (I’ll assume you’re a pretty together person based on the wisdom of your
Shatner Rules
purchase.)
    That’s not much of a difference when you get right down to it. But Bernhard Goetz was, and is, living in his truth. And the truth is amorphous; it is what it is to the person who is living it. And with
Aftermath
, I want people to share their truth, unfiltered, without judgment. I am a man of some opinions, but I keep them to myself on
Aftermath.
    That being said . . . after the taping, another producer came up to me and asked if I was scared of Goetz. I said, “No.” He said, “Well, you looked scared.” And I replied, “Well, I’ve never been that close to anyone that crazy before.”
    Keep in mind, I’ve signed autographs at hundreds of science fiction conventions.
    Aftermath
has allowed me to meet fascinating characters: the aforementioned Fualaaus came on to discuss their scandalous May-September (of the following year) romance; I spoke to survivors of the 1992 anti-government standoff at Ruby Ridge; I also chatted with New York’s notorious society girl–turned–Mayflower Madam Sydney Biddle Barrows; Iraq War hostage Jessica Lynch; and Unabomber brother Dave Kaczynski.
    I even did a prison interview with Lee Boyd Malvo, the teenager who—along with John Allen Muhammad—murdered at least ten people in 2002 in the DC Sniper spree.
    At the end of our conversation, I asked him, “Will God forgive you?”
    He said, “If I can forgive myself.”
    Was I talking to a murderer? Yes, but mostly I was also talking to a young guy who was horribly manipulated by a man he trusted and is now serving a life sentence. He has written letters to many of the survivors, and to the families of the murdered, apologizing for his actions.
    That interview with the sniper took weeks to happen. I would sit in my office between 4 and 6 P.M. every day, with the entire crew, waiting for the phone to ring. It finally went down when Malvo got access to the prison pay phone.
    While
Aftermath
has its share of the infamous, I’ve also had the opportunity to meet two men I deeply admire: tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, and Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst turned peace activist who released the Pentagon Papers to
The New York Times
in 1971.
    Ellsberg copied three thousand top secret pages of analysis and four thousand pages of government documents in forty-seven volumes, all of which showed that the Johnson administration had lied to the public and Congress about the war in Vietnam. It’s hard to realize the significance of this action, and the effort that it took, in this era of technological ease, when I can tell half a million people what I had for breakfast in the blink of an eye via Twitter.

    FUN FACTNER: William Shatner usually goes with fruit and a protein or grain, along with some vitamin supplements, for breakfast.
    Why am I doing
Aftermath
? Well, perhaps it’s time for me to sit in the hot seat and discuss my own truth.
    My wife Nerine died in 1999, after battling a severe addiction to alcohol, one that both she and I were powerless to control over the course of our marriage. The coroner ruled that she had died of an accidental drowning. She had alcohol and Valium in her system at the time of death, and I discovered her at the bottom of our pool when I returned from a family dinner in Orange County, California.
    Some months later, I went to New York, along with one of my daughters, to be interviewed on a tabloid news show about a television project I was involved in. I sat down across from the woman who was to interview me, and what was the first question out of her mouth?
    “What’s it feel like to murder your wife?”
    Needless to say, she didn’t get a follow-up question. I ended the interview and