I always try to bring some empathy to the party when a famous person looks like they’ve lost the thread in the emotional stability department.  In Britney’s wildest moments, I saw not a big scary bald mess but a lonely girl in exquisite pain. I even found myself caring about Charlie Sheen—who I can’t stand—because his break with reality was being witnessed as entertainment by millions, and he was so out of touch with reality that he had no idea how messed up that was.

But I’ve got nothing for Mel Gibson. He’s obviously crazy as a bag of nuts, but whatever pain he’s in is mixed up with too much violence, misogyny, and anti-semitism—plus a big old whopping dose of denial—for me to see anything but a very dark soul. Especially after reading excerpts in The Daily Beast from Heaven and Mel, an ebook screenwriter Joe Eszterhas has written about the time he spent working on a (really misguided-sounding)  movie collaboration with Gibson. Read on if you dare

*Also: there’s nothing about Sarah Silverman here, but the notion of  Mel Gibson’s face appearing anywhere on this blog is just too loathsome to contemplate, so it seemed right to run a picture of a cute Jewish girl instead.

• Gibson spoke to Eszterhas about putting out a hit on his then-wife Oksana: “I’m going to have her killed…She’s going to be gone. Gone! And no one will ever know it but me…She is evil. They worship the devil where she comes from.”
• He does, in fact, appear to share his his father Hutton Gibson’s view that Jews have really blown this whole Holocaust thing way out of proportion, saying “The Holocaust is a bunch of horseshit,” and going on to add “They’re just a bunch of oven dodgers.”
• He hates John Lennon said he deserved to be shot. “He was fucking messianic! Listen to his songs, `Imagine.’  I’m glad he’s dead.”
• He didn’t show a whole lot of respect for the fans. Once, a couple approached Gibson at a surf shop and asked if they could take their picture with them. “He smiles graciously and says sure. He turns to Randy and hands him the camera and at the same time draws a line with his fingers across his throat.  After Randy takes the picture, Mel asks, “Did you chop off their heads?” Randy has no idea what he’s talking about. “That’s what I was trying to tell you. Never include the heads when you take the picture. Then it’s worthless.”
• His views on homosexuality were less than enlightened. While speaking to a reporter from a Spanish magazine, he got up from his chair, pointed to his butt, and said, “This is for shitting, not fucking!…They take it up the ass! This is only for taking a shit.”