Podcasts · TV & Film · True Crime

Gerbil

The Hollywood Reporter

8 episodes · in order

Everyone knows the story about Richard Gere. Few know how it started. For four decades, a salacious and unproven rumor has shadowed one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Investigative reporter Allen Salkin spent six years chasing its origins — and uncovered a story about gossip, power, politics, the internet and the peculiar wiring of our own brains.

More about the show

New episodes every Thursday.

Episodes

  1. Gerbil: Inside Hollywood’s Most Unkillable Rumor - Trailer

    · 1:32 · Trailer

    The Richard Gere gerbil rumor won’t die. Why? Did a movie star really show up at a hospital in the 1980s with a rodent in his rectum he’d inserted for sexual pleasure? Investigative reporter Allen Salkin spent…

  2. 1 - The Word

    · 41 min · Episode 1

    Say "gerbil" to someone and watch their face. Everyone's heard the rumor. Nobody knows where it came from. Reporter Allen Salkin isn't sure he should be the one to dig into it, but a tip from the daughter of an '80s ER…

  3. 2 - The Philadelphia Gerbil Panic of 1985

    · 52 min · Episode 2

    Could Jerry Penacoli — Philly's golden-boy newsman, be the Gerbil rumor's actual patient zero? Eyewitnesses and archival tape tell a wilder, sadder story than anyone remembers. Did the rumor jump cities before it…

  4. 3 - Sex Object

    · 46 min · Episode 3

    Playing pimps and hustlers, attacking the press, projecting an unreadable sexuality — welcome to early Richard Gere. Bret Easton Ellis, Karina Longworth, and journalist Michael Gross help explain how the star became…

  5. 4 - Tail Between His Legs

    · 47 min · Episode 4

    In the 1980’s after Rock Hudson's death, Hollywood's homophobia is in full panic mode, and American culture is whispering about – and mocking – the sexuality of leading men. Plus: another newsman, another gerbil rumor,…

  6. 5 - Without a Base, Without a Trace

    · 46 min · Episode 5

    Is "gerbiling” actually a real thing? Between a bestiality investigator's case file, a 2024 FBI report, and doctors who've seen things, we go looking for the line between urban legend and actual medical phenomenon.

  7. 6 - Fear and Biting in Mesa

    · 50 min · Episode 6

    Gerbils have been illegal in California since 1924. So how does the rumor even work? Allen road-trips to Arizona to meet real gerbils, becomes a casualty of a nasty hamster, consults Sigmund Freud, and calls up New…

  8. 7 - A Guide to Dating Gerbils

    · 1 h 06 min · Episode 7

    The Toronto Film Festival, a Hollywood sitcom writers room, and a Manhattan humor magazine provide clues through the murkiest origins of the rumor. Testimony from writers and reporters, and a key archival discovery,…

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