During an appearance to promote his new memoir, One Helluva Ride, on Wednesday, Michael Douglas described a terrifying incident at a dinner party where he said cult members threatened to kill him and his girlfriend if he didn’t join.
“They invited me for dinner, and then they said, ‘Well, with a lady friend,’ they said … ‘We’ve been trying to reach you,'” Douglas revealed on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
“We got to dessert, and they said, ‘We’ve been trying to reach you, and you just don’t get it. You don’t get it. So, you’re going to have to be eliminated.
Michael Douglas added, “They wanted … to join, to give yourself over, to be part of it,” in response to Joe Rogan asking what the actor “didn’t get.”
“They were going to whack me,” Douglas continued. “I remember there was a long silence, and I said, ‘Well, you’ve done it, haven’t you?’ And they said, ‘Yeah,’ … and a big, long pause. My girlfriend just started falling apart, peeing in her pants and all that.
“Then I said, ‘I’m going to leave now,’ and they said, ‘Yeah, you better.'”
Douglas said he believed that if they had made “any sudden movement”, they would have been killed.
“It’s strange,” he added. “I’ve never had many experiences, but there’s numbness… Kind of this whole numbness just comes over you, or it did in my case. Just was frozen.”
When Joe Rogan asked Douglas which cult the actor had escaped from, Douglas replied that musician Mel Lyman, founder of the Fort Hill Community, was in charge. In 1971, Rolling Stone called Lyman “the East Coast Charles Manson.” Douglas said that after the incident, he contacted the police.
Michael Douglas has been sharing numerous interesting stories about his life
In another story Michael Douglas told Joe Rogan, he disclosed that Danny DeVito once swallowed several marijuana joints following a police stop. Douglas said police stopped him for making an illegal left-hand turn while they were traveling to a concert.
“And I get out of the car, and I go back and I talk to the police officer,” Douglas recalled. “I remember when I got back into the car – Danny was with me – and we had, you know, a few joints, and Danny was in the back seat. And I just looked at him, and said, ‘Where’s the grass?’ And Danny smiled. All his mouth was entirely… green… he swallowed all of them!”
He also disclosed in his memoir that before he started dating his wife Catherine Zeta-Jones, he had to end his relationships with five other women.
“I told her, ‘Wait here, I have to make five quick calls. ‘Five? You have to make five calls?'” he wrote.
“They knew I was recently separated and in the process of getting a divorce. I made sure they all lived in different cities, which felt like a respectful way to be non-monogamous.”