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Richard Gere: Hamster Never Went Up My Bum

We can’t remember how many years ago we heard the infamous “Richard Gere got a hamster stuck up his bottom” legend — suffice it to say that over many years it passed into folklore and we were considering passing it on to our children as a bedtime story, then to our children’s children. It’s nice to have these traditions, no?

But unfortunately, Richard Gere himself has ruined our dreams, by actually confronting the long-running rumour and nixing it. “I stopped reading the press a long time ago. Lots of crazy things came up about me at first, especially from the tabloids. There is an infamous ‘Gere stuck a hamster up his bum’ urban myth. I just decided not to pay attention to any of it. It’s a waste of energy,” he told Metro.

There’s something squeamishly embarrassing about the fact Gere knows about this rumour. Who told him? We want to meet the guy or girl that actually went up to the silver fox and asked him about his ass and a small rodent-like creature. Still, in the meantime, we’re going to have to seek out a new celebrity, and a new totally improbable rumor to pass along. [Photo: AFP]

#66: Richard Gere Rumored To Stick Gerbils Up His Butt

Never have so many known so little about one rumor. The words Richard, Gere, and gerbil became intractably linked over a decade ago, the story going like this:

Back in the early ’90s, Richard was allegedly admitted to a Los Angeles area hospital with a foreign object lodged in his rectum. Only he and the X-ray machine know for sure, but the object was reported to be a gerbil, either alive or dead (we’ll let you make the educated guess). According to the rumor, Richard had been participating in a sexual activity called “gerbilling,” wherein a gerbil is used in an attempt to attain auto-erotic stimulation. The incident, if true, would have taken place while Gere was riding high from his Pretty Woman success, and while married to uber-fox Cindy Crawford.

Though Richard has never directly addressed the rumors, they’ve persisted, making their way into the cultural consciousness — with everything from a South Park episode to the gerbil-in-question’s very own MySpace page.