Israeli mentalist Oz Pearlman stood just inches from President Donald Trump when gunfire erupted at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. In footage of the assassination attempt, he’s clearly visible waving a note—but before he could even recover from the traumatic experience, he discovered a blood libel spreading against him online.
Americans, prone to spreading conspiracy theories at every turn, claimed the note gave the signal to open fire and that Pearlman participated in the assassination attempt on the American president. But in an interview with ABC News, the famous mentalist told what really happened in those terrifying moments.
It turns out that just before chaos erupted, Pearlman was in the middle of performing a trick for senior administration officials. He was trying to guess the name White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt had chosen for her daughter, expected to be born soon. “Karoline told me: ‘Challenge me, I’m supposed to give birth next week, can you guess what I’ll name my daughter?'” Pearlman recalled.
The process began backstage but was interrupted when the president entered the hall and asked to do it in front of the full audience. Pearlman naturally agreed to his request and continued the performance around the reporters’ tables. “I guessed letter by letter, how many letters are in the name, and I wrote it on the note,” he explained.
From the amusing moment on stage, everything changed in an instant to paralyzing panic: “The second everything erupted is etched in my memory forever,” Pearlman said. “I dropped to all fours, everything around me was chaos. My first thought was: ‘Are we going to die? Maybe it’s a bomb about to explode?'”
Less than 30 centimeters from President Trump’s face, Pearlman saw Secret Service agents leap on the president and throw him to the ground to protect him. “I was so close, I could see everything. I crawled on the floor like a soldier in the army. I wish I had Meta glasses—and had that picture.”
Now Pearlman is revealing what was actually written on the note that ignited the conspiracies: it was simply the name he had guessed for Leavitt’s baby—nothing more than an innocent magic trick that became entangled in an international assassination plot.