CBS released a preview of Charlie Rose’s “60 Minutes” interview with Sean Penn Friday in which the actor expressed regret over how his Rolling Stone article about his talk with Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was received.
“I have a terrible regret,” he told Rose. “I have a regret that the entire discussion about this article ignores its purpose, which was to try to contribute to this discussion on the policy on the war on drugs.”
“Let me be clear: My article has failed.”
Penn’s intentions were to facilitate a conversation, and he was a bit distraught by how the coverage of his article warped that goal into questions over what he was doing interviewing El Chapo in the first place.
“Let’s go to the big picture of what we all want,” Penn said. “We all want this drug problem to stop. We all want the killings in Chicago to stop. We are the consumer. Whether you agree with Sean Penn or not, there’s a complicity there. And if you are in the moral right, or the far Left, just as many of your children are doing these drugs. Just as many. And how much time have they spent in the last week since this article came out talking about that? One percent?”
The Oscar winner also clarified his role in the eventual capture of El Chapo by Mexican authorities, saying that he met with him on Oct. 2 “nowhere near where he was captured.”
“Here are the things that we know,” he said. “We know that the Mexican government, they were clearly very humiliated by the notion that someone found him before they did. Well, nobody found him before they did. We’re not smarter than the DEA or Mexican intelligence. We had a contact upon which we were able to facilitate an invitation.”
Later in the interview, Rose and Penn discussed the morality of El Chapo’s profession versus the way drugs are treated in the U.S.
“Do you make a moral equivalency between El Chapo and people who buy and sell drugs in America?” Rose asked.
Penn paused, before saying, “I do if it’s me. I can’t make that judgment for everyone else. But I wouldn’t go so far as to buy or sell drugs.”
Rose seemed a little taken aback before asking, “So he’s no better or no worse than you?”
“I say, I can’t make him worse than me if I’m not out there doing everything that I can to get a conversation going on the way in which we prosecute that war,” Penn replied.
The full “60 Minutes” interview will air Sunday, Jan. 17, at 8 p.m. EST on CBS.
