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Russell Crowe once again indulges his favored hobby—bemoaning his terminal victimhood at the hands of a cruel and unfeeling world—in a recent interview with CBS, in which the actor adds yet another item to the floor-length list of mitigations and provisos appended to his apology for having launched a telephone at the head of a New York hotel concierge. Reports the BBC:

In an interview with CBS, the New Zealand-born Oscar winner claims the US legal system is "open to be misused".

"Where I come from, a confrontation as basic and simple as that would have been satisfied with a handshake and an apology," he said.

Ironically, a handshake was exactly what the actor refused to exchange with his touch-tone-pad-indented victim, after his lawyer flipped out over a planned flesh-pressing ceremony on The Late Show With David Letterman. Instead, Crowe was left to wander the talk show circuit alone, begging forgiveness for an unforgivable act that he would later downgrade to "not that big a deal," and finding himself paying restitutions in the "low six-figures." But in Croweland, where accountability is make-believe and blame deflection the national pastime, it's the U.S. legal system, not he, who is the real villain here, a theme the actor will expand upon in an upcoming interview in which he will finally reveal that it was Justice William Rehnquist, acting on the pernicious encouragement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who actually launched the device at the front desk employee that fateful night.