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After five decades on the public stage, I’ve seen it all. But the degree of bare-knuckle, white-knuckle, throat grabbing, take-no-prisoners intensity on Celebrity Apprentice is barely bearable. In the first hour this evening, the crucial decision was to go with the “selfie” angle, which I helped make notorious last year. After all, it was a sexy exercise program for Cosmopolitan Magazine, the most overtly sexual magazine in the cosmos.

I would have preferred they showed a little less of my demonstrating grinding and rubbing with Johnny Damon in the final edit, but it’s not my show.

Because I was so confident that we had prevailed, I wanted to rub it in Ian’s smug face and found myself wishing that last shark in his movie had done its job on ‘Sharknado 2.’

— Geraldo Rivera

The bottom line is that Johnny as Project Manager led Team Vortex to victory with our more vivacious and contemporary idea, not to mention our having the least friction internally.  The bottom line was that our exercise spread was sexier and hipper than theirs.

In the second hour it was all about selling wedding dresses for big bucks. And I knew that my blood enemy Ian Ziering had a big fat check waiting out there from some skin company that he works with. Prudence dictated that I not take on the role of his opposing project manager for two big reasons.

1-      I knew he had the big check coming in from his company, and,

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2-      I had already tapped many of my sources of donations in the first task I helmed last week.

But because he irks and bugs me so badly and because I still bear a grudge from his conspiring with Kevin Jonas and Lorenzo Lamas to get me eliminated in the second episode, I really felt that I had to fight him or die trying. I started dialing for dollars and some really generous people stepped up to the plate including billionaire philanthropist Stewie Rahr and my wonderful Fox News colleagues Brian Kilmeade, Steve Doocy and Bill Hemmer.

As it turns out, I felt confident that our Team Vortex had won. There was a surreal moment when Mr. Trump asked if we would like to keep our donations for our own charity or risk it on a winner-take-all. Because it was money going to our respective charities I felt it unnecessarily self-centered to go for it all. It would have been a different story if it was Vegas and the money was going to either him or me personally.

Because I was so confident that we had prevailed, I wanted to rub it in Ian’s smug face and found myself wishing that last shark in his movie had done its job on ‘Sharknado 2.’

As it turns out, our victory was by the relatively tiny margin of about $2,500 out of almost $600,000 raised. Still, I won. Ian lost. But our team’s compassion and reason allowed both wonderful charities to reap the rewards. Let’s go Team Vortex.