Bro Caught Showering At Trump Taj Mahal Liquidation Sale 'Just Wanted To Get Clean'

ATLANTIC CITY, NJ — Speaking exclusively to Patch just hours after he was ambushed by TV news cameras while showering in a luxury Trump Taj Mahal hotel suite on Day One of the hotel's big liquidation sale (video below), local college bro Dave Cipollini, 22, insisted he didn't do it for the attention, or the laughs, or the glory.

"I didn't expect any of this," Cipollini, who lives in a tiny island town off Atlantic City called Brigantine, said Thursday afternoon. "I just wanted to get clean."

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Pressed further, though, the college student admitted that deep down, he may have been driven by a more sinister motive: revenge.

Cipollini, a Phi Kappa Psi brother currently in his senior year as an advertising major at West Virginia University, claimed in a phone interview with Patch that he was actually banned for life from the Trump Taj Mahal a few summers ago, after jumping onstage during a Blues Traveler concert at the hotel. (Sugar Ray and Smash Mouth also played that night, he recalled.)

After about 15 seconds of dancing onstage to the hit Blues Traveler song "Hook," Cipollini said Trump's hotel security pulled him down, dragged him into a nearby alley and said: "Don't come back. Ever."

"They took a picture of me and said something about facial recognition," he remembered.

So, as the frat bro bathed himself Thursday morning in what used to be one of the hotel's most expensive suites, Cipollini said he felt "really happy to be back."

"I definitely got some revenge today," he said.

Other than that, though, Cipollini insists the shower was unplanned. He originally stopped by the Taj Mahal with his mom and sister, he said, to see if he could find anything cool at the fire sale.

"There were a few things that caught my attention, like a camel lamp," he said. "But then I saw the shower."

Video of Cipollini's impromptu hotel shower — a brilliant juxtaposition, really, between the simple pleasure of a humble, freeloadin' college kid enjoying a fancy spigot and the apocalyptic panic of a Black Friday-style bargain mob fighting over Trump's moldy old casino furniture — was aired live by NJTV late Thursday morning.

It has since been viewed and shared by thousands of people online. "My friends are all texting me, saying, 'I can’t believe you got on this live stream,'" Cipollini said. "Some of these people I haven’t talked to in years."

In the now-semi-viral clip, an NJTV news crew touring the hotel barges into the 50th floor suite bathroom where Cipollini is showering, shines a blinding light on his face and sticks a camera up to the glass. "What are you doing?" a newscaster barks.

"I'm just taking a shower," Cipollini replies.

"Why?" the newscaster asks.

"Um, I mean, it's a liquidation sale," Cipollini bro-splains in perfect monotone. "They're giving us a sample, so I wanted to see how the shower was. I thought maybe I could get a free shower."

The rest of the interview is just as hilarious — and hilariously calm, on Cipollini's part. (Watch the full video and read the transcript here.) Look closely, though, and you'll notice the subtlest signs of distress — brought on by Cipollini's realization, mid-shower, that the defunct hotel is no longer stocked with any kind of soaps or shampoos. Or towels.

It's an adorable dilemma, in the end, and one that gives way to perhaps the finest moment of the whole NJTV tour video, in which Cipollini is forced to dry himself — and the floor — with some on-sale pillowcases delivered begrudgingly to the bathroom by his mom. (In fact, Cipollini's mom wouldn't let him leave the suite, he told us later, until he'd finished sopping up his entire shower puddle.)

Other than his mom, though, Cipollini said no one gave him much grief for making himself at home at the Taj Mahal.

"There was really no security," he said. "It was kind of a madhouse in there. There were people trying to get stuff really fast, so they didn’t really care about me showering."

His only regret? "Not hopping in the tub on the other side of the suite."

Photos courtesy of Dave Cipollini