A Brief History
On September 25, 2018, comedian, actor, and television maven Bill Cosby, “America’s Dad,” was sentenced to prison for the crime of aggravated sexual assault. He joins a long list of celebrities who have let their sexual urges either get them in trouble or stain their reputations. We have previously discussed such celebrities in prior articles and today we look at more such tainted personalities. Who would you add to this list? (Actor Bob Crane, perhaps?)
Digging Deeper
1. Bill Cosby, comedian, actor.
Not just alleged but convicted. By his own admission he administered drugs to women in order to have sex, and he has been accused by many of drugging and then raping them. Previous lawsuits were settled to cover up such allegations, but his sordid practice finally caught up with him. Ironically, he often preached to the Black community about morals, ethics and other holier than thou topics.
2. Prince Andrew, Duke of York.
Known in his younger days as “Randy Andy,” this British royal is the younger brother of Prince Charles, heir to the throne. Known for his playboy like excesses, Andrew has recently withdrawn from royal duties because of his association with accused (and now dead) sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Andrew is accused of having had non-consensual sexual relations with underage girls supplied by his buddy Epstein and Epstein’s long time girl buddy, Ghislaine Maxwell. (The Maxwell criminal case is slowly evolving as of July 2020 when this article is being prepared and the details remain to be seen. The Epstein case was cut short by Epstein’s alleged suicide while in custody.)
3. Dennis Rodman, basketball player and friend of Kim Jong-un.
Rodman has long been known as a strange guy; a persona not modified by his stunt of marrying himself! His bizarre tattoos, piercings, clothes, hair dye and general behavior are “complemented” by his strange friendship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. In the sexual realm, Rodman has been romantically linked to Madonna and Carmen Electra, in spite of claiming he did not have sex until he was 20 years old (when he and his buddies were serviced by a prostitute). Rodman claims to have bedded at least 2000 women, of which he claims 500 were “gold-diggers.” Rodman also raised eyebrows (eyebrows?) when he posed nude for a PETA campaign against wearing animal fur. Rodman has claimed he “broke his penis” on 3 separate occasions, and in 2014 he accidentally broadcast himself having sex with 6 women. Yeah, accidentally…
4. Magic Johnson, basketball player and executive.
The NBA is infamous for the sexual activities of its players, with such all time greats as Wilt Chamberlain claiming to have had sex with 20,000 women! (Though not all at once…) Johnson lived up to his nickname by admitting to having sex with LOTS of women (he claimed 300 to 500 per year during his NBA career), even having “harems” of willing women throughout his career and even during his marriage. In 1991 he revealed that he tested positive for the HIV virus because of all the unprotected sex he had, an announcement that came only 2 months after getting married! Tales of sex, sex, sex, ensued, including illegitimate children and Johnson having parties where only men were invited, though entertainment from exotic dancers was provided. Johnson allegedly had sex before and after basketball games with his teammates and team employees covering for him. Magic provided game tickets to potential conquests and flew women around the country to meet up with him (so he said). Though he did not discriminate on the basis of race or hair color, he claimed a preference for athletic women that “looked good in spandex.”
5. Kevin Spacey, actor.
Hollywood actors have long been the subject of sexual tabloid fare, including such luminaries as Charlie Sheen, Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields and Fatty Arbuckle (acquitted of rape and murder). Spacey was accused of sexual harassment of teenage boys in 2017, a list of accusers that numbered past 15. Spacey came out as gay and made a kind of apology to those that believed his behavior (allegedly while Spacey was drunk) was inappropriate, but it seems Spacey’s career has been ruined. Lawsuits and criminal charges followed in 2018 and 2019, but both were later dismissed, one of the cases because the accuser died of cancer.
6. Lewis Carroll, author.
The guy that wrote Alice in Wonderland! His real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, born in Cheshire, England in 1832. (Cheshire Cat, get it?) Despite coming from a conservative and religious family, Carroll/Dodgson had a penchant for drawing and photographing nude children. Dodgson biographer Morton Cohen says that Dodgson’s, “sexual energies sought unconventional outlets.” The famous author’s obsession with nude young girls was claimed to be “artistic” and not erotic, something that is highly doubtable. In today’s world, our esteemed author would be a convicted felon serving time in prison.
7. T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), soldier, archaeologist.
Lawrence was a bit of an odd egg no matter how you slice it, and his love life reflected his unusual character. He attained fame for his World War I exploits in Arabia, helping to engineer the “Arab Revolt,” later changing his name after the war and rejoining the British military under a pseudonym as an enlisted man in the Royal Air Force (he had been an Army officer previously) and was booted from the service for his deception. Lawrence was finally allowed to return to duty with the RAF, leaving the service in 1935. He died in a motorcycle wreck shortly afterwards. Lawrence’s sexual nature has received much attention and little solid fact. He cannot be proven to have had a sexual relationship with any particular person and has often been speculated to have been asexual. On the other hand, suspicions of having engaged in homosexual affairs with other service members and notably with Selim Ahmed, “Dahoum,” a water boy that worked with Lawrence starting in 1911 while Lawrence was engaged in archaeology in Egypt. Dahoum, a minor, moved in with Lawrence and lived with the soon to be famous man until 1914. If the relationship is true as suspected, Lawrence was a pedophile.
8. Every Holier than Thou Politician.
It seems as if gay bashers and those criticizing others about affairs often have skeletons of their own in their proverbial closets, some of whom we have previously discussed in our articles. Examples of such hypocrites are Senator Larry Craig and Congressman Mark Foley, conservative icons and gay bashers that turned out to be soliciting gay sex themselves. Then there is Newt Gingrich, the erstwhile Speaker of the House of Representatives, who was persecuting President Bill Clinton over an extramarital affair while Gingrich himself was currently having an extramarital affair! The Reverend Jesse Jackson, former candidate for President of the United States, was “counseling” President Bill Clinton about Clinton’s extramarital transgressions while Jackson himself was having an extramarital affair that produced an illegitimate child. One has to wonder if a politician doth protest too much about sexual topics, lest that same politician be a lying hypocrite. The same applies to staunch opponents of abortion, including Pennsylvania Representative Tim Murphy, a hypocritical Republican Congressman who has been a staunch “Right to Life” supporter anti-abortion candidate was found to have urged his mistress to have an abortion when she told him she was pregnant. How many other “Right to Life” advocates have concealed having abortions in their own families? Giving a British accent to this category, we can include UK Prime Minister, John Major. As the leader of the Conservative Party, Major was supposed to be the traditionalist purveyor of moralistic lifestyles, not the man who was revealed in 2002 to have had a 4 year sexual affair with a government minister, Edwina Currie. Although Major had already been voted out of office in the 1997 collapse of Conservative Party dominance (in favor of the liberal Labour Party), he was roundly chastised for his hypocrisy in moralizing when he did not practice what he preached. During his time as Prime Minister and head of the Conservative Party, the Party was rocked by numerous scandals, resulting it its fall from power.
9. Television Preachers and Large Congregation Pastors, ad nauseum.
Television preachers have reaped untold riches by milking gullible adherents of millions of dollars in donations, spending the money lavishly on their own degenerate lifestyle. Of course, not every single one has been accused of such hypocrisy or been convicted of any crime, but enough prominent ones that the subject causes us severe nausea. Included in the sorry saga of sexual scandal sermonizers are Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard, Ernest Angley (another gay bashing hypocrite), Eddie Long, Jim Bakker, Marcus Lamb, Bill Gothard, Shoko Asahara (Japanese cult leader that not only sexually abused followers, he instigated a terrorist poison gas attack!), Tony Alamo, Bob Coy, Dave Reynolds, Doug Phillips, and finally, “reality tv” star Pastor Joshua Duggar, who was the eldest of 19 Duggar children featured on television. Duggar was found to have molested 4 of his sisters when they were underage and at least one other underage girl. You can add some of the Catholic senior clergy to this list, especially Cardinal George Pell, convicted in 2019 of sexually abusing 2 underage boys. This is just a partial list of such discredited preachers, pastors and priests, and there are plenty more that could have been listed, especially cult leaders. (Of course, many of the “Holy Men” listed here are “alleged” offenders and have not necessarily admitted or had their offenses proven in court. Others have been convicted in court or made public confessions.)
10. Fritz Petersen & Mike Kekich, Major League Baseball Players.
These two left-handed Yankees pitchers were at first good friends. It later turned out in 1973, each was having an affair with the other’s wife. Both couples divorced and not only did the pitchers switch wives, but kids, too. Not surprisingly, the Yankees decided that it would be a bad idea to keep them on the same team. Although such a scandal would now hardly cause a ruffle on the baseball waters, at the time the wife swapping escapade was a Major League Big Deal, especially as it occurred in the New York media center of America.
Question for students (and subscribers): What sleazy celebrity would you add to this list? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Parish, James. The Hollywood Book of Death: The Bizarre, Often Sordid, Passings of More than 125 American Movie and TV Idols. Contemporary Books of McGraw Hill, 2001.
Porter, Darwin. Hollywood Babylon–It’s Back!: All Those Celebrities, All Those Scandals, All That Nudity, And All That Sin. Blood Moon Productions, 2008.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by pixeIhouse from Canada of protesters gathered outside Kitchener’s Centre In The Square as Bill Cosby prepared to perform, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. This image was originally posted to Flickr by pixeIhouse at https://flickr.com/photos/55650988@N06/15604932994. It was reviewed on by FlickreviewR and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-2.0.