A while back, Reddit user tt1101ykityar asked about the most toxic, heinous thing a celebrity's ever said, and there were sooo many examples I had never even heard of. Here are some completely forgotten horrible celeb quotes and moments.
Note: There is offensive language ahead, along with mentions of rape.
1. Back when Miley Cyrus was 16, Jamie Foxx said on his radio show that Cyrus should "make a sex tape and grow up."
2. Justin Bieber made a number of racist jokes when he was younger that have been all but forgotten. In 2014, a video emerged of Bieber replacing the word "girl" in his song "One Less Lonely Girl" with the n-word, singing, “One less lonely n*****. If I kill you, I’d be a part of the KKK, and there’s gonna be one less lonely n*****.”
3. In another instance, he said, "Why are black people afraid of chainsaws?" Then made chainsaw noises while repeating "Run n*****."
4. Howard Stern has made a ton of awful jokes over the years, but I think these are the two worst: first, when he joked about the Columbine school shooting. "There were some really good-looking girls running with their hands over their heads. Did those kids try to have sex with any of those good-looking girls? They didn't even do that?" Stern asked. "At least if you're going to kill yourself and kill the kids, why wouldn't you have some sex? If I was going to kill some people, I'd take them out with sex."
5. And next, when he played gunshots over Selena's music after her death and said, "This music does absolutely nothing for me. ... Spanish people have the worst taste in music. They have no depth."
6. On the red carpet for the 2012 BET Awards, Machine Gun Kelly said, “Black girls give the best head” and called a woman off-camera a "bitch," saying, “Bitch, walk the fuck away then, you fucking dirty dick bitch. ... Weak-ass dress and fake-ass Louis Vuitton purse. I’ll go in on this bitch. Hair all fucked up, lipstick smeared everywhere, fuck outta here. You look like you just got done giving head."
7. Jason Momoa once said he liked being on Game of Thrones because as his character Khal Drogo, he got to "rape beautiful women."
8. T.I. once said he wouldn't support a female president because women "make rash decisions." His full quote reads, "Not to be sexist, but I can’t vote for the leader of the free world to be a woman. Just because, every other position that exists, I think a woman could do well. But the president? It’s kinda like, I just know that women make rash decisions emotionally — they make very permanent, cemented decisions — and then later, it’s kind of like it didn’t happen, or they didn’t mean for it to happen. And I sure would hate to just set off a nuke."
9. Promoting the Planet of the Apes film that he was in, Mark Wahlberg called his costar Helena Bonham Carter "incredibly sexy" and "really cute in the [ape] makeup," adding, "She looks a bit like Janet Jackson."
10. Elizabeth Hurley once said, "I’ve always thought Marilyn Monroe looked fabulous, but I’d kill myself if I was that fat. I went to see her clothes in the exhibition, and I wanted to take a tape measure and measure what her hips were. She was very big.”
11. In the wake of the Las Vegas mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival, the members of NOFX joked about it, saying, "I mean that sucked, but at least they were country fans and not punk rock fans."
12. Brooke Shields has always been candid about her experience dealing with postpartum depression. After her book came out, in which she spoke about that time in her life, Tom Cruise inexplicably went on the Today show and said, "There is no such thing as a chemical imbalance. The thing that I’m saying about Brooke is that there’s misinformation. She doesn’t understand the history of psychiatry. She doesn’t know what these drugs are, and for her to promote it is irresponsible.”
13. In response to the revelation that Benedict Cumberbatch's ancestors owned slaves in Barbados, and rumors that Cumberbatch's family would be asked to pay reparations, Cumberbatch stated, "The issue of how far you should be willing to atone is interesting. I mean, it’s not as if I’m making a profit from the suffering — it’s not like it’s Nazi money.”
14. He's also made a number of problematic and misinformed comments about autism, mostly in relation to people speculating that some of his characters, like Sherlock Holmes, are on the autism spectrum. "I don’t go into a job going, ‘Is this autism? Is this Asperger’s? Is this some other form of slight learning difficulty or disability?’ I’m very wary of that, because I’ve met people with those conditions. It’s a real struggle all the time. Then these people pop up in my work and they’re sort of brilliant, and they on some levels almost offer false hope for the people who are going through the reality of it.”
15. He also generalized people with autism as having extremely low "mental ages" and suggested their only thoughts were about bodily functions. “I went to schools and met people, some of whom are very high functioning on the autistic spectrum. I met a 17-year-old who had the mental age of a 1 and a half year old. Everything was just about bodily functions. Smell. Sexual arousal. Shitting. Whatever. So when I hear people use diagnostic labels casually — Sherlock is autistic, Turing is autistic — it really upsets me.”
16. Denis Leary also made awful comments about autism, saying in his book, “There is a huge boom in autism right now because inattentive mothers and competitive dads want an explanation for why their dumb-ass kids can’t compete academically, so they throw money into the happy laps of shrinks…to get back diagnoses that help explain away the deficiencies of their junior morons. I don’t give a s— what these crackerjack whack jobs tell you — your kid is not autistic. He’s just stupid. Or lazy. Or both.”
17. While perhaps not as bad as some of the rest, Kim Kardashian once compared her life to an 18-year-old with cancer. When an interviewer suggested that the pressure to continue making dramatic content for Keeping Up with the Kardashians led to Kardashian "say[ing] yes to things one might otherwise say no to, for example marrying Kris Humphries and then divorcing Kris Humphries," Kim replied, "Not really. We [were] done filming our season at that point, so we decided to film for the wedding. And that was a decision that he and I made together. But I think that, with any decisions in life [brace yourselves], like, I spoke to a girl today who had cancer and we were talking about how this is such a hard thing for her, but it taught her a big lesson on who her friends are and so much about life. She's 18. And I was like, that's how I feel."
18. Chris Evans and Jeremy Renner joked about Black Widow being a "slut" and a "a complete whore" during the Avengers: Age of Ultron press tour, after being asked about fans pairing the character with both Cap and Hawkeye. They were clearly joking, but their use of the slurs caused some fans to get upset, and they had to issue an apology.
19. Angry at jokes about the Jonas Brothers promise rings, Jordin Sparks once said, "It's not bad to wear a promise ring 'cuz not everybody, guy or a girl, wants to be a slut, OK?"
20. On his HBO show Project Greenlight, Matt Damon once seemed to suggest to a Black filmmaker, Effie Brown, that diversity in Hollywood is only important when it comes to actors. "When we're talking about diversity, you do it in the casting of the film," he said, leading to Brown saying, "Wow, okay" and retweeting a gif of her face that had the caption, "When you realize even the most liberal white dudes in Hollywood will mansplain representation to you."
21. In 1965, Sean Connery told Playboy, "I don't think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman, although I don't recommend doing it in the same way that you'd hit a man." He said he thought an "open-handed slap" was fine "if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning," or, "If a woman is a bitch, or hysterical, or bloody-minded continually, then I'd do it."
22. Winona Ryder claimed that Mel Gibson made an AIDS joke and then asked her if she was an "oven dodger" (as in, "dodging" the gas chambers in the Holocaust). She recounted, “Mel Gibson was smoking a cigar, and we’re all talking, and he said to my friend, who’s gay, ‘Oh wait, am I gonna get AIDS?’ And then something came up about Jews, and he said, ‘You’re not an oven dodger, are you?’” Ryder said he tried to apologize later in the night.
23. John Wayne once told Playboy that "I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.” He also called Midnight Cowboy "perverse," saying, “Wouldn’t you say that the wonderful love of those two men in Midnight Cowboy, a story about two f***, qualifies [as perverse]?” He also said of Native Americans, “I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. ... There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”
24. Back when he was 23, LeBron James said, “With teammates you have to be trustworthy, and if you’re gay and you’re not admitting that you are, then you are not trustworthy.”
25. And Kirk Cameron once called same-sex marriage “unnatural," adding "I think that it's detrimental, and ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization." He then said if his child came out as gay, "I wouldn't say, 'That's great, son, as long as you're happy.' I'm going to say, 'There are all sorts of issues we need to wrestle through in our life. Just because you feel one way doesn't mean we should act on everything we feel.'"
26. After Arnold Schwarzenegger called George W. Bush's opponents "girlie men" in an SNL sketch (that he did not write), he repeated the phrase at the RNC, saying, “To those critics who are so pessimistic about our economy, I say: Don’t be economic girlie men.”
