Last month, a viral Reddit thread had us sharing the dark and untold secrets of dead celebrities — and people were shocked to realize their most beloved heroes actually did some pretty fucked-up shit when they were alive.
It all started when Reddit user u/misterZ_6000 asked: "Which dead celebrities are treated like saints but were truly awful people when they were alive?"
You can check out last month's list here, if you missed it — and read on for some new examples below.
And just as a warning: If you don't believe in speaking ill of the dead, these will not be the BuzzFeed posts for you. Kindly close the tab, and go read a book. Goodbye!
1. "Christopher Plummer. An absolute garbage dump of a man. Wrote a whole book about how much he liked to sexually harass women, how he objectified underage girls, and admitted to rape fantasies."
2. "Gandhi. He is a horrible person for the way he treated his women. What he did would be considered sexual abuse today. He felt guilt about sex. To purify himself, he would sleep naked with young women and try not to get an erection. He did this repeatedly. One of the women was Abha Gandhi — his grand niece, at the time a teen. He believed if he was able to resist the temptation of flesh, he would be purified."
3. "David Bowie allegedly regularly fucked underage teen girls, and we love to pretend that didn't happen."
4. "I’ve worked for Prince, and it’s a not-so-hidden secret he was absolutely awful to work with. There used to be a saying, 'You’re nobody in this industry until you’ve been fired by Prince.' He’s a legend for sure, but was awful to those who put the show on, and his ego was out of control."
5. "Thomas Edison. Literally one of the biggest pieces of shit. Stole patents, stomped out competitors with physical force and violence, allegedly electrocuted an elephant to mislead the public that his inferior power grid was less dangerous than Nikola Tesla’s, and a lot more."
6. "Alfred Hitchcock. He'd torture his leading ladies, for one. His abuse of Tippi Hedren, the star of The Birds and Marnie, is probably the most well known. She talked about it with Variety a few years ago at the height of the #MeToo movement."
7. "Ted Kennedy. He killed a girl (Mary Jo Kopechne) whilst driving drunk. Interestingly though, later in life, he was often described as one of the nicest senators to work for."
8. "Ray Charles. Made children all over the place and refused to acknowledge them."
9. "Hugh Hefner was, kind of not surprisingly, actually not a feminist, and was more accurately a big misogynistic prick."
10. "Henry Ford was an antisemitic bigot."
11. "For some Rolling Stones fans, Brian Jones. He deserves to be honored for his role in the band, and for his musical contributions, and it's a shame how his life ended. But he also had a history of domestic violence."
12. "Stanley Kubrick. Although the way he treated Shelley Duvall during the production of The Shining is widely known, people (read: people who think there's nothing more to cinema than what Kubrick did) tend to brush it off when they talk about him. He was well known for treating his actors like shit, but he has been glorified to a point where his shortcomings are completely eclipsed by his popular persona of a mad genius."
13. "James Brown. Physically abused his wife (once allegedly with an iron pipe), sending her to the hospital, physically abused another woman, raped a woman at gunpoint, sexually harassed a couple of women, and more."
14. "Ronald Reagan laughed at gay people dying of AIDS."
15. "Marlon Brando. He basically raped Maria Schneider on the set of Last Tango in Paris."
16. "Rick James straight up kidnapped someone and allegedly tortured them."
17. "The Wright brothers. Their first flight is famous, but they hindered aircraft progress by suing anybody trying to build an airplane that remotely had similar features. The United States had a very limited Air Force in World War I because of this."
18. "Big Pun. His kids and widow fucking hated him. He pistol-whipped his wife in front of his children and broke her face."
19. "FDR. He put Japanese Americans into internment camps. Refused to support anti-lynching legislation. Supported redlining to refuse allowing Black people to buy homes in nicer areas."
And finally...
20. "John Wayne. White supremacist, homophobic, sexist, and just a straight-up horrible person."
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You can read the full thread of responses on Reddit.
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.