No matter how great their songs and speeches might be, that doesn’t excuse the fact that some famous people did some absolutely terrible things when they were alive.
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson wrote a lot about liberty while he was living at Monticello, but apparently, that idea only applied to some people. He had over 610 slaves over his lifetime, and 400 of them were enslaved at Monticello.
One of his most famous slaves was Sally Hemings. Jefferson fathered at least six children with her, although it’s not like she was able to refuse him or anything. He had complete control over her life, and rejecting him would’ve led to severe punishment, so she didn’t really have a choice.
Henry Ford
Henry Ford did a lot of good things, like building cars and doubling his employees’ wages. But they don’t excuse his bad actions, however. He bought a small newspaper called The Dearborn Independent in 1918, and he used it to spread a lot of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.
Later, he had these anti-Semitic issues collected in four volumes called The International Jew, and he sold half a million copies of these. Adolf Hitler actually praised Ford’s views and had copies of The International Jew translated into German.
J. Marion Sims
In the 1840s, gynecologist J. Marion Sims was trying to repair injuries women suffered during childbirth. So what did he do? He operated on enslaved black women and girls, without any anesthesia and without any permission from the slaves. He just asked the slave owners.
Two of the enslaved women he operated on were named Lucy and Anarcha. Sims experimented on the two women, even though Anarcha was only a teenager, and he continued operating on Lucy after she nearly died from blood poisoning.
Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin was one of the most famous painters of all time, yet he had a dark side most people don’t know about. He traveled to Tahiti in 1891 at the age of 43, a married man and father to five children, and took a Tahitian girl named Teha’amana as his ‘child-wife.’
She was 13. It gets worse, however, when you remember that one of Gauguin’s own daughters in Europe was the same age as Teha’amana, and that he had relationships with many other Tahitian girls. He had several children with these underage girls, and abandoned all of them.
L. Frank Baum
L. Frank Baum had a life before writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that involved editing a newspaper called The Saturday Pioneer. In it, he reacted to the killing of Native American chief Sitting Bull. But he wasn’t on Sitting Bull’s side.
No, he talked about how the frontier would only be safe once all Native people had been killed, and he also encouraged the ‘total extermination’ of Native people after the Wounded Knee massacre. He doesn’t seem so wonderful anymore.
John Lennon
John Lennon. He’s not a person who you might assume did terrible things, but he did, and he openly admitted to them, too. During an interview with Playboy, he talked about how he had physically hurt women before and described himself as a ‘hitter.’
The interview itself wasn’t published until after Lennon’s death, but still, the point stands. The man who wrote a song like Imagine confessed to hitting women, and he also neglected his first son, Julian.
Jerry Lee Lewis
The music was supposed to be the story when Jerry Lee Lewis came to Britain in 1958. Then the news about his wife, Myra Gale Brown, came out. Brown was only 13 while Lewis was 22 when the two got married, and she was also the daughter of his own cousin. Yes, really.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Lewis was still married to his first wife, Jane Mitchum, when the two got hitched. No amount of rock ‘n’ roll and piano-playing skills could ever erase what he did to Brown.
Roald Dahl
You might be surprised to know that children’s writer Roald Dahl wasn’t as friendly as he appeared. He was actually a raging anti-Semite. Dahl made several comments against Jewish people when he was alive, and his own family apologized for them in 2020.
In 1983, Dahl said during an interview that Hitler ‘didn’t just pick on [Jewish people] for no reason’ and talked about how there was a ‘trait in the Jewish character’ that encouraged people to hate them. Yikes.
Gandhi
Mahatma Gandhi didn’t exactly believe in his own message of peace, as it turns out. During his later life, he repeatedly shared a bed with naked young women, including his own grandniece. Why? Because he claimed it was a ‘celibacy test.’
Gandhi argued that, if he could avoid having sexual intercourse with these women while they were in his bed, then he had achieved complete self-control over himself. Because, apparently, that was the only way to test that, in Gandhi’s eyes.
Robert Peary
Arctic explorer Robert Peary wasn’t someone who treated Inuit people like, well, real people. In 1897, he brought six Inughuit people to New York and treated them like specimens in a museum, going as far as putting them in the American Museum of Natural History.
The people were stuck in an overheated basement, and the conditions were so bad that four of them actually died. One of them returned home, while another, Minik Wallace, was left as an orphaned child in the city and didn’t return to Greenland for over a decade.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
You’d think a philosopher like Jean-Jacques Rousseau would be big on supporting humanity, and yes, he was. But he also sent all five of his own children away and abandoned them. He had them sent to foundling homes, places deliberately set up for abandoned children.
These places had extremely high death rates. While Rousseau did try to find these children later, the damage was done, and it’s likely that all of them died shortly after.
Chuck Berry
Rock ‘n’ roll stars are bound to be controversial, that’s a given, but Chuck Berry took things to another level. He met 14-year-old Janice Norine Escalanti while he was in a bar in Mexico, and then he took her to St. Louis to work at his nightclub. She later went to the police.
Berry was arrested for transporting an underage girl across state lines. It gets worse, however, because during the ‘90s, Berry faced lawsuits after claims that he had installed hidden cameras in his restaurant’s women’s bathroom.
Marie Stopes
In 1921, Marie Stopes opened one of the first family-planning clinics in the world, which seems fair enough. The rules were strict, though, and she would only allow married women to access resources for free. Stopes was also a big believer in eugenics.
So much so, in fact, that she supported forced sterilization on people that she thought were unfit to become parents, including poor people and sick people. Stopes also believed ‘racially inferior’ people should be sterilized, too.
Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound was another man with some nasty views, and he was happy to spread them. He worked for fascist Italian leader Benito Mussolini’s political party and made several announcements on the radio during World War II.
He attacked Jewish people, he attacked President Franklin Roosevelt, he also attacked America’s role in the war. Pound openly supported Hitler and talked about how eugenics was necessary to ‘conserve the best of the race.’
Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin was 28 years old when he met Lita Grey, who was 8, and she began acting for him when she was 12. He began a relationship with her three years later. Grey became pregnant, forcing her to lose the lead role in the movie The Gold Rush.
Chaplin tried to pay her off and get her to have an abortion, but she had the child anyway. The pair rushed into a secret wedding when she was just sixteen years old, and two years later, they divorced.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
13 people in history who faked their own deaths
Believe it or not, there have been people throughout history who have successfully faked their own deaths.
