You can love someone’s art and hate their personal life, and the same is true for many of the influential leaders, artists, and activists on this list.
Thomas Jefferson
The founder who wrote the Declaration of Independence didn’t believe all men were created equal.
Jefferson owned upwards of 600 slaves during his lifetime who he forced to work at his mansion in Monticello. He regularly broke up slave families by selling people to deal with his financial troubles and believed blacks were biologically inferior in his private writings.
He also fathered children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, who was a teenage girl when they began their relationship.
King Leopold II of Belgium
Despite being lauded by all of Europe at the dawn of the 20th century as a benevolent, charitable monarch keen on civilizing and Christianizing Africa, he secretly operated a monstrous corporate enterprise.
By declaring the Congo Free State his personal property, he reduced the region to a vast, violent slave-labor camp devoted to producing rubber. When the Congolese failed to meet production quotas, his personal army of mercenaries initiated a reign of terror, cutting off the hands and feet of millions of Congolese boys, girls and women as payment.
As many as 10 million died, while King Leopold funneled the profits into extravagant public monuments in Belgium.
Mother Teresa
While Mother Teresa is remembered for her icon of caring, the care inside her homes astonished some doctors and volunteers who witnessed it firsthand.
Independent researchers who published their findings in The Lancet discovered that patients got minimal medical attention and there weren’t enough basic tools and strong painkillers like morphine. Mother Teresa allegedly saw pain as a way to connect to Christ. That belief translated to how her homes were run.
She also drew widespread condemnation for her brazen acceptance of funds from despised figures like Haiti’s Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and Charles Keating.
Instead of investing money where it was needed, improving care with better medicine and medical supplies for the hospices she built around the world, her order protected the secrecy of their billions of dollars in donations and earnings.
Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel)
The creator who entertained and taught generations of children to do the right thing concealed a dark secret of epic selfishness in his private life.
While his wife of 35 years was dying from painful Guillain-Barré syndrome and cancer, Geisel carried on a blatant long-term affair with his best friend’s wife.
After her suicide in 1967, due in part to depression from emotional abandonment and the profound humiliation of her husband’s adultery, Geisel married his mistress less than a year later.
Charles Dickens
The Victorian writer responsible for implanting the ideals of the wholesome family into our culture and authoring some of the most famous tales of abandoned or mistreated children was a cold-hearted individual who destroyed his own family.
Charles Dickens grew extremely bitter toward his wife Catherine after 22 years of marriage and their ten children. And he began pursuing a relationship with an actress named Ellen Ternan, who was 38 years his junior, and decided to evict Catherine from his home so that she could no longer contact their children.
This cruel move forced his wife to leave their kids with him or surrender them to a life of poverty.
Recent discoveries of personal letters from Dickens provide evidence that he went as far as to pressure a doctor into declaring his healthy wife insane so that he could have her committed to an asylum.
John Lennon
The man who became the worldwide symbol for peace and sang songs telling the world to “love one another” was an abusive husband and father.
He beat his first wife Cynthia, and tormented his first son Julian with years of intense emotional abuse and outright neglect. Julian later recalled how his father would scream at him to the point of tears, even once declaring he detested the sound of Julian’s laughter.
Lennon openly acknowledged in interviews that he was a hitter who took his intense misogyny out on the women he loved.
Woodrow Wilson
Blessed in our history books as the founder of the League of Nations and promoter of worldwide democracy, the 28th President of the U.S. was a vile white supremacist.
Once in the White House, Wilson promptly reversed years of integration by officially re-segregating federal departments, including the Post Office and Treasury, and indeed all of them.
Many thousands of black civil servants either had their careers end prematurely by being forced to work behind a screen or were outright fired. Wilson arranged a private screening of the Klan-supported racist epic The Birth of a Nation at the White House and applauded its historical portrayal.
Roald Dahl
You might know him as the whimsical author of children’s stories Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
But Dahl was also an unreformed bully and unapologetic antisemite who badmouthed and insulted nearly every editor and publisher he worked with.
In 1983, he wrote an essay for a British newspaper stating, “I have discovered a trait in the Jewish character which does provoke anger…even Hitler didn’t want to kill them all in one day!” His children later apologized for his lifelong bigotry that caused his readers so much anguish.
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs wanted us all to think he was different. What he may not have wanted us to know is just how lacking he was in empathy for the people who cared about him.
He denied for decades that he was the father of his eldest child Lisa. When she was born, Jobs infamously signed an affidavit stating he was infertile at the time of her conception.
He refused to provide child support and his daughter’s mother was placed on public assistance as Jobs’ net worth reached the millions. He famously exploited his factory workers and screamed at his employees in humiliating ways.
Joan Crawford
Joan Crawford is forever etched in our collective memory as a dazzling Oscar-winning Hollywood icon. However, in her bestselling memoir Mommie Dearest, Christina, one of Crawford’s adopted daughters, revealed the extent of the abuse she endured.
In it, she described how Crawford physically abused her kids, emotionally tortured them for sport, and demanded impossibly bizarre hygiene standards.
Friends of the family and Crawford’s first-born son, Christopher, later confirmed that Christina did not lie about a single thing in her best-selling memoir Mommie Dearest, including how Joan made her children’s lives miserable by abusing her power as their mother .
Coco Chanel
You know how Chanel helped women free themselves from corsets? She was an active Nazi spy during WWII.
Recruited as an agent codenamed “Westminster” with agent number F-7-124, Chanel took advantage of her affair with a German officer to reside at the Ritz in Paris during the war.
She also tried to leverage Nazi Aryanization laws to seize Jewish business partners out of her perfume company. Luckily for Chanel, she escaped punishment by fleeing to Switzerland after the war.
Alfred Hitchcock
The renowned director, known for his thrilling movies, instilled fear in his actresses off-camera.
While filming The Birds, Hitchcock became fixated on Tippi Hedren, compelling her to endure extended, perilous shooting conditions where real birds were constantly hurled at her.
When she resisted his s**ual advances, Hitchcock bluntly told her he would destroy her. He trapped Hedren into signing an exclusive contract with his production company and prevented her from acting in any other films.
Winston Churchill
Lauded as the heroic figure who helped defeat Nazi Germany, Churchill was an imperialist who caused millions of deaths. Churchill’s cabinet in India pleaded with him to divert resources to Bengal during the 1943 famine, but he declined. Over three million people starved to death that year as a result.
In a memo, Churchill actually placed the blame squarely on the starving Bengali people, questioning, “Why isn’t someone feeding them?” They breed like rabbits.”
British cabinet members of Churchill’s government, such as Leopold Amery noted in private journals that Churchill cared less about Indian starvation because he hated Indians.
Che Guevara
That iconic image of worldwide revolt, liberation, and idealized counter-culture masked a ruthless killer who reveled in brutality.
Once the Cuban Revolution concluded, Guevara took command of La Cabaña fortress, authorizing the swift execution of many hundreds of individuals deemed political enemies.
He boasted in his writings that a revolutionary needed to be a “cold killing machine guided by pure hate.” Guevara also founded Cuba’s first work camps where homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and political deviants were placed for reeducation.
Christopher Columbus
Though honored for hundreds of years as a bold explorer who found the Americas and opened up the world to new trade, Columbus committed genocide as governor of Hispaniola.
Contemporary accounts, including a now-vanished 48-page report from royal investigator Francisco de Bobadilla, extensively document Columbus’s use of violence and oppression to maintain control over both indigenous people and Spanish colonists.
Columbus frequently ordered his men to cut the arms off of natives who did not meet unrealistic gold collection quotas and sold indigenous girls into sexual slavery. And Columbus drove hundreds of thousands of natives into slavery and death by overwork and massacre.
Pablo Picasso
Known as the greatest artist of the 20th century, who founded Cubism and created a pathway for modern art, Picasso emotionally abused the women in his life.
Picasso’s grandchildren and numerous biographers have written extensively about how Picasso would take great pleasure and profit from pitting his lovers against one another.
Picasso famously categorized women as either “goddesses or doormats”, going out of his way to emotionally ruin and financially sabotage women when he grew tired of them.
Two of Picasso’s main muses and lovers, Marie-Thérèse Walter and Jacqueline Roque, would later kill themselves.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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10 women who earned their place in history by being ‘evil’
Throughout history, women who have overcome stereotypes and expectations to take power for themselves often earn evil or bad because they refused to just exist peacefully on someone else’s terms.
