A while back, Reddit user banstovia posed the question, “Who is a celebrity who did horrible stuff when they were alive but are praised like saints now that they’re dead?” And the folks of r/AskReddit did not hold back with their responses. Here’s what they said:
1.
Steve Jobs — “Everyone only remembers him as the guy who created and then saved Apple and ‘invented’ the iPhone. People don’t remember how he fucked over his best friend, knocked up his girlfriend and left her as soon as he found out she was pregnant, refused to give the mother of his first child any money, refused to show any outward affection to his daughter, and (although this one is a bit milder in scale) refused to take showers and would put his bare feet up on the conference table. Oh, also, he refused cancer treatment in favor of new-age healing until it was too late, and then he spent a buttload of money to leapfrog his name on the organ donor list.”
2.
James Brown — “Regularly beat his wives.”
3.
Coco Chanel — “All those Nazi ties.”
4.
Hugo Boss — “In the same vein, he was a literal Nazi.”
5.
Paul Walker — “He allegedly liked underage girls.”
6.
Jerry Lee Lewis — “He married his 13-year-old cousin, and almost everyone remembers him for that, other than his music. When he died, fellow musicians were full of nothing but praise for him and conveniently overlooked this as well as his other misdemeanours.”
7.
Alfred Hitchcock — “Guy was a total abusive perv. A genius who made absolutely terrific films and expanded the very vocabulary of visual storytelling, but what a twist. Abuse of performers, especially women, used to be expected from directors in pursuit of incredible performances (which frequently worked).”
8.
Pablo Picasso — “Fucking Picasso.”
9.
Paul Gauguin — “Since we’re at painters… Left his wife and five kids to pursue art in Paris. Then he followed his dream of living in a ‘primitive’ paradise on the Tahitian Islands. He didn’t like it there. He took a 13-year-old Tahitian girl as his wife. She was pregnant when he decided to go back to Europe. He did come back to Tahiti one more time, but never saw them again.”
10.
Thomas Edison — “You know, for not really inventing what he’s most famous for.”
11.
Bing Crosby — “He abandoned his first family and then treated his second family very well in an attempt to make amends. Drove the first set of kids crazy.”
12.
Gandhi — “He was an abuser and made teenage girls sleep in his bed to ‘help him learn to resist temptation’ or some shit like that.”
13.
John Wayne — “I highly suggest looking up Behind the Bastards podcast episodes on celebrities. The episode on him was the first that came to mind.”
14.
The Kennedy family — “Rosemary Kennedy (JFK’s sister) underwent a lobotomy at the age of 23. Apparently, her mother was out of town that day, so Kennedy senior went ahead and let his daughter be lobotomized because of ‘mood swings.’ This is just the tip of the iceberg, though.”
15.
Finally, Mother Teresa — “She was a horrible person to those she supposedly cared for.”