1.
I feel like in the wake of all of Justin Bieber’s 2010s controversies, people always forget this bonkers one that occurred when Justin Bieber visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam in 2013. Before leaving, he wrote in the guest book: “Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber.”
2.
Cheating scandals are perhaps not a huge deal in Hollywood, but there are a few I’m including because of some wild details. First up — Julia Roberts and cinematographer Danny Moder. The two met while filming The Mexican in 2000 — while Roberts was in a relationship and Moder was married to a woman named Vera. Moder later separated from Vera and dated Roberts (though Roberts denies being the reason they broke up). So far, pretty standard for Hollywood, right?
Here’s where it gets unhinged: in early 2002, when Moder’s divorce to Vera was still not finalized, Roberts was photographed in a DIY T-shirt that said “A Low Vera” — in obvious reference to her beau’s wife. She had clearly made the shirt herself, and I still think it’s one of the more bonkers things a celebrity has done.
3.
There’s a good chance you remember the whole Kristen Stewart cheating scandal that dominated the news cycle for a while, but I’ll recap it here: while Stewart was shooting Snow White and the Huntsman, she had an affair with 41-year-old director Rupert Sanders. At the time, Stewart was with Twilight costar Robert Pattison, and Sanders was married to model Liberty Ross. After paparazzi photos exposed them, both Stewart and Sanders released apologies.
Once again, pretty standard for Hollywood, right? There are two kind of wild parts of the scandal, however, that I’m willing to bet you forgot or never knew. First of all, Pattinson went to Reese Witherspoon’s house to stay and recover after news broke, which is so random to me (though the two had starred together in Water For Elephants).
Second of all, future president Donald Trump was WAY too invested in the entire saga, tweeting multiple times about it over the course of multiple days.
4.
Did everyone but me know that Billy Bob Thornton was engaged to Laura Dern back in 1999? That seems completely random. But that’s not even the wild part. The wild part is that, according to Dern, she traveled to shoot a film, and when she got back, Thorton was MARRIED TO ANGELINA JOLIE. She said, “I left our home to work on a movie, and while I was away, my boyfriend got married, and I’ve never heard from him again.”
5.
Here’s another Angelina Jolie-related controversy that I can’t personally forget: that time she kissed her brother after winning her first Oscar, then thanked him onstage, saying, “I’m so in love with my brother right now. He just held me and said he loved me, and I know he’s so happy for me. And, um, thank you for that.” I should also note this is not the only time they publicly kissed.
6.
One last cheating scandal: I feel like NO ONE talks about the fact that David Letterman was extorted in 2009 over sleeping with female employees, then admitted to it on his show rather than pay up. One day, he found a box in his car with a letter that said, “I know you do some terrible things” and that the writer was working on a screenplay about Letterman. “He’s going to take all this terrible stuff he knows about my life and put it in a movie unless I give him some money,” Letterman said the letter revealed.
Letterman was actually able to find out the identity of the blackmailer with the help of the Manhattan district attorney’s office. CBS producer Robert J. “Joe” Halderman was arrested, and that very same night, Letterman went on his show and admitted, “Yes, I have had sex with women on my show.” He was married at the time with a five-year-old child.
7.
The Dave Matthews Band Chicago River incident still blows my mind. Way back in 2004, a Dave Matthews Band tour bus emptied the contents of their septic tank — 800 pounds of poop — on a sightseeing boat on the Chicago river.
8.
In the wake of the infamous Robin Thicke/Miley Cyrus VMAs performance, it feels like a lot of people forget that another scandal happened that night regarding Thicke. At the afterparty, Thicke took a photo with fan Lana Scolaro (see photo at the link). After the photo was uploaded, people started to notice that you could see Thicke groping Scolaro’s butt in the mirror behind them — which Scolaro then confirmed happened.
In fact, X (formerly Twitter) user Jen Leadley tweeted the photo at Thicke’s wife, Paula Patton. With neither Thicke nor Patton addressing the photo, the scandal fizzled out, but it still goes down in history to me. (Thicke and Patton later divorced.)
9.
Donald Glover once pretended to be an Asian girl named Yuki on Tumblr. (You can check out what the blog looked like here). It was apparently to promote his newest album, Camp.
10.
In a darker entry for this list, three months after Amy Winehouse died in 2011, Neil Patrick Harris and husband David Burkta threw a Halloween party that featured a meat platter assembled to look like Winehouse’s corpse. It did generate controversy at the time, but largely was forgotten until it resurfaced in the past few years. Harris did not apologize until 2022, calling the dish “regrettable.”
11.
Michael Jackson’s most remembered scandals are the ones alleging child sex abuse, but people tend to gloss over one that was huge in 2002: when he held his nine-month-old son out a window. He was apparently showing the baby to the crowd (four stories below), but sparked extreme concern over the one-handed action. He later apologized, saying, he could “offer no excuses for what happened,” and that “I got caught up in the excitement of the moment. I would never intentionally endanger the lives of my children.”
12.
We all know Tom Cruise is a Scientologist, but somehow this weird promotional video he made for Scientology in 2004 — leaked in 2008 — has gotten forgotten over the years. He says some wild remarks in it, though the Church of Scientology claimed the video was a pirated and edited version of a three-hour event.
13.
Okay, I lied earlier on this list. Here’s another cheating scandal, this one involving a secret love child and Arnold Schwarzenegger. In 2011, Schwarzenegger revealed that he’d fathered a child with a woman on his household staff — back in 2001. She was kept on the staff while Schwarzenegger reportedly paid for the child’s care, claiming all the while it was her husband’s child. Schwarzenegger did not reveal the truth to his then-wife, Maria Shriver, until after his term as governor ended. The two ended up splitting.
14.
Orlando Bloom and Justin Bieber had a pretty random feud going in the 2010s, starting when Bieber claimed he’d once slept with Bloom’s ex-wife, Miranda Kerr. Kerr denied that this had occurred, leading to tensions between the two men that came to a head when they ran into each other in Ibiza. Bieber allegedly made a comment about Kerr, causing Bloom to allegedly try to punch him. There are different accounts of what occurred, but TMZ did publish a video where you can see the altercation and hear Justin shouting “What’s up bitch?”
The best part? Bloom was allegedly dining with Leonardo DiCaprio, who witnessed the whole thing. Diddy, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton were also apparently there. Oh, to be a fly on that wall.
15.
Zayn Malik made headlines around the world when he decided to leave the massively successful boy band One Direction, but it wasn’t exactly a scandal, and he seemed on good terms….until some public beef rose up between Malik and Louis Tomlinson, who was still in the band. Malik began making disparaging comments about the music he’d recorded with One Direction, and Tomlinson took to Twitter to make fun of Malik. Notably, Zayn replied with the iconic tweet: “remember when you had a life and stopped making bitchy comments about mine?”
16.
Nowadays Alec Baldwin is better known for his more recent controversy, but back in 2007, he made headlines for another reason entirely. Basically, his 11-year-old daughter Ireland did not show up to a planned meeting (Baldwin was fighting with ex-wife Kim Basinger over custody at the time), and he left an awful voicemail that got leaked, calling her a “rude little pig” and saying, “You don’t have the brains or the decency as a human being. I don’t give a damn that you’re 12 years old or 11 years old or that you’re a child or that your mother is a thoughtless pain-in-the-ass who doesn’t care about what you do as far as I’m concerned.” He also threatened to come “straighten [her] ass out: “Do you understand me? I’m gonna really make sure you get it.”
17.
And finally, let’s end on a “scandal” that’s a bit more lighthearted. The year was 1999, and Matthew McConaughey was celebrating watching his alma mater’s football team win. A noise complaint caused officers to come to his home, where they found McConaughey, next to a bong, dancing naked with bongo drums. He was arrested and charged with resisting transportation, as he fought back as the police put him in their patrol car.
The story made waves when it first occurred, but McConaughey’s 2020 retelling of the story makes it even wilder and funnier. After over a day of partying, McConaughey decided to “wind down” and got naked, opening the window to access the smell of jasmine from his garden. He began smoking weed and put on “the beautiful African melodic beats of Henri Dikongué,” playing along with the music on bongo drums. “What I didn’t know was that while I was banging away in my bliss, two Austin policemen also thought it was time to barge into my house unannounced, wrestle me to the ground with nightsticks, handcuff me and pin me to the floor,” he wrote.
He said one officer tried to wrap a blanket around his waist, but he resisted, saying, “I’m not putting shit on! My naked ass is proof I was mindin’ my own business!” He then decided as he was led out, “still naked and reluctant to submit to the inevitably of my predicament,” to do a bit of parkour by running up a wall and backflip over one of the cops. “My thinking was that in mid-flight, while upside down in the air, I would assume a pike position and then slide my cuffed wrists under my butt and up and over my legs, and then stick the landing … with my fettered hands in front of me.” McConaughey said he believed that by “pulling off such an extraordinary Houdini-like stunt, the officers would be so impressed they would abrogate the arrest and set me free.”
The stunt, predictably, did not come to fruititon, and McConaughey was brought in. He declined something to cover up his body twice, saying it was proof of his innocence, but finally relented and put on pants when a “6-foot, 6-inch jailbird built like a brick shithouse” said, “Trust me, you do wanna put these on.” The charges ended up being quickly dropped, except for a $50 fine McConaughey had to pay for the noise. He decided to exit out the front door to waiting reporters rather than sneak out, telling them, “I don’t want to rent a place there, but it was a nice stay for a night.”
What’s your favorite — or the most shocking — forgotten celebrity scandal? Let us know in the comments.
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