7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things

By:
7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things

We humans seem programmed to be overly forgiving of people we admire, particularly celebrities. A high-profile movie star strangled an entire litter of Samoyed puppies while masturbating furiously? We'll forget about it the instant he makes a Batman movie we like.

That's why we feel it's important to occasionally remind the world that the celebrities we most revere can also be the most appalling shitheads imaginable. For instance ...

Steve Jobs Swore He Was Infertile In Order To Deny Paternity Of His First Daughter

7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images News/Getty Images

Steve Jobs is the man who was once played by Ashton Kutcher in a movie, and is responsible for creating the device you are probably reading this article on. Prior to the recent rash of biopics, however, Jobs' private life was, for the most part, private. And the more we find out about it, the more we think that was because the dude was sort of a weirdo.

Take his relationship with Chrisann Brennan. When the two moved into a house in Cupertino together in 1977, Jobs refused to share a bedroom with her, taking a small bedroom at the front of the house for himself and granting her the master. Then, a month later, he shoved all her shit out and took over the master bedroom himself, because apparently Jobs only enjoyed owning things he acquired in a hostile takeover.

apple computer
Tom Munnecke/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

"iSee, iWant, iTake."

The couple split soon after Brennan became pregnant, and when she gave birth to a daughter, Lisa, in May of 1978, Jobs was having none of it. For two full years, he vehemently denied that he was her father, even going so far as to submit sworn court documents that he couldn't possibly be the father because he was infertile (he was not). Even though Jobs was decades away from becoming one of the world's richest people, back in 1978, he was still a millionaire. Allowing your first daughter to be raised on welfare and a waitress income while you're wearing only the lushest polyester and jamming to the finest eight-track polyphonic stereo that money can buy is a dick move, Apple Man.

7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things
St. Martin's Press

All while using her name to sell the single shittiest thing he ever made.

After a lawsuit forced him into a paternity test, Jobs had to reimburse the state for its welfare costs to the tune of 500 bucks a month -- which, when you are Steve Jobs, is the financial equivalent of a mouse fart. He eventually struck up a relationship with Lisa in 1986 (when she was eight years old, and only after being sued into admitting he was her father), supporting her on and off throughout the years. In her own words, "Growing up I'd been very poor, very rich, and sometimes in the middle." For her part, Lisa's mother tried to get $25 million out of Jobs with the most polite extortion letter ever written:

What I need you to know is that I find myself unable to get past the years Of loss that I lived through to raise Lisa. I have raised OU daughter under
Chrisann Brennan

Steven Tyler Took Legal Custody Of The Teenager He Was Banging, May Have Pressured Her Into Aborting Their Child

7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things
Theo Wargo/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

While today he's most recognized as a prettier, more flamboyant version of your grandmother, back in the mid-'70s, Steven Tyler was navigating the Aerosmith ship over the massive waves of success brought on by smash hits like "Dream On." But Tyler wasn't just in it for the fame; right around the time Aerosmith was hitting the big time, he reached deep into his heart to take legal custody of a troubled underage fan ... so that he could have approximately all of the sex with her.

Julia Holcomb had a tragic past. Her father was a gambler with abandonment issues, she was a passenger in the car crash that killed her brother and grandfather, and her mother had a history of choosing less-than-stable stepfathers. So it's understandable that, shortly after a 14-year-old (according to Tyler) or 15-year-old (according to her) Julia met Tyler backstage at an Aerosmith concert, her mother readily signed over custody to the rock star. And by "understandable," we mean "completely irresponsible and totally nuts."

7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things
Mark Sullivan/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Keep in touch with Mama Kin.
"Eh, whatever."

But Julia's mother wasn't about to start making decisions that were in her daughter's best interest now, and so the young teen spent three years living with Tyler, a skeletal sex wizard. As you may suspect, this arrangement did precisely nothing to soften the tragedies of her life. According to Julia, a profusely coked-up Tyler "convinced" her to have children with him by tossing her birth control pills off a balcony. Then, once she became pregnant, he took off on tour, leaving her all alone in his Boston apartment. Then the apartment caught fucking fire, with Holcomb barely managing to survive by crawling into a fireplace (which it seems was the last place the fire thought to look for her). Then, while she was in the hospital recovering, Tyler allegedly spent a full hour pressuring her to abort her five-month pregnancy (which, if you recall, was achieved in the first place by Tyler confiscating her birth control and casting it into the wind), finally convincing her by threatening to send her home to her mother. Having gotten his way, Tyler, riding a balloon of cocaine up into the stratosphere, sat down and watched the doctors carry out the procedure.

Holcomb went on to happily marry another man and become a mother of seven. Tyler went on to feature his teenage daughter in an overtly sexual music video.

7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things
Geffen Records

"Walk This Way," but only if "this way" is at least a thousand yards from the nearest school.

Now, it's important to note that Tyler's version of events -- namely, that Holcomb was a repeated-abortion-having sexual pincushion -- was written with the intent of achieving bestseller status, while Holcomb's version was published on a website with an obvious pro-life political agenda. So the whole truth probably lies somewhere in between. Still, when you're placing someone on a scale from "massive douche" to "the black douche-hole at the center of the galaxy," you're really splitting hairs.

Peyton Manning Allegedly Teabagged His Female Personal Trainer, Blamed The Incident On Her "Vulgar Mouth"

7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things
Patrick Smith/Getty Images Sport/Getty Images

Peyton Manning, the beloved Denver Broncos quarterback and recent Super Bowl champion, is arguably the most famous Papa John's spokesman in America. After playing college ball at the University of Tennessee, Manning was the first overall NFL draft pick by the Indianapolis Colts, where he played for 14 seasons before being snatched up by the aforementioned Broncos. Along the way, he's picked up eight division championships, two Super Bowl rings, five MVP awards, and managed to get that dumbass "chicken parm" jingle irrevocably stuck in your head. If the phrase "Aw, shucks" fell into a vat of chemicals and grew arms and legs and a face, Manning is what would come crawling out. He would then lurch to the nearest athletic facility and drop his soupy grundle into a woman's face, because that's also his M.O.

7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things
Jerritt Clark/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

"Balls on chin, you taste so good."

Back when Manning was the star quarterback at the University of Tennessee, he was being examined in the locker room by the university's staff personal trainer, Dr. Jamie Ann Naughright (nee Whited), for pain in his foot. While she was crouched behind him in possibly the most vulnerable position a human being can submit to, Manning pulled down his shorts and sat directly on her face. Naughright's harrowing deposition described the event thusly: "It was the gluteus maximus, the rectum, the testicles, and the area in between the testicles. And all that was on my face when I pushed him up."

27. allegation and provided by Ms. Whited: On February 29, 1996, while I was performing therapy on a student athlete, XXXX, he pulled his pants down a
University of Tennessee

Manning denied any wrongdoing, insisting that he had meant to moon UT cross-country runner Malcolm Saxon and had simply forgotten that Naughright's face was right in his asshole, because that's obviously the kind of thing that can slip your mind. (Saxon later challenged Manning's version of the event.)

Naughright won a $300,000 settlement from the school for this and other incidents of sexual harassment (the rest of which were not perpetrated by Manning). The whole thing was largely forgotten until Manning mentioned the "mooning" in his 2001 autobiography, in which he also painted Naughright as having "a vulgar mouth." Evidently, Manning felt the only cure for vulgar mouths was to thrust his underballs at them.

THE MANNINGS ARE THE BEST FATHER-AND-SON QUARTERBACK COMBINATION IN THE HISTORY OF FOOTBALL... Sports Wlustrated MANMI ARCHIE PEYTON MANNINO AND WIT
HarperCollins

He holds the Manning family passing and sacks records.

Jay Z Stabbed A Producer At A Party

7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things
Theo Wargo/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

Jay Z is one of the most successful rappers of all time. When he isn't releasing albums (which is most of the time), he uses his considerable status as a public figure to sell everything from Duracell batteries to cognac, and comfortably exists as one half of the celebrity supercouple Z-yonce, which may not have been an actual term, but it is now. He's a shrewd businessman, was once part-owner of an NBA team, and he named his daughter after a color.

7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things
Mark Davis/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

He then bought the rights to the color.

Jay Z also stabbed the everloving shit out of someone, which rarely makes it onto his list of superlatives.

Jay Z's road to fame wasn't a bumpless one. Unable to get a record deal, he started selling CDs out of the trunk of his car before saying "fuck it" and founding his own label, Roc-A-Fella Records, to release his debut album in 1996. So you can probably imagine that, for a guy who had to work that hard to succeed, the thought of someone bootlegging his blood, sweat, and tears might rub the wrong way. Specifically, the stabby way.

Fast-forward to 1999. Jay Z had just released The Life And Times Of S. Carter, and word on the street was that record executive Lance "Un" Rivera had been bootlegging the shit out of it. Jay Z was at Manhattan's Kit Kat Club to attend a listening party for Q-Tip's new album -- because it was still the '90s and naming yourself after common household items and/or beverages was an acceptable thing to do -- when he spotted Rivera. Jay Z approached the record thief and, as he described it, blacked out in anger. This is another way of saying that he stabbed Rivera in the abdomen with a five-inch blade. While it no doubt hurt like an absolute son of a bitch, Rivera wasn't seriously injured, and would go on to recover from the attack after a brief hospital stay.

7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things
Steven Henry/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images


"From now on, I'm only pirating from Kidz Bop."

Jay Z initially denied involvement -- even declaring himself not guilty in between rounds of nonsense in the chorus of his hit "Izzo (H.O.V.A.)" -- but then pleaded guilty to second-degree felony assault, a charge that normally comes with up to 15 years in prison. But because Jay Z is a famous rich person, he got three years' probation and had to pay an out-of-court settlement to Rivera for somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 million (and an unspecified number of Tidal subscriptions).

7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things
Roc-A-Fella Records

The song stayed the same, because plea bargain, y'all got to feel me isn't nearly as catchy.

7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things

Gerard Depardieu Was A Grave-Robbing Mugger

7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things
Andreas Rentz/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

Gerard Depardieu is a national treasure of France, famous worldwide for his breakout role opposite Andie MacDowell in Green Card, his truly prodigious alcoholism, and his ability to play Cyrano de Bergerac without the aid of any prosthetics whatsoever. He also definitely played a Musketeer at one point, but we'll be goddamned if we can remember when or which one.

7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things
United Artists

One of these guys heard the movie's title and decided that's all he's eating for the rest of his life.

In recent years, Depardieu has become a bit loose-lipped; a fact that is probably in no way related to his ready admission of drinking 14 bottles of wine every single day. In his autobiography That's The Way It Was, Depardieu describes a difficult childhood growing up in a dirt-poor region of central France. At least part of that difficulty comes from the fact that he was lucky to grow up at all, because when she discovered she was pregnant, Gerard's mother tried to abort him with a knitting needle. "And to think I almost killed you," she later told him, presumably with a cross-stitched embroidery she hung on his bedroom door.

As an understandably troubled teen, Depardieu prostituted himself to taxi drivers to make money. "I've known since I was very young that I please homosexuals," he said. Before long, however, he figured out that he could make way more money by simply beating the shit out of them and robbing them. And from there, of course, it was a natural progression to grave robbing, because Depardieu is apparently a time traveler from the 19th century. He and an unnamed associate (we're assuming Victor Frankenstein) spent their nights digging up the recently deceased and hawking the clothing and jewelry they recovered for cash.

7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things
Hulton Archive/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Even his headshots look like Igor.

Depardieu hightailed it out of France in 2013 and obtained Russian citizenship to avoid paying French taxes. (In his defense, his tax rate as a high-income individual would've been 87 percent, so we probably would've run away too.) The nation that made him famous has basically disowned him, but that's OK, because he's now best bros with Vladimir Putin. He and Putin hit it off immediately because, as Depardieu puts it, they "could have both become hoodlums." Depardieu has a loose definition of the phrase "could have."

7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things
The Presidential Press and Information Office

"He could have been a great dictator, if only he had secretly murdered a few more uppity orphans."

The Principal From Ferris Bueller's Day Off Paid A 14-Year-Old Boy To Pose For Sexually Explicit Photos

7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things
Paramount Pictures

You may not know the name Jeffrey Jones, but you know Jeffrey Jones. As the relentless Principal Rooney in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, he taught generations of teens that sometimes you stick it to the Man, and sometimes the Man fumblingly sticks it to himself. Either that or you know him as Winona Ryder's bumbling dad in Beetlejuice. It's one of those two. While it certainly can't said that anyone belongs to the Jeffrey Jones fan club, we'd be lying if we said he didn't occupy a special place in our 1980s cinema hearts.

Well, here's something else you didn't know about Jeffrey Jones (besides his name). Back in 2003, Jones pleaded no contest to charges of hiring a 14-year-old boy to participate in an X-rated photo shoot. Now, we should point out that Jones's attorney made it painfully clear that Jones was "not accused of touching or having physical contact with any minors whatsoever." This was strictly a "you do your thing over there, I'll be right over here with a camera and a sinister grin"-type deal. This is another way of saying that we can never watch him stalk a young Matthew Broderick without genuinely fearing for Ferris Bueller's safety. And that scene where he stumbles disheveled onto a bus full of elementary school students now looks like the preamble to the world's most exploitative horror movie.

7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things
Paramount Pictures

Bow Bow, oooooh nooooo

Jones was sentenced to five years' probation and a lifetime as a registered sex offender. That last part is noteworthy because, in 2009, Jones failed to complete his sex offender registration (you're required to register annually), which typically carries a sentence of up to three years in prison. Instead of going to jail, Jones was released on $20,000 bail and later sentenced to 250 hours of community service, which translated into picking up litter along Los Angeles highways (or "making freeway pumpkins," as an LA District Attorney spokesperson hilariously put it).

7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things
Paramount Pictures

He was watching. Ferris knew before we did.

So while Jones didn't quite get off as scot-free as a more famous celebrity might have, he still enjoyed a way less severe punishment than an real high school principal would've received.

Terrence Howard Is A Habitual Woman-Beater (And Is Also Shithouse Crazy)

7 Celebrities Who Everyone Forgets Did Horrifying Things
Steven Henry/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

Possessing a commanding, cool-eyed stare that can probably make panties spontaneously combust, Terrence Howard has enjoyed a fairly successful acting career, but is arguably most famous for his masterful portrayal of a drug dealer turned hip-hop mogul in the massive hit show Empire, and for being replaced by Don Cheadle in the Iron Man movies. But Howard had kind of a horrifying childhood, as he recently discussed in an interview with Rolling Stone which needs to win some kind of award for casual insanity.

When Terrence was six years old, he was waiting to see a department store Santa Claus when some guy accused his father of butting in line. The elder Howard responded by stabbing that guy to death with a goddamned nail file.

b
Cleveland Plain Dealer / Landov

It was the most immediate path to the Naughty List in history.

Unfortunately, that undeniable trauma appears to have manifested itself in the form of violent disdain for human females. Howard allegedly beat up his first wife, Lori McCommas, in 2001. While in Costa Rica with his second wife, Michelle Ghent, in 2013, he "followed into the restroom ... punched her on the left side of her face ... pushed her against the bathroom wall and strangled her for several seconds". His third wife, Mira Pak, pretended to be happily married for the aforementioned Rolling Stone interview, hiding the fact that her divorce from Howard was only a month away from being finalized.

orla inda undein den y amnt L Sdk GUET 145 EaLg Die EV Iel 13 hacass peu GLOAL CIFT GIFT NON S ASXATA INSIG IA
Neilson Barnard/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images


Here they are, whispering sweet reminders of the prenup into each others' ears.

Howard has also been escorted from an airplane for violent behavior and, in 2005, got in a disagreement with a couple in line at a restaurant which ended with him shoving the man to the ground and punching the woman in the face. It is important to note that he saved his punch for the woman in this altercation, because we suppose that's how he draws his strength. In Howard's defense, this is not a man you wish to accuse of butting in line.

In the time between his falling out with Marvel Studios and landing his role in Empire, Howard spent 17 hours a day in his penthouse constructing random shapes out of plastic and wire -- shapes that, somehow, prove his world-changing theory that 1x1=2, and not 1 (the correct answer). Perhaps it would all make more sense if we could read his reams of notes on the subject, but unfortunately they're written in Terryology, a language of his own invention. None of that is a joke.

Bernie is currently pursuing a career as a freelance writer or anything that allows him to do what he loves most: buy used celebrity tissues on eBay. He has a Twitter.

Psst ... want to give us feedback on the super-secret beta launch of the upcoming Cracked spinoff site, Braindrop? Well, simply follow us behind this curtain. Or, you know, click here: Braindrop.

For more celebrity behaviors that you've forgotten or willfully ignored, check out 23 Insane Things Your Favorite Celebrities Believe and 17 Outrageous Lies Celebrities Thought They'd Get Away With.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out The 5 Most Hilariously Drug-Fueled Celebrity Interviews Ever, and watch other videos you won't see on the site!

Also, follow us on Facebook, and let's speculate about who's gay in Hollywood.

Did you know cats modeled their "meow" after the cries of human babies, just because they knew us humans care about that noise? Did you know dogs can read your mind (emotionally), and live in constant suspicion that you know where the good food is (you totally do)? In the next LIVE episode of the Cracked Podcast, host Jack O'Brien leads Cracked's team of pet-loving/fearing comedians through all the ways our dogs and cats are more powerful, creepy, and awesome than we ever could have imagined. Jack will be joined by Carmen Angelica, Dan O'Brien, Alex Schmidt, and Jake Weisman at the UCB Sunset Theatre on Wednesday, March 9, at 7 p.m. Purchase your tickets here!

Scroll down for the next article

MUST READ

Forgot Password?