5 Famous People That Engaged In Shocking Violence

See, Mailer had a slight problem with alcohol. We know: A writer? Alcohol?! Say it ain't so!

PBS

On November 19, 1960, Mailer threw a party to announce that he was running for mayor of New York City. In an attempt to set up a dialog between the rich and the poor, he invited all of the city's most elite citizens, as well as a whole bunch of homeless people. He got a bit upset when, for some reason, most of the rich people canceled. It turns out that it's not easy to get Rockefellers, Hearsts, du Ponts, or even Trumps to attend a party where the well liquor is Mad Dog 20/20. Purple flavor, of course. We're talking about high society here.

As the night wore on, Mailer started getting mean drunk. Eventually, his mortified wife, Adele, stepped in to subdue him, and this escalated into a full-scale screaming match, which ended when Mailer pulled out a two-and-a-half-inch pen knife and stabbed her several times in the chest. Hopefully he had some sort of quip about pens and knives at the ready, but honestly, it was probably all rage-screaming at that point.

New York Daily News

Adele survived. She told doctors that she'd "fallen on some glass" and stayed with Mailer for another two years. And literary types spent the next forever carefully debating whether or not Mailer's genius was "super duper great," or "just regular great."

But actually, Oppenheimer was kind of a violent, unhinged maniac -- at least in his youth, before he settled down for a respectable career of building weapons of mass destruction. In 1925, while aboard a train traveling to Cambridge, he tried to make a move on a woman who rejected his advances. According to a close friend of Oppenheimer's, Francis Fergusson, he later spotted the woman standing underneath a staircase he was standing on and tried to drop his suitcase on her head.

Later, as a grad student, Oppenheimer had an opportunity (Oppentunity?) to work for future Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Patrick Blackett. However, Oppenheimer's strength was in theoretical physics, and he struggled with the hands-on laboratory work Blackett required. Once again, he had a coping mechanism for this stress: He injected an apple with toxic chemicals from his lab and left it on Blackett's desk. To be fair, maybe he'd seen a Disney movie and assumed Blackett would just take a long nap afterward.

Panoptik~commonswik/Wiki Commons

Thankfully, Blackett didn't eat it, and Oppenheimer was only given probation and sent to a psychiatrist, rather than given an injection of his own and sent to the grave. But even treatment didn't do much good, because when Fergusson later paid a visit, Oppenheimer leapt on his friend's back and tried to strangle him do death for no apparent reason.

It's like he was a time-traveler sent back to warn us about his own future self.

In 2011, protests over a suspicious London police shooting boiled over into violence, and after the ensuing riots, authorities pored through massive amounts of CCTV footage to find the people responsible. That's when they saw this:

via Hampstead & Highgate Express

That's Waylett carrying a goddamn Molotov cocktail. Look, you can shoot fireballs out of a wand or you can huck them in a bottle. It's really the same thing.

After being arrested and charged, Waylett argued that he had no intention of throwing the firebomb. He just liked holding it. It felt good in his hand. Warm, most likely. Even if they bought that, though, the court also saw evidence that Waylett had "participated" in the looting of a nearby liquor store, and sentenced him to two years in prison. In a later interview, Tom Felton, who played Draco Malfoy, commented: "He's let himself down hugely really, and it's a disappointment for him and the franchise."

Warner Bros.

For one thing, he reinstituted the death penalty for counterfeiting, which these days seems ... a little on the harsh side? And this was the 1600s, so the "death penalty" often meant drawing and quartering. In his time as Master of the Mint, Newton completely revised and standardized the British currency, modernized the minting process ... and personally oversaw the brutal execution of dozens of counterfeiters. He even took a role in investigating potential leads, occasionally mingling with the rabble in local bars and taverns in order to suss out information. In short, Isaac Newton was basically a 17th-century Eliot Ness, only if the bootleggers got chopped into fractions at the end. Hey, there's still math involved! Way to tie it all together, Newton.

Wiki Commons

Also check out 5 Beloved Celebrities Who Were Nothing Like You Think and 5 Beloved Celebrities Everyone Forgets Did Terrible Things.

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Check out Robert Evans' A Brief History of Vice: How Bad Behavior Built Civilization, a celebration of the brave, drunken pioneers who built our civilization one seemingly bad decision at a time.