5 Beloved Groups Everyone Forgot Did Terrible Things

That's ... that's a lot of cancer-fightin' money. Surely, every penny has gone to the greater good.

Well, not so much. It turns out that some of that pocket change you handed over goes to making sure that mom and pop charities don't use the word "cure," or even the freaking color pink. Real, actual money that could be used to help fund research instead goes directly into the pockets of lawyers (both for Komen and for the Joe Shmoes being sued). How dare Mary Ann Tighe of Long Island run a kite-flying event to fund lung cancer research and call it "Kites for the Cure"? Or the other 80-odd organizations that used the word "cure" or the color pink in some form?

The good news is that sometimes Komen's lawyers fail, and organizations like "Mush for a Cure" are able to fight back and keep their names. Michael N. Mercanti, a lawyer who represented this small charity operation, said, "They shouldn't be spending money on lawyers when people give their donations to find cures for breast cancer." He's got a point. We have a feeling that a lot fewer people would donate at the supermarket if the cashier said, "Would you like to give 8 cents for some petty bullshit?"

Kayla Mueller joined her boyfriend in Syria to help install equipment at a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders. In doing so, this incredibly brave woman paid a horrific price. She was kidnapped by ISIS, raped, and ultimately murdered 18 months after being taken. What's unimaginably worse is that during that time, she had to watch other women be freed after DWB negotiated for their release. But since Mueller was not technically a Doctors Without Conscie- sorry, Borders employee, they refused to negotiate for her, and left her to die. Even after being sent an email from her captors specifically for discussing saving Mueller's life, DWB's executive United States director Jason Cone said, "I don't think there was a moral responsibility. We can't be in the position of negotiating for people who don't work for us." Yeah, what are they, Doctors Without Borders or something?

So you have the world's most notorious murderous assholes actively trying to not kill someone, and the league of Batmans basically said, "Nope, not our problem. Go ahead and kill her. We'll take the ones who have been physically right there next to her in the same room, though. Go, us." Amazingly, Kayla's parents found it in themselves to come to peace with Dickwads Without Borders, eventually donating $120,000 to the group. "It is difficult, but ultimately this endowment is going to do what Kayla wanted done," her father said. That's a level of grace 99 percent of us would barely be able to fathom.

Wait, what was this entry about? Oh, dammit.

As you might have gathered, this is what happened to Joann Davis, widower of Apollo 11 engineer Robert Davis. According to Davis, her husband had been gifted a grain-sized piece of moon rock and a piece of the Apollo 11 heat shield by Neil Armstrong. These items stayed in the family for decades. Unfortunately, tragedy repeatedly struck Mrs. Davis. After the death of her daughter and the diagnosis of an illness in her son that would require 20 surgeries, the 75-year-old woman was struggling to find a way to support herself, said son, and her several grandchildren. If only she had, like, a valuable moon rock and a piece of a famous spacecraft laying around the house ...

And so Davis did what any law-abiding citizen would do: She contacted NASA directly to see if they could help her sell these artifacts in a legal manner, thus allowing her to care for her family (or at least not go too horribly into debt). Only, instead of helping her out, NASA immediately assumed she was some kind of space criminal trying to illegally sell these things. Why they thought a person directly contacting the very people a criminal would want to hide from was trying to pull one over on them, we'll never know. In any case, they set up a meeting with Davis and her husband (Davis had since remarried) at a Denny's (because of course). Once officials saw the tiny rice-sized moon rock, they seized it, grabbed her husband's wrist, bent him over the table, and proceeded to lead her out to the parking lot for a two-hour interrogation.

Oh, and they wouldn't let her use the bathroom. She told them she needed to pee as they were leading her out, and when her request for human dignity went unanswered, she was forced to urinate in her pants, and she spent the entire hours-long interrogation soaked in her own filth. Her lawsuit against them is still ongoing. For love of all that's good and holy, please go back to space, NASA. You're getting cabin fever here on Earth.

The Swedish government eventually caught on and investigated this horrible series of events, and found that the Karolinska Institute had really dropped the ball here. For one, they'd somehow missed that the initial credentials the dude had turned in were "questionable" and also "false," and when other doctors raised concerns about working with a legit mad scientist, they were ignored. Macchiarini was eventually fired, the board for the Karolinska Institute was dismissed, and nothing terrible and negligent will ever happen again just because a dude is charming and handsome, the end.