Total Ding-Dongs Whose Lawsuits Blew Up In Their Faces

6

General MacArthur's Libel Suit Exposed His Young Filipina Girlfriend

In 1932, a group of unemployed World War I veterans stormed Washington, D.C. to demand the early payment of their bonuses. In response to this fairly reasonable request from his fellow soldiers, then-Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur ignored the President's orders to stand down and led six tanks full of troops to break up the protest by any means necessary, up to and including injuring 55 of them and lighting their stuff on fire. It was generally seen as a dick move.

Journalist Drew Pearson certainly thought so, calling MacArthur "dictatorial and disloyal" and his crackdown "unnecessary, arbitrary, harsh, and brutal" in his syndicated column. With his trademark deliberation, MacArthur slapped Pearson and co-columnist Robert Allen with a $1.75 million libel suit. Pearson might have been crushed like a bug ... if he hadn't discovered MacArthur's affair with an actress named Isabel Cooper. He was 50 and recently divorced when he met her while serving in the Phillippines in 1930; she was 16 and nicknamed "Dimples." On returning to the States, he set her up in a hotel in Washington, D.C. and "bought her many lacy tea gowns, but no raincoat. She didn't need one, he told her; her duty lay in bed."

Alex CastroWhich even by 1930's standards was still well into "Eww" territory.

Truly, a beautiful love story, but by 1934, 20-year-old Cooper had grown sick of MacArthur. He was trying to send her back to the Philippines when Pearson tracked her down and discovered she'd be happy to make some cash by smiting her old sugar daddy. She agreed to appear as a witness in his lawsuit and also sold him some of MacArthur's love letters, which are better left undiscussed.

When MacArthur learned Cooper was on the witness list, he immediately sent his army buddy Dwight Eisenhower to find her, but Pearson had seen that coming and already had her hidden away in Baltimore. MacArthur then imagined his angry young ex-girlfriend testifying in court while Pearson published his love letters and suddenly decided a libel suit wasn't the greatest idea after all. The general not only dropped his suit, he coughed up $15,000 to buy his letters back.

5

Goat-Testicle Doctor John Brinkley Was Discredited And Ruined

You could say John Brinkley, a sort of Depression-era Dr. Oz, had some balls. Goat balls, to be specific. His primary claim to fame was an operation that transplanted goat testicles into human ballsacks as a cure for impotence. Of course, Brinkley's "cure" was as insanely dangerous as it was ineffective, but he always managed to smooth-talk his way out of the torrent of malpractice suits that followed him around like a medically negligent Eeyore. By 1938, he was hustling almost a million dollars a year (that's about $18 million in future money).

Library of CongressAlong with the prestige of fondling a presidential nutsack back in the halcyon days when that was still seen as something of a rarity.

4

The Guess Jeans Guy Got Sued Into Oblivion By His Employees

Georges Marciano, co-founder of the Guess clothing brand and Anna Nicole Smith's career, moved from France to California in 1977 and soon amassed a fortune beyond his wildest dreams, only to blow it after sinking into addiction and paranoia. It was a bit like Scarface, if Tony Montana had popularized acid-wash jeans and went down in a hail of lawsuits rather than bullets.

3

Jonathan Aitken Ended Up Destroying His Own Life

In 1995, the future looked bright for British politician Jonathan Aitken. The Conservative MP was Chief Secretary to the Treasury and even had a decent chance of becoming prime minister someday, but things went south when the Guardian and Grenada TV made a documentary about his shady dealings with Saudi Arabia. Among many allegations, they claimed Aitken scored prostitutes for Saudi bigwigs and that aides of Prince Mohammed Bin Fahd had paid his 1,000 pound hotel bill at the Paris Ritz.

2

Alger Hiss's Slander Suit Revealed Him As A Soviet Spy

In 1950, former State Department official Alger Hiss was jailed for perjury after lying to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) about his Communist past. It's hard to exaggerate the shitstorm this triggered at the time. The verdict suggested Soviet spies had infiltrated the US government, which helped kick off the paranoid McCarthy era. Hiss's supporters claimed their man had been framed by a right-wing conspiracy, but these days, most historians think Hiss was probably guilty. But the most contentious case of the Cold War might never have happened at all if it wasn't for a slander suit.

1

Henry Ford Was Called "Ignorant" And Then Proved It

Ask someone about Henry Ford's political views today, and they'll probably remember him as the anti-Semitic loon who earned a shoutout in Mein Kampf. But years before he became Adolf's favorite American, Ford was pissing people off in a much nobler way with his pacifism. In 1916, an editorial in the Chicago Tribune slammed him as an "ignorant idealist" and "anarchistic enemy of the nation" for opposing a troop deployment to the Mexican border. It also wrongly claimed Ford wouldn't hold a job for deployed workers, but the tycoon was mostly upset about the name-calling.

The Tribune's lawyers had to prove the veracity of their claims to fend off the libel charges, and the way they did it was borderline genius: They subjected Ford to six days on the witness stand answering questions about history and politics. It turned out that one of the most powerful men in the country thought the American revolution happened in 1812 and Benedict Arnold was a writer. He also claimed to have voted for James Garfield, who'd been inconveniently assassinated years before Ford was even old enough to vote. Sure, Ford was a wildly successful businessman, but the guy would have been deadweight on your bar quiz team.

Of course, the media lapped it up. Cartoonists drew Ford in a dunce hat, and the Nation labelled him "pitiful." A New York Tribune journalist called him "deliciously naive and omniscient and preposterous," almost certainly while sipping a martini and chortling to himself. A jury finally decided the Chicago Tribune was guilty of libel for calling Ford an anarchist but only awarded him six cents in damages.

The tycoon was reportedly so upset by the outcome and the media coverage that he muttered "never again" as he left the courtroom. Most biographers agree that it marked a turning point in his life: After the trial, Ford grew darker, weirder, and cranked his anti-Semitism up to eleven. Oddly enough, the scandal only boosted his popularity with ordinary Americans. The big-city media mocking a controversial businessman for his ignorance had only made him seem more relatable to a lot of people. Fortunately, nothing like that has ever happened since.

You can serve Blair with a frivolous lawsuit on Twitter.

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