Total Ding-Dongs Whose Lawsuits Blew Up In Their Faces

It wasn't entirely a good year for the bad doctor. That was the year Dr. Morris Fishbein published a two-part article about Brinkley in the Journal of the American Medical Association titled "Modern Medical Charlatans," which was even less charitable than it sounds. To protect the good name of man-goat testicular transplants, Brinkley sued Fishbein for $250,000 ... which was exactly what the AMA had hoped he would do.

The 1939 libel trial offered a golden opportunity to destroy Brinkley. Before a jury in Texas, a line-up of experts patiently explained that you can't just pop a goat ball in a human nutsack and expect anything to happen besides gangrene, while the AMA presented tests that showed the "medicines" Brinkley got rich selling were just water stained with a drop of dye. Brinkley's lawyers argued their client was a visionary genius persecuted by the establishment, like the Galileo of goat gonads, but the jury was spectacularly unconvinced. Having been officially declared a conman, the malpractice suits came hard and fast, and Brinkley was bankrupt by 1941. Don't worry; he didn't live in poverty too long. The next year, he was no doubt greeted at the pearly gates by hundreds of testy souls whose deaths he caused.

By 2007, following a divorce and the acquisition of a $3,000 a week pill habit, he started acting strange, even for him. With no real evidence, he decided five former employees had stolen from him. Not just a bit of garden-variety fraud, either: In Marciano's imagination, they'd already swiped $413 million of assets, and they were plotting an Ocean's Eleven-worthy art heist. His accountants and then the police assured him otherwise, but he sued for embezzlement anyway, only to be swiftly dismissed as a rich asshole in the midst of a chemical freakout. Then the employees sued back.

After a jury awarded the five defamed employees a cool $370 million in damages, everyone else who'd had to deal with his bullshit decided to get a piece for themselves. A month later, the accountant who'd originally investigated Marciano's claims won a payout of his own, his wife, and his business partner -- all of whom were implicated in the supposed scheme by Marciano after they refused to play along -- scored another $55 million, adding up to a grand total of $425 million in damages. While an appeal reduced the bill to a mere $260 million, it was more than enough to force Marciano to flee to Montreal and sell his famous Italian-Revival mansion in Beverly Hills for $24 million. It boasted seven bedrooms, a sunken tennis court and magnificent gardens, not to mention all the schadenfreude a lucky buyer could ever need.

Aitken came out swinging the day it aired. He slapped the Guardian with a libel suit, then assaulted his own Queen's English with a godawful metaphor, announcing that "If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play, so be it." Before the High Court, Aitken insisted that it had been his wife, not the Saudis, who had settled his Ritz bill after visiting Paris with their teenage daughter. Both his wife and daughter signed statements backing up his story, and he even promised a "ladies' day" of the trial when they would testify on his behalf. Things looked grim for the Guardian -- after all, surely Aitken wasn't such a horrifically prolapsed asshole that he'd make his own kid lie to the High Court?

Fortunately, the trial didn't last long enough for that. The Guardian had the receipts -- literally, from British Airways and a rental car agency in Geneva -- that proved Aitken's wife and daughter weren't even in France that weekend. They dropped their evidence-shaped anvil on the court and flattened the lying bastard like Wile E. Coyote. The failed lawsuit left Aitken with a 1.8 million pound bill, and his wife divorced his bankrupt ass while Granada TV trolled him with a new documentary called The Dagger of Deceit. Everyone in Britain was judging him, including an actual judge, who sentenced him to 18 months in jail for perjury and perverting the course of justice.

It soon emerged that his downfall was even dumber than it seemed. Before the trial began, the Guardian had offered to settle the case. Aitken refused, opting instead to battle on with a "sword of truth" about as impressive as a neckbeard's ornamental katana.

It all started in 1948, a year when Brylcreem was big, Frank Sinatra could have gotten it from your great-grandma, and an ex-Communist named Whittaker Chambers told HUAC that Hiss was part of his 1930s network in Washington, D.C. Hiss appeared before the committee to deny it, claiming at first that he'd never even met Chambers, but after a grilling from investigators -- including young Richard Nixon -- he conceded he'd known him by a different name. Still, Hiss insisted, he never knew him well, and they sure as hell weren't secret comrades. He then dared Chambers to repeat the allegations away from Congress so he could sue his ass. When Chambers did just that in a radio interview, Hiss filed a $75,000 lawsuit to prove his red, white, and blue bona fides.

Now, let's back up a bit. In his testimony to HUAC, Chambers hadn't accused Hiss of spying. In fact, he'd straight-out denied his group had committed espionage. All he'd told them was that Hiss had been a Communist in the 1930s -- a perfectly legal thing to be -- and he hadn't even produced much evidence of that. But now, as part of the lawsuit's deposition, Hiss's attorney demanded Chambers hand over any correspondence between the two men.

It turned out there was quite a lot. Chambers readily forked over an envelope containing handwritten notes from Hiss and copies of classified State Department documents and then led investigators to his farm, where his field of fucks lay barren, and gave them some incriminating microfilm he'd hidden inside a pumpkin. The "Pumpkin Papers" (seriously) seemed to prove that not only had Hiss been bullshitting about his dealings with Chambers, but he'd actually been sneaking information to the Soviet Union.

Although the statute of limitations for espionage had expired, Hiss was sentenced to nearly four years in jail for lying to HUAC. He went on to argue his innocence right up until his death in 1996, but in the meantime, the Reagan administration made Whittaker Chambers's pumpkin farm into America's lamest historic landmark. Only about two people visit it each year.