Being a celebrity is, like, so hard, you guys. You have to be a role model, but you’re also incredibly hot, so you’re constantly attacked with opportunities to not be that, and those opportunities sometimes become babies. Heck, maybe you just don’t want the piece of your heart that’s walking around outside your body to be followed by photographers 24 hours a day. Whatever the case, it occasionally becomes necessary to “I don’t know her” your child, but when the public’s nose is firmly shoved into your business, such things are bound to come out eventually.

William Randolph Hearst

William Randolph Hearst

(Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons)

The father of yellow journalism was also father to a daughter with Marion Davies who was passed off as Davies’s niece her whole life because having a movie star mistress was one thing, but an illegitimate child was another. There’s no official proof, but it was an open secret at the time, and Hearst was certainly way too involved in his mistress’s niece’s life.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Schwarzenegger didn’t realize the son of a housekeeper who worked for the family for 20 years was his for seven or eight years, but it took another half-dozen or so for the world to find out -- because his wife did. That sort of thing doesn’t tend to end well for marriages.

Clark Gable

Clark Gable

(MGM/Wikimedia Commons)

After an (apparently non-consensual) encounter with a married Clark Gable during the filming of Call of the Wild, costar Loretta Young was left pregnant and concocted a wild scheme to hide the pregnancy and birth and then “adopt” her own daughter. She even had the child’s unmistakably Gablian ears surgically altered to throw people off the scent.

Eric Clapton

Eric Clapton

(Majvdl/Wikimedia Commons)

Clapton famously immortalized Pattie Boyd in song and then treated her horribly, leading to their divorce in 1988 after she found out one of his affairs resulted in a son. What she (and everyone else) didn’t know until his son’s tragic death in 1991 was that he’d also had another child two years earlier.

Gavin Rossdale

Rossdale had a five-year relationship with artist Pearl Lowe in the ‘80s but still claims he somehow didn’t know her daughter, who was officially his goddaughter and whose “school parents’ evenings” he attended, was also his until 2004. He even told Lowe he’d never speak to her again if she let the child take a DNA test “and he’s kept his word,” apparently because it made Gwen Stefani mad, which is fair. She’s way too perky not to be secretly terrifying.

Louis Armstrong

Louis Armstrong

(Herbert Behrens/Anefo/Wikimedia Commons)

Louis Armstrong was officially childless because, according to his wife, he was sterile, but he at least was convinced he’d fathered a child with a dancer in the ‘50s who wasn’t known to the public until 2012. In fact, in letters to his business manager, he wrote that he believed he knew the exact moment "that cute little baby girl was made." Unprofesh, Louis.

Sisqo

In his “Thong Song” heyday, Sisqo reportedly fathered a child with a 14-year-old Swiss girl. She says he’s refused to take a DNA test, but her claim is good enough that the courts legally declared him her son’s father and ordered him to pay tens of thousands of dollars in child support. Switzerland doesn’t fuck around.

Dan Marino

Dan Marino

(Webefex/Wikimedia Commons)

In 2013, the New York Post broke the news that a married Marino had fathered a child with a production assistant eight years earlier. It’s a testament to just how well liked Marino still is in sports circles that everyone got mad at the Post instead of him.

Jesse Jackson

In 2001, a married Jackson was forced to admit he had a nearly two-year-old daughter with a staffer after tabloids threatened to admit it for him. He was ironically serving as “spiritual adviser” for Bill Clinton at the time, probably advising him to wrap it up.

Chuck Norris

By all accounts, Norris truly didn’t know a 1963 affair had produced a daughter until she wrote to him in 1990. He also didn’t tell anyone until 2004, when he published his autobiography, because some celebrities tell all, but Chuck Norris drops bombshells.

Orson Welles

Orson Welles

(Acme Newspictures, Inc./Wikimedia Commons)

Famed Beatles and Rolling Stones documenter Michael Lindsay-Hogg won’t ever know for sure that Orson Welles was his biological father. DNA testing has proved inconclusive, but friends of his mother, actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, have confirmed it for him, as well as his own face in the mirror.

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