5 Celebrities Whose Shenanigans Got Them Expelled From School

5 Willem Dafoe Got Kicked Out for Making Porn

That was how he’d put it, anyway, when later describing the incident in passing. “Eventually, I was expelled from school for making a pornographic film,” he said, speaking of his teenage years. “I was just a young boy in Wisconsin — anything to get out of there.”

That sort of claim prompts a few follow-up questions, and when he elaborates on other occasions, he says the situation was a little different from the one summarized there. He was taking a communications class at Appleton East High School, and a project of his involved going out with a camera and interviewing people. These subjects were eccentrics, who possibly played up their eccentricities for the camera. One, who called himself a satanist, brought out his porn collection while young Willem was filming. 

Dafoe claims he knew better than to include that part in his final submission, but the teacher still saw the footage and called in his parents, saying he was making pornography. Dafoe left the school now and managed to take a class a nearby college that fulfilled his high school graduation requirements. If the school caught him making a pornographic film for real, starring himself, no such class would have been necessary as they would have immediately issued him an honorary degree.

4 Samuel L. Jackson Got Kicked Out for Taking Hostages

If we made the 1970s sound weird, they were nothing compared to the tumultuous 1960s. During this time, Samuel L. Jackson attended Morehouse College, and when he and some other students demanded changes at the place, they registered their request by holding the faculty hostage. We mean that literally. They sealed off Harkness Hall with chains and padlocks, sealing themselves in with the trustees for a standoff that lasted 29 hours.

They had four demands. First, they demanded a Black studies program, which is surprising because this was Morehouse and you’d think they’d have had one of those already. Second, they demanded that the majority of the trustees be Black, which is again something you might expect to already be true at Morehouse, but if it wasn’t, that’s not really something students can ask for. The third demand concerned housing, and the fourth said that the college should merge with five other colleges and rename itself Martin Luther King University. That last part was truly absurd and stood no chance of being granted, even though Martin Luther King Sr. was one of the trustees and was present in that very room. 

Today, people are debating just what types of protest schools must allow. You’ll be unsurprised to learn that physically locking in hostages violates not just school disciplinary codes but state law. Not only did Moorehouse kick Jackson out — he found himself with a felony conviction. The surprising part is this was no permanent expulsion, and the school let him return after two years. The school motto is, “Et Facta Est Lux,” or, “Let bygones be bygones.”

3 Ted Turner Was a Lover

Students in the 1960s had another major grievance: Dorms didn’t allow guests past a nightly curfew. Seriously: A fair number of giant campus protests in those days weren’t about the war or broad national issues but about how male and female students weren’t allowed into each other’s buildings past a certain time. 

Over at Brown University, a student named Ted Turner was suspended twice when a female companion was found in his dorm room. Then, the university expelled him after determining that he and his girlfriend were living together. Further details on the expulsion aren’t public, so we don’t know whether this meant she moved in with him in his dorm or whether he responded to a suspension by moving in with her.

Either way, this didn’t permanently sour relations between Brown and Turner. They went on to name him as one of their trustees. They had a good reason: He now had a lot of money.

2 Harlan Ellison Was a Fighter

If you go to college to learn a skill, and a professor tells you you’re not great at it, you’d be wise to listen to their advice so you can improve. Harlan Ellison took a different path. When he was at Ohio State University at the start of the 1950s, a professor criticized his writing. Ellison responded by punching the guy, and that marked the end of his time at Ohio State University. 

He went on to a career in writing, which started out with magazines like the below one, as this was still the 1950s.

He then progressed into more notable work in fantasy and sci-fi, and this is what we were talking about before when we mentioned survivorship bias. There are far more cases out there with professors criticizing students’ writing and the students then not becoming writers, precisely because the professors assessed them validly. 

1 Van Gogh Had a Dispute About Butts

Here’s a somewhat similar story of the rare rebellious protégé who gets vindicated. This one goes all the way back to 1886, when Vincent van Gogh was studying at the Academy of Antwerp under the Belgian painter Charles Verlat. One day, Verlat brought in a physical copy of the Venus de Milo, and he assigned the class to paint it. 

Van Gogh did paint a torso that was nude and armless, but he failed to capture the Venus’ proportions. The torso he painted was wider, and Verlat took out a crayon and drew over it to correct the pupil’s mistakes. “You clearly don’t know what a young woman is like, goddammit,” said van Gogh. “A woman must have hips, buttocks, a pelvis in which she can carry a baby!” 

Some sources say this outburst meant the academy asked him to repeat the year, while several others say he now immediately left and never came back. By the following year, he had abandoned Antwerp for Paris, where he discovered it was far easier and cheaper here to now find live models willing to pose. He could now freely paint women with buttocks as large as he wanted, and from that point on, there was no stopping him. 

He did go to an asylum, and he killed himself, but only because that ass got him acting crazy.

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