4

Soren Kierkegaard

Crime: Statutory Rape

Arguably the pioneer of existential philosophy in the nineteenth century, Soren Kierkegaard is widely known for his analyses of religion and the human condition. He is considerably less known for seducing a child. Kierkegaard was twenty-four when he met fourteen-year-old, Regine Olsen and decided it would be in everyone’s best interest if he had sex with her.

There’s something about Olsens.

To his credit, he wasn’t interested in only, “Hitting and quitting that” (a common 19th century saying). Kierkegaard wanted to develop a monogamous relationship with Olsen, so monogamous in fact that she would never be able to love anyone else but him. Like most teenagers, Regine Olsen was fairly impressionable. Kierkegaard became a close friend of the family and had a subtle hand in influencing her taste in art and culture while a less than subtle hand worked furiously under her dress. For two years Kierkegaard contributed to shaping her into a woman who couldn’t possibly fall in love with anybody other than him until naturally, she did just that. Kierkegaard then proposed when she was eighteen and then for no clear reason other than to screw her up a little more, he called off the engagement after a year leaving Olsen devastated and hopeless.

3

Louis Althusser

Crime: Strangling His Wife

Socrates once said, “By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll be happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.” No one took this advice more literally than Louis Althusser. A Structural Marxist philosopher from the early 20th century, he remains a favorite topic among literary critics and philosophy majors, or as you know them, those assholes in college-town bars with the tweed jackets and the gravitas beards. In fact, the only thing this group of dilettantes likes more than correcting people who pronounce “Althusser” wrong is ignoring the fact that he strangled his goddamn wife.

“You’re dwelling on the corporal while I’m trying to engage you in the metaphysical, dude.”

It’s common for couples to offer one another massages after tough days. It is considerably less common for these massages to be issued from the front, exclusively on the neck and with enough force to crush a windpipe. Still, that’s exactly what Althusser claimed occurred on November 16th of 1980. He explained that he was giving his wife (who assumedly was made entirely out of eggshells) a front-neck-rubdown when she stopped moving. While the neck is a vulnerable part of the body, generally a person being strangled will indicate that he/she is unhappy with the situation, especially while face to face with the person doing the strangling.

2

Amy Fisher

Attempted Murder

Long Island is known best for two things: its ice tea and Amy Fisher, both of which are bad for you and rely heavily on duplicity. Amy Fisher started a relationship with the mechanic Joey Buttafuoco in 1992 after crashing her parents’ car and asking Buttafuoco to work on it without telling anyone. What should have been an ordinary setup for softcore porn launched to international fame because Amy was underage, Buttafuoco was nineteen years her senior and because Amy then shot his wife. Fisher drove to the Buttafuoco house one night in May and shot Mary Jo Buttafuoco in the head, but poorly because she survived. The story made headlines across the country, partially because of the love triangle, and partially because Buttafuoco is a hilarious name. Amy spent three years in prison for attempted murder and Joey Buttafuoco also did time for statutory rape.

1

O.J. Simpson

More Wife Killing

It would be wrong to build a list of celebrity crimes without consequences and not include O.J. Simpson. The football hall of famer allegedly stabbed his wife and Ron Goldman to death in 1994, and when I say “allegedly” I mean “unquestionably.” Simpson was acquitted of the murder charges in a criminal trial confirming once and for all that in a doubles match with evidence and motive vs. fame and money, evidence and motive will always lose miserably.

And lose by way of stabbing

After the trial, O.J. Simpson promised to launch a tireless man-hunt for the real killer across golf courses all over the country. So far, his findings have been inconclusive at best. Zero Accountability Moment In 2006 O.J. Simpson tried to prove that crime does, in fact, pay by writing a book entitled, If I Did It where he hypothesizes how the murders might have happened if he had done it. The insane plan to cash in on the death of his ex-wife and her friend left the entire country incredulous. No one knew if he was bragging about what he had done, or bragging that if he would have had the chance, he would have done it ten times better than the actual killer. Just about everyone suspected that book would never see the light of day, but Goldman’s family received the rights to the story to satisfy an unpaid civil judgment. They published it with a new title, If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer. The "If" in the title was emphasized a little less than Simpson might have wished ...

Too on the nose?

O.J. Simpson never made any money from his story. Ironically, the book Simpson hoped would simultaneously bring him more wealth and fame proved that a man capable of killing two people with a knife, was completely incapable of killing two birds with one stone.