5 Horrific Things Beloved Celebs Got Away With
Celebrities go to great lengths to carefully craft their public image to be as sanitized and PR friendly as possible. However, sometimes celebrities still manage to be complete and total assholes anyway and come with pretty dark secrets that the general public just doesn't know or forgot about.
And since there's no shortage of douchebaggery any time soon, that means we get pretty heinous incidents like ...
Robin Williams Sexually Harassed A Fellow Co-Star
Everyone knows who Robin Williams is -- a legendary comedian and actor who built up a long career from Mrs. Doubtfire in Mrs. Doubtfire to Dr. ... uh ... Good(?) in Good Will Hunting. What people might not know however, is that he was kind of a creep too.
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Williams got his start on a sitcom from the 70s called Mork & Mindy -- a spin-off of Happy Days -- featuring Robin Williams as an alien called Mork and Pam Dawber as human partner-in-crime Mindy McConnell, who eventually mates with Mork to produce a half-alien/half-human baby. And if that premise sounds utterly dated and ridiculous, welcome to 70s television.
Unfortunately, the production time wasn't all wacky hijinks and cliched scriptwriting, as Pam Dawber shared allegations of being frequently groped and harassed by Williams on set. "I had the grossest things done to me by him" "And I never took offense. I mean, I was flashed, humped, bumped, grabbed. I think he probably did it to a lot of people ... but it was so much fun."
Williams would continue to do other kinds of harassment, like getting naked in front of her and grope her purely "out of boredom." The alleged harassment was incredibly targeted the entire time, as Pam experienced the vast majority of it.
Pam Dawber herself said she was never bothered by any of it, but that doesn't let Williams off the hook at all, as sexual harassment is still sexual harassment. Guess Williams didn't learn the concept of consent at Julliard.
David Bowie Had Sex With A Teenage Groupie
When it comes to one of the weirder/eccentric people in rock history, David Bowie ranks pretty high up there. He had done just about everything, every genre, and everyone, from groundbreaking art-rock albums to having a screwed up period where he totally supported fascism for a while. And while he was idolized worldwide by many people, not many knew that he actually did something else just as fucked up, like having sex with a teenaged girl.
Lori Mattix was part of the baby groupies of the 70s, underaged women that were sexually exploited by rockstars twice their age. She had built up somewhat of a reputation among other predatory men with whom she had sex with, like Jimmy Page and Mick Jagger. At the time, well before the #MeToo movement, being a rockstar had entitled you to all sorts of benefits, like fame, fortune, and statutory rape.
Lori and David Bowie met at a club in 1973, and Bowie was immediately entranced by her, leading to the two eventually hooking up in his suite, even though Bowie was in his mid-20s and she was 14 at the time.
Lori herself talked about this in a 2015 interview with Thrillist, going into extensive detail about the encounter and how he "de-virginized" her, which is about as gross and creepy as it sounds. The #metoo movement recently revived discussion about the baby groupie scene, along with Lori's many encounters with older celebrities, and how a lot of sexual abuse goes under the radar for men with enormous influence. Though this particular encounter hasn't actually been talked about a lot whenever David Bowie's legacy is brought up, which kind of goes to show you the lengths society will go to protect men of status.
And continuing the awful rockstar trend of sex with children ...
Iggy Pop Also Had Sex With A Teenage Groupie
Iggy Pop, frontman of the 70s band The Stooges, is widely known to be the "Godfather of Punk" and has left a large mark on rock history. And like most rockstars of his prestige, Iggy Pop was no stranger to the groupie scene of the 70s, particularly the baby groupie scene, featuring the two most famous groupies at the time, the aforementioned Lori Mattix, and Sable Starr -- who Iggy Pop had sex with.
Iggy Pop had met Sable Starr sometime in 1970, which launched a long sexual relationship between then 13 Sable and a much older Iggy Pop.
This lasted a while until Iggy eventually got bored -- or grew an actual conscious -- and they split apart. This didn't stop Iggy from repeatedly bragging about it in his songs, though. Take the lyrics from "Look Away," which say, "I slept with Sable when she was 13/Her parents were too rich to do anything/She rocked her way around LA/'Til a New Tork Doll carried her away." There is also some semblance of fake sympathy on the track, too, with the words "Sable had a baby back at her folks'/Me, I went straight and serious, too/There wasn't much else that I could do." We're not experts or anything, but there was probably a lot Iggy could have done for Sable, like not having sex with a child at all or anything. Just saying.
Van Morrison and Eric Clapton Are Corona Denialist Idiots
Van Morrison is best known for penning the song "Brown Eyed Girl" and "Gloria." But what you might not know is that he's a pretty anti-science scumbag of a human being who thinks quarantine and social distancing are "fascist" and that Corona isn't a big deal.
He threw a fit about not being able to go to brunch anymore and called the British government "fascist bullies" for locking down the country, all because they wanted to do the heinous crime of saving people's lives. "I'm not telling people what to do or think. The government is doing a great job of that already. It's about freedom of choice. I believe people should have the right to think for themselves," he said, presumably while also wearing a tinfoil hat.
Earlier this year, Morrison decided that people weren't dying fast enough and penned three songs, all protesting the pandemic restrictions set by the UK government. And, as you may have guessed, all three songs are pretty godawful. "Born To Be Free" contains some gems like rhyming "cramping my style" with "they take a mile," along with the hilariously bad comparison between Corona and the Berlin Wall, which works pretty well if you know absolutely nothing about history like Van Morrison here.
The track "No More Lockdown" is for people who were too stupid to understand Morrison's "message" the first time around and lays it on pretty thick. If you didn't already figure it out from the title of it, the lyrics spell it out directly for you, "No more lockdown/No more government overreach/No more fascist police/Disturbing our peace." Morrison is as much of a master at subtlety as he is critical thinking.
And that's not all; Eric Clapton of Cream fame is also part of the grift, collaborating with Morrison on the lockdown tracks. The same Eric Clapton who went on a racist outburst and also got conned into having sex with a spurious witch. Because both are clearly the bastions of intelligent thought. Luckily, neither of the two have any significant impact on government policy -- for now.
Marvin Gaye Had A Baby With His 15-Year-Old Niece
Despite being killed by his father on April Fools' day, Marvin Gaye's life was no joke. His influence on soul and Motown is immeasurable, as anyone who has ever listened to What's Going On could tell you. But like many other famous men, the artist himself was not as great as you might have initially thought. As it turns out, Marvin Gaye had a baby with his first wife's 15-year-old niece.
Marvin Gaye met his first wife, Anna Gordy, in 1959, who was actually 17 years older than him. And despite having a passionate but turbulent marriage with her, Gaye found sexual interest in Anna's niece, Denise Gordy, who was 15. (Marvin was 33.)
In Michael Eric Dyson's biography Mercy, Mercy Me, he discusses how the Gordy family gave consent to this, as Anna herself was too old to have a baby. Because as everyone knows, statutory rape suddenly becomes a moral duty when your family gives their blessing. The family tried to keep it a secret -- we can't imagine why -- but their friends and neighbors eventually found out.
If it wasn't already self-evident, maybe having a child with your wife's niece isn't exactly the best icebreaker to whip out at a social gathering/party. What's even worse is that Marvin Gaye eventually fell in love with his second wife, Janis Gordy, when she was 17, and while Marvin was still married to Anne Gordy. Looks like Marvin Gaye was interested in the wrong kind of sexual healing all along.
Top image: DFP Photographic/Shutterstock, ArtSiegel/Wikimedia Commons
