Sex Pistols member Sid Vicious was only 20 when he met Nancy Spungen in 1977. British punk god and veteran American groupie bonded instantly over their mutual passion for extreme drug use. Less than two years later, both were dead. The story goes that the couple holed up in Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel after the Pistols [...]
100 Greatest Celebrity Scandals Of All Time
#18: Patty Hearst Is Kidnapped
An heiress living her life as a student in the post-hippie stomping grounds of San Francisco, Patty Hearst seemed to be the picture of privilege. But when members of the Symbionese Liberation Army kicked in her door, mauled her boyfriend, and carried her away for ransom in February of 1974, the 19-year-old’s life was changed [...]
#17: Kurt Cobain Commits Suicide
Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain charmed the world with his mopey outlook and striped t-shirts. It was a brief romance. Fans barely had time to memorize the lyrics on Nirvana’s third album before Cobain checked out, killing himself with a 20-gauge shotgun blast. Conspiracy theories abounded. Was he moved to suicide by some bad heroin? Was he [...]
#16: Marvin Gaye Murdered By His Father
Although he was best known for his soulful odes to racial harmony and sexual bliss, singer Marvin Gaye‘s personal life was anything but laid back. At age 44, Gaye publicly admitted he was long-time “drug addict and sex freak”, a Safe-for-Work version of one ex-wife’s accusations that Gaye was a porn fiend and chronic masturbator [...]
#15: JonBenet Ramsey Sexually Assaulted, Murdered
America reeled when, in 1996, six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey was discovered strangled and sexually assaulted in the wine cellar of her family’s home in Boulder, Colorado. The former Little Miss Merry Christmas’s painted Kewpie-doll face became a nightly news fixture, and America was gripped by a necromantic furor. Armchair detectives pondered clues such as the undigested [...]
#14: Marilyn Monroe Dies Under Mysterious Circumstances
By 1962, sex symbol Marilyn Monroe had racked up an impressive list of ex-lovers and enemies to go with her cinema successes: outfielder Joe DiMaggio, playwright Arthur Miller, singer Frank Sinatra, wiseguy Sam Giancana, President John Kennedy and his brother Robert, the Attorney General. And those were just the household names. So when Monroe’s body [...]
#13: Kanye West: ‘George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People’
Kanye West usually engages his mouth before his brain. Case in point: A recent negative review of his live show prompted a blog rant the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Courtney Love bought an iMac. But the “Stronger” rapper spoke truth to power when he publicly dissed George Bush during a 2005 benefit [...]
#12: The Roman Polanski Rape Trial
Take a 13-year-old American girl, a randy (albeit brilliant) movie director decades her senior, and a nude private photo shoot in Hollywood’s hottest hottub (Jack Nicholson unknowingly donated his to the cause), and you’ve got the ingredients for a monster scandal — even without the champagne and Quaaludes. After churning out some of Hollywood’s most [...]
#11: John Lennon Murdered
Even in the unsettling world of rock star deaths, few were as shocking as the murder of Beatle John Lennon, shot outside his Manhattan apartment in 1980 by a fan who had asked for the singer’s autograph hours earlier. Thanks to both the worldwide success of the Beatles and Lennon’s strident political activism (which almost [...]
#10: Woody Allen Marries His Stepdaughter
“The heart wants what it wants,” says Woody Allen, which is probably the only reason a middle-aged man could ever give for hooking up with his babymama’s adopted daughter. Mia Farrow thought everything was fine between her and her director boyfriend in 1992 when she accidentally stumbled upon a series of nude photographs of the [...]
