Historical Rap Sheet

"The League of Shadows has been a check against human corruption for thousands of years. We sacked Rome, loaded trade ships with plague rats, burned London to the ground. Every time a civilization reaches the pinnacle of its decadence, we return to restore the balance."

— Ra's al Ghul, Batman Begins

The crimes of the villain(s) date back long before our grandfathers were born. Historical events that hurt many people are attributed to a single organization or person, usually more than one. Even if there isn't technically a law against causing earthquakes or eruptions, the events are used to show how dangerous the criminal is by placing wars, economic struggles, assassinations, and other pivotal events in their past. Stock Unsolved Mysteries are particularly useful for this.

These crimes can be committed by a group, like the Ancient Conspiracy, or a single person, like We Didn't Start the Führer. Those tropes cover the actual villains, this trope is about the "crimes". Therefore, it can involve Reminiscing About Your Victims.

Note that this doesn't necessarily have to apply to a villain: an Idiot Hero Reality Warper or Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds could have caused a natural disaster through clumsiness.

Subtrope of Historical In-Joke and Real Event, Fictional Cause, and essentially the evil twin of Been There, Shaped History. Compare Beethoven Was an Alien Spy, Julius Beethoven da Vinci and Historical Villain Upgrade. Often a form of List of Transgressions or Offstage Villainy.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Played for Laughs in Black Butler's anime, where before being tortured, Sebastian says in a light-hearted manner, "I admit it, I started the Black Plague." Considering his age and what he is, he probably wasn't kidding.
  • The Titanic was sunk by zombies attacking the crew and a grim reaper slicing the ship in half with his sythe.
• It's implied in Hanappe Bazooka that Nero had Dance and Bazooka start the Great Fire of Rome.
• Lupin the Third:
  • The Castle of Cagliostro: the Cagliostro family's centuries-old counterfeiting operation of (allegedly) untraceable "Goat Bills" were used to cause the collapse of the Bourbon dynasty, financed Napoleon's campaigns, and caused The Great Depression.
  • The Mystery of Mamo: The titular Mamo has personally claimed credit to all of the worst tragedies of humanity over the last 10,000 years. Everything from wars to plagues all in his pursuit of immortality. He also has a collection of clones, among them Adolf Hitler and Mao Zedong.
  • Lupin III: Alcatraz Connection: The Lupin gang obtains evidence that The Mafia group that is their target of the film was involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. They also discover an abandoned city beneath Alcatraz Island — turns out that the Mafia had turned Alcatraz into the ultimate Luxury Prison Suite and they got a bit ticked off when Kennedy discovered their secret and ordered Alcatraz to be shut down.

Comic Books

• In Superman Family #165 we learn that Superman's dog Krypto accidentally caused the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. You can read it here.
• The DCU's Immortal criminal Vandal Savage claims to have been many historical figures including Genghis Khan, Vlad the Impaler, Blackbeard and Jack the Ripper. He was also an advisor to many famous conquering and may have either been Julius Caesar or participated in Caesar's murder, depending on which version of the story you believe. He is known to make some of it up, but being around before the discovery of fire he has a pretty big rap sheet.
• Batman villain KGBeast, a Soviet super-assassin, has been described by the CIA as a participant in the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.
• Doctor Zero clashes with Anubis, an immortal Plague Master who was worshipped as the Egyptian god. He's responsible for the Black Death sweeping across Europe.
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Orlando has a long history of causing massive problems through his/her stupidity, starting with telling other Trojans they should drag that giant wooden horse inside the city walls to get a better look at it.
• The Ultimates
  • Red Skull assassinated John F. Kennedy, took part in the Vietnam War, worked for two of the most brutal dictators of the 20th century (Pol Pot of Cambodia and Idi Amin of Uganda), worked for the Russians in Afghanistan, and has trained and fought alongside terrorist groups across the entire globe.
  • Nick Fury is giving a debrief to the Ultimates, that contains top-secret information. There are 11 alien species living on the planet (at least, that SHIELD knows of). One of those species are the Chitauri, shape-shifter aliens that arrived in 1977. They infiltrated Germany in the 1920s, helping National Socialism and Hitler. WWII was actually a war meant to eradicate those aliens, and it ended with the destruction of their training camps in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck: It turns out that Bombie the Zombie is responsible for sinking the Titanic. Back in 1909, Scrooge ran into Bombie at the North Pole, who then fell into an ice crevasse. Three years later, Foola Zoola's curse draws Bombie back to Scrooge during one of his travels across the North Atlantic, dragging the iceberg with him.

Fan Works

• Danganronpa: Paradise Lost heavily hints that Haiji Towa was a regular participant in child sexual abuse overran by infamous American billionaire and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
• Day of the Barney Trilogy has Barney responsible for, among others, the extinction of the dinosaurs, Caligula's depravity, the Black Death, the rise of Hitler, and betraying Anne Frank.
• Reimagined Enterprise repurposes several real-world wars of the 1990s as the Eugenics Wars. For example, Khan Noonien Singh's people were the real reason the UN sent a military expedition into Somalia in 1992.
• In The New Adventures of Invader Zim, Norlock has acted as an Evil Mentor to most of history's most famous warlords, conquerors, dictators, and criminals.
• A Good Compromise: According to Lord Protector Julyeen, Kilana (possibly an earlier incarnation of her) originally gave the order to deploy the Teplan blight.
• Kyubey in The Soulmate Timeline is the reason that Neanderthals and Denisovans went extinct. They were less efficient sources of emotional energies than modern, extant humans, and it was simply better for Kyubey's purposes to guide humanity to not have the less effective stock continue to use resources.

Film — Animated

• Anastasia: Grigori Rasputin was responsible for Red October via a Deal with the Devil as vengeance against the Romanovs for trying to assassinate him.
• DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp shows that the villain Merlock was responsible for the sinking of Atlantis and the destruction of Pompeii. The really scary part? He did all of it because he was having a crappy vacation.
  Genie: Mount Vesuvius would never have blown its top if Merlock hadn't blown his!
• In The Rugrats Movie, after the babies end up rolling down the street in the Reptar Wagon when Angelica kicks it, causing them to eventually end up in the woods, this occurred while they were under Grandpa Lou's watch and he had fallen asleep like usual. After finding out about this, Didi mentioned that he slept through the attack on Pearl Harbor.
  Grandpa Lou: I sounded the alarm as soon as I could!

Film — Live-Action

• In Batman Begins, the League of Shadows claims to have sacked Rome and Constantinople, engineered (or at least spread) plagues, and caused the Great Fire of London. Whether there is any truth to these claims is never answered.
• In Zoolander, brainwashed male models set in motion by an evil council of fashion designers have had a hand in every major assassination attempt, beginning with Lincoln and on up through JFK. It Makes Sense in Context. Kind of.
• Captain America (1990) has the Nebulous Evil Organization that Red Skull works for being responsible for such things as the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations.
• Captain America: The Winter Soldier features the resurrected HYDRA as having been responsible for pretty much most (if not every) major terrorist event done since World War II, as part of their "convince people to give up their freedoms" Evil Plan.
• Smokin' Aces 2: Assassins' Ball implies that the Neo-Nazi Tremor family was the real perpetrator of the March 11, 2004 bomb attacks in Madrid, as part of a worldwide campaign of terror orchestrated by Big Bad "Hal Leuco".
• In Near Dark, two vampires in a small pack roaming the Southwestern US committing bloody massacres, Jesse and Severen, reminisce how they started the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
• Men in Black: A small Hyper-Destructive Bouncing Ball located within MIB headquarters was the trigger of the 1977 New York blackout.
  K: A practical joke from the Great Attractor. He thought it was funny as hell.
• Déjà Vu (2006) mentions that the last time that the Time Machine that is central to the plot was used to actually try to send something into the past instead of just viewing it, the power necessities accidentally caused the Northeast blackout of 2003.
• Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell: During a course on Greek history, the immortal Jackass Genie (wearing the skin of a college professor) describes how the Trojan war and the destruction of the entire civilization was caused by the Djinn.
• Faust: Love of the Damned: M has a framed photograph displayed on his desk in his office where he's shown buddying up with Adolf Hitler, and another implying that he was behind the accident that killed Princess Diana.
• Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance: Roarke is Satan in human form and he requires an host to walk on Earth. Among his previous hosts were Vlad the Impaler, Idi Amin, Josef Stalin, John Wayne Gacy... and Jerry Springer.
• The Big Bad of A Good Day to Die Hard, Komarov, is revealed to be at least partially responsible for the Chernobyl disaster - he was using the plant to manufacture weapons-grade plutonium and his grand plan, in pure Die Hard style, is to swindle the CIA with false proof that his rival Chagarin was responsible for this so they wll release him so he can go back to the plant and steal the plutonium he stored there during the chaos of the meltdown to sell to terrorists.
• James Bond:
  • In Dr. No, Bond does a Double Take when he sees Francisco de Goya's Portrait Of The Duke Of Wellington in Dr. No's lair. In 1961, the portrait was stolen in a high-profile story and was still missing at the time the movie was produced, thus implying that the title villain was the culprit.
  • Thunderball opens with a meeting of SPECTRE operatives detailing their latest plots, with a British agent stating that the organization received £250,000 of the stolen loot from the Great Train Robbery of 1963 in the UK as a consultation fee.
  • Licence to Kill: In a deleted scene, Pam Bouvier tells Bond that Sanchez's financial advisor and accountant Truman-Lodge is wanted in the United States for insider trading on Wall Street, strongly suggesting that he was involved in the 1987 Stock Market crash.
  • Casino Royale (2006) attributes to primary villain Le Chiffre some of the financing of the 9/11 attacks. He's said to have made a pretty penny using al-Qa'ida funds to short-sell airline stocks in the days leading up to the attack.

Literature

• In The Pariah by Graham Masterton, the death of the Toltecs, the atrocities of Caligula, the Black Death, and the Salem witch trials are all attributed to the demonic antagonist.
• For Love of Evil: Satan engineered the Black Plague by tricking Gaia. He later regretted how far it went, and the experience taught him his responsibility as the Incarnation of Evil. Inverted later as he tricks Chronos into averting the holocaust and World War II as a favor to YHWH, though this costs him his friendship with subsequent Incarnations of Time, who till then were the only ones friendly to him.
• Spider Robinson's Callahan's Crosstime Saloon short story "Unnatural Causes". A team of alien Krundai are responsible for many harmful acts in Earth's history, including: starting riots, wars and revolutions, causing the downfall of the Roman Empire, assassinations, promoting drug use, and the Holocaust. Their ultimate aim is to cause humanity to destroy itself so they can feast on our bodies.
• A Running Gag in Good Omens involves Crowley, the demon who was responsible for the original Temptation in the Garden of Eden, frequently receiving the congratulations of Hell whenever they notice something like the Spanish Inquisition has popped up in the human world. They inevitably leap to the conclusion that Crowley was responsible for getting it started. He frequently protests to the sympathetic Angel Aziraphale that he had nothing to do with it whatsoever: the human race thought of new ideas to be beastly to each other all on their own.
  "Neither claimed any responsibility for Milton Keynes, but both reported it as a success."
• The Hypnotists: Dozens of famous historical events, both good and bad, have been caused by hypnotists (often Jax's ancestors) doing things like making Christopher Columbus make a wrong turn so he'd reach America or mesmerizing Napoleon into losing the Battle of Waterloo.
• Croup and Vandemar have one in Neverwhere that isn't particularly specific but apparently includes assassinating kings, heroes, and gods.
• In The Dresden Files, the Fallen Angels Anduriel and Imariel (and their hosts, husband and wife Nicodemus Archleone and Polonius Lartessa) have only collaborated a few times in history. The last time they did, they caused the Black Plague. Tessa is also stated to have caused the Rwanda Genocide and Killing Fields of Cambodia (as well as the War of the Roses and the Drug Cartels of Columbia) essentially for shits and giggles.

Live-Action TV

• At the start of season two of Utopia, it is revealed that The Network is behind the assassinations of Aldo Moro, Mino Pecorelli, Richard Sykes, Airey Neave and the bombing of TWA Flight 841.
• Star Trek: The Original Series: In "Wolf in the Fold", it is discovered that Redjac is a noncorporeal lifeform which has been a serial killer on several planets, including Earth where it was Jack the Ripper as well as a few other unnamed killers (in China in 1952 and Kiev in 1974).
• In the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie, the Master attributes an invented historical rap sheet to the Doctor while recruiting Chang Lee. The Doctor himself has been responsible for inspiring the Great Fire of Rome and starting the Great Fire of London (both accidents) as well as bringing about the destruction of Pompeii (by stopping it and then triggering it again as a crossing of the Godzilla Threshold), among other historical encounters.
• The X-Files: According to the Day in the Limelight episode "Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man", the CSM was personally responsible for the assassinations of JFK and MLK, and made sure that the Buffalo Bills never won the Super Bowl.
• Supernatural:
  • The demon lord and Torture Technician Alastair implies that he had a hand in the concentration camps, noting how he hasn't been on Earth since "Poland, '43".
  • In "No Exit", the ghost that Sam, Dean, and Jo are hunting turns out to be H. H. Holmes.
  • The Horsemen War claims that he has been responsible for most of the conflicts throughout human history, specifically citing both World Wars, the Middle East, and the Sudan for the past century.
• Babylon 5: In "Comes the Inquisitor", Sebastian, a Vorlon "inquisitor"-slash-Torture Technician sent to test the resolve of Delenn and Sheridan, mentions that he was abducted back in the Victorian age... and it's revealed at the end that he was Jack the Ripper.
• Bewitched: Bumbling Aunt Clara causes the Northeast Blackout of 1965 when she tries to use magic on some candles.
• Quantum Leap: In one of the show's Kisses with History, Sam causes the Northeast Blackout of 1965 during an attempt to leap home.
• Grimm: One of the Grimm diaries reveals that the burning of Rome was accidental, caused by Emperor Nero sending an Excandesco to burn the homes of the Christians.
• Timecop: Ian Pascoe is said to have caused the Chernobyl, Titanic, and Hindenburg disasters, but we don't see it in the show outside of historical records.
• Blackadder Back & Forth had Baldrick kill all the dinosaurs with his dirty underwear.
• During a Time Travel trip, Professor Bobo from Mystery Science Theater 3000 burnt down Ancient Rome when he accidentally knocked over a candle trying to steal a cheese wheel.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Anya was responsible for the 1905 Bloody Sunday Massacre in St Petersburg, which was a precursor to the Russian Revolution.
  • In "Once More, With Feeling", Sweet sings "Something's cooking, I'm at the griddle/I gave Nero his very first fiddle!"
• Millennium (1996): In "Maranatha", the bad guy is introduced when he causes the Chernobyl disaster before the episode flashes to the present.
• Legends of Tomorrow has Vandal Savage, similar to his comic book counterpart.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In "The Howling Man", Brother Jerome tells David Ellington that the Devil is responsible for the great wars, the overwhelming pestilences, and the wholesale sinning that is regularly inflicted on the world. After Ellington releases him, he causes World War II, The Korean War, and the development of atomic weapons.

Music

• The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" lists many atrocities that the titular Devil has been part of, such as being the one who convinced Pilate to crucify Jesus, being a German general during World War II, being accomplice of the assassination of both Kennedys, and the French and Russian Revolutions.
• In Chumbawamba's "Everything You Know is Wrong", the singer declares himself to be connected to various conspiratorial events from the JFK Assassination to the Iraq War.

Tabletop Games

• Old World of Darkness averted this for one and only one specific instance: anything and everything else was free to be the result of a supernatural plot, but the Third Reich had to remain purely human in its origins.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition: One example that is more recent (and incredibly controversial, almost to the point of Creator Killer) was that the Setting Update made mention of the vampires influencing the current (as of 2018/2019) anti-gay policies of Chechnya. The Anarchs are also mentioned to have claimed responsibility for both 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis, but there is a heavy In-Universe discussion of them being an Unreliable Narrator.

Video Games

• Criminal mastermind Lord Kane in Evil Genius is alleged to have had a hand in every major crime of the 20th century, from starting the fire that crashed The Hindenburg to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He insists that his greatest atrocity was the result of a minion mishearing his statement "A bit of light panic, I think eh?" as "That ship, the Titanic, sink her". And yet you can recruit him to be your henchman.
• Star Trek Online: In a purely fictional example, the Player Character discovers in the Starfleet mission "Taris" and the Romulan mission "Revelation" that the Tal Shiar, particularly Hakeev and Taris, caused the supernova that destroyed Romulus in 2387.
• Kane from Command & Conquer claims to be the biblical Cain, who has led the Brotherhood of Nod throughout human history. Given his fondness for Sarajevo and the fact that his elites are called the Black Hand, Kane probably helped instigate World War I, and in one timeline's version of World War II he was a shadowy adviser to Josef Stalin.
• In the Assassin's Creed franchise, both the Assassins and the Templars, as a result of their endless war and infiltration tactics, have become responsible for countless well-known (and unknown) crimes and major acts throughout history, with well-known historic figures on both sides of the conflict. As revealed mostly in the Glyphs found in Assassin's Creed II and Expanded Universe publications, these acts include the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Julius Caesar and Adolf Hitler(!), The Tunguska Event and many of the acts of terrorism that led up to The War on Terror. Assassin's Creed Rogue also has the protagonist being directly responsible for the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, and almost getting killed by it.
• In inFAMOUS, undercover federal agent John White infiltrated the First Sons (a secret society run by superhuman "Conduits"), which claims to have been founded in Colonial America or even Medieval Europe, when their superpowers were mistaken for witchcraft, and led to subsequent witch hunts such as the Salem witch trials.
• Castlevania: Bloodlines: Countess Elizabeth Bartley kickstarted the events that led to WWI. She hoped that with all the death and destruction brought up by such a large-scale conflict, there would be enough souls to be sacrificed to resurrect her uncle, Count Dracula.

Web Original

• In Everyman HYBRID, HABIT, a malevolent entity who possesses people, claims to have a very long historical rap sheet including the likes of Josef Mengele and Jack the Ripper. This leads to some Fridge Horror when you start wondering just how many of them were actually good people who had been forced to watch as their own bodies committed horrible crimes. Knowing HABIT, that may have even been the entire purpose of the crimes.
• Hardly Working: Over the course of the show, the Phantom of the Office has taken responsibility for the Black Plague, the extinction of the dodo bird, and most shockingly, the death of Jesus Christ.
• The Time... Guys: Doc assassinated Julius Caesar, and it's heavily implied that he was the one who convinced John Wilkes Booth to kill Abraham Lincoln.
• SCP Foundation:
  • One SCP is heavily implied to be the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.

Western Animation

• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • In an early episode it's revealed that once every few millennia fairies have to be evil for 24 hours. During Wanda's stint, she killed the dinosaurs.
  • Through sheer ignorance rather than malevolence, Cosmo burned down Pompeii, sunk Atlantis nine times, and turned Xanadu into Pittsburgh.
  • Binky apparently brought The Black Death to Europe because he thought it was a band.
  • Cosmo and Wanda had a former godchild who wished for Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination and the start of World War I.
  • Amelia Earhart disappeared after aggravating Wanda's father Big Daddy.
• In YooHoo & Friends, Father Time was responsible for starting the Salem Witch Trials after trying to help three women carrying heavy buckets of water... by enchanting brooms to carry them. Thankfully he managed to save their skins shortly afterward.
• The Simpsons:
  • Charles Montgomery Burns has done many atrocities during his long life, including such monstrosities as being the one who made Amelia Earhart disappear, collaborating with the Nazis (even boasting of being better at manufacturing munitions than Oskar Schindler himself), and stealing a Trillion Dollar Bill that would have helped fund reparations on Europe after World War II (and thus made the French hate America from then on).
  • Abe Simpson, as part of a group confessing to various deeds of Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking, claims that he was the one who canceled Star Trek: The Original Series.
• One episode of Xiaolin Showdown has Dojo turn evil for a day (apparently it happens naturally once every couple thousand years). Master Fung mentions in passing that the last time around was the last time anybody ever heard of Atlantis. (This is contradicted in a later episode, where the cast visits the abandoned city.)
• In Futurama it was the Big Brain that killed the dinosaurs.
  • In "Bender's Big Score", Bender, Brainwashed by Nudar and the scammers, time travels to the past and steals all kinds of priceless items (The Mona Lisa, David, The Ten Commandments, Eddie Van Halen's guitar, the Gutenberg Bible, and the 2308 Nobel Prize, among other things).
• A Freeze-Frame Bonus in Gravity Falls has Bill Cipher suggest he may have had something to do with JFK's assassination. Then again, this is Bill we're talking about.
  • Ford has a set of Mind Control neckties which he apparently made for Reagan's masters. This is never elaborated upon.
• American Dad!:
  • When Roger is about to get hit by a bus and his life flashes before his eyes, it's shown that he apparently caused the Exxon Valdez disaster, participated in segregation, and came up with the idea for Jar-Jar Binks.
  • In two other episodes, it's mentioned that the CIA invented crack cocaine and the FBI invented AIDS.
• Miraculous Ladybug: Kwamis need bearers to act as Power Limiters. If they try to use their powers without the miraculous, they kick off unintended disasters. Plagg is responsible for the sinking of Atlantis and the extinction of the dinosaurs and dragons. Less seriously, Trixx is responsible for the Loch Ness Monster myth.

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