Unperson / Real Life

People being unpersoned in real life.

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History

• This happened in ancient Egypt to perceived traitors (most notably, the heretical Pharaoh Akhenaten, who had tried to Unperson the Egyptian Pantheon). These disgraced people had their carved images, monuments, etc. either defaced or obliterated, wiping out not only their images but also their names. Given the Egyptian focus on the afterlife, and the need for a perpetual image and name to ensure that afterlife, this was a very serious punishment.
  • Ironically, because of this modern scholars often have a better idea of the lineage of pharaohs than they themselves did, because we have access to records that were sealed in tombs and thus not altered to erase someone the way the records they would have access to were. One such case of this is Djehuty, an overseer of treasuries who served under one of the earliest female pharaohs and had his family's existence purged due to falling into dishonor. A group of Spanish archaeologists working on "Project Djehuty" would attempt to resurrect his image starting in the 2000s.
  • An interesting subversion: One that continues to puzzle Egyptologists is the extensive but by no means complete removal of the name and images of Hatshepsut from her monuments. Early scholars theorized that this was the work of her successor and nephew Thutmose III, a military-minded king (being one of the earliest Young Conquerors of whom we have record) whom they guessed might have chafed under the direction of his much more diplomatic aunt. However, later research showed that Thutmose and Hatshepsut had actually gotten along quite well,^note Which is less surprising given more recent research. While he did a good bit of conquering, this seems to have largely been a response to Realpolitik concerns about making sure Upper Egypt was safe from raids from the African interior and keeping Mittani from interfering with Egypt's traditional overlordship over Canaan. Thutmose himself appears to have been deeply concerned with good governance and expanding knowledge through more than just military action—rather like his aunt. Of course, if one could expand knowledge through a military campaign, he'd be happy to do that (his last "campaign" was basically an armed sightseeing/exploration expedition in Nubia). with Hatshepsut giving Thutmose essentially free rein in military matters once he came of age, and Thutmose never begrudging Hatshepsut her authority over civil administration and trade. It also doesn't help that only the most public mentions of Hatshepsut are defaced; interior carvings and other places the public would have to do serious work to get at are unaffected. This has led to a number of theories, the most prominent of which blames on Thutmose's late-reign advisors (on the theory that they would have pressured the elderly king to diminish the public memory of his aunt out of misogyny) to his successor (who may have believed that erasing Hatshepsut from public memory might detract from questions about the strength of his claim to the throne).
  • The 25th Dynasty was virtually erased from existence by Psamtik I, the first of the 26th, because they were Nubian invaders who occupied Kemet/Ancient Egypt as an extension of the Kushite Empire for 88 years. It's also possible that Psamtik did this out of revenge, because Shebitku, a Pharaoh from the 25th, executed his possible great-grandfather, Bakenraref.
  • The latest "pharaoh"^note As the old Arabic saying has it, "من يحكم في القاهرة دائما فرعون ومن يحكم في دمشق دئما ولي" Man yaḥkum fil-Qāhira dā'iman fir`awn wa man yaḥkum fī Dimashq dā'iman waliy "He who rules in Cairo is always a pharaoh—and he who rules in Damascus is always a governor." to receive this punishment are former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and his wife Suzanne—one of the first things to happen after the Revolution of 2011 was a ruling by the administrative court that declared that everything with their name/s on it had to be renamed.
• The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was burned down in 356 BC by a guy named Herostratus. He had done this specifically to get his name in the history books, and the Ephesian authorities, in an attempt to deny him this goal, executed him, erased his name from all their records, and made it a crime to mention his name on penalty of death. As you can well imagine, it didn't work that well, as people needed to know what the name was in order to know which one not to say on pain of death. Thanatos Gambit much?
  • That being said, it did work partially, as we know nothing about what Herostratus' life was like before he decided to burn down the Temple, or why he had such a desire to become famous through infamy.
• The Romans did this, though the Latin term for it, damnatio memoriae or "damnation of memory", came later. A notable example is Lucius Aelius Sejanus, who was even omitted from the Gospels, which were written for a Roman audience at a time of turmoil for both mainstream Jews and the Christians that would eventually spin off from them, despite playing a key role in the Passion of the Christ through a political conspiracy with Herod Antipas and his sudden downfall on charges of treason. It also works the other way around: around 525 AD, Diocletian had his memory damned by the Christians, who saw the then-current dating system as too commemorating of their most infamous persecutor.^note This didn't take hold everywhere; the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt still uses the first year of Diocletian's reign as their epoch date, on the grounds that this preserves the memory of the martyrs who died during his reign. Egypt was probably the province hardest hit by the Diocletianic persecution, at least in terms of sheer numbers (since it was heavily populated and probably majority-Christian by the time Diocletian became Emperor) and they were very attached to preserving their system of dating the "Years of the Martyrs." To this day, the Coptic epoch is dated Anno Martyrum or AM. Also, to be frank, there was probably a bit of thumbing their noses at the rest of Christendom in this, for both theological reasons (Egypt having largely rejected the Council of Chalcedon—please don't ask, see Heresies and Heretics for details) and national ones (the Egyptians generally being heartily sick of hundreds of years of foreign and particularly Greek rule and taking every opportunity to take the piss out of the Greeks).
• Joan of Arc was such a celebrated figure in France that when Bishop Pierre Cauchon, who dehumanized and ultimately executed her in a Kangaroo Court for daring to defend her own country against the English, died in 1442 he was buried in an unmarked grave as the people's way of doing this to him.
• Henry VIII did this to Anne Boleyn and her co-accused. He had their portraits destroyed, their badges and other devices painted over or hacked off, their papers burned, and their jewels reset. Two notable images survived: a defaced medallion prototype that shows little more than the general shape of Anne Boleyn’s face, and one painting that may be of Francis Weston. All the famous portraits of Anne, including the paintings held by the National Portrait Gallery and Hever Castle and the ring at Chequers, are artists’ concepts of what Elizabeth I’s mother might have looked like painted fifty years after she died by men who never saw her.
  • Henry didn’t think to do the same with his fifth wife Catherine Howard, but he may have been too sick by then to care. Her family did the job for him, though, by taking down her portrait. No proven extant depiction of Howard exists today.
• At West Point there is a series of portraits of generals of The American Revolution. Among them is Benedict Arnold—turned face inward. He is no longer publicly acknowledged as a former Commandant of West Point, due to his plan to surrender the fort to the British during the American Revolution.
  • Similarly, there is a monument commemorating his victory at Saratoga that which only depicts ''his boot'' without mentioning him by name. It represents the leg was shot during a vital military charge, which then had his horse fall on it, shattering it. He spent over a year bedridden, during which he struggled with debts and started thinking about treason. The monument reflects the apocryphal story that if Arnold was ever captured by the Americans, they would cut off his wounded leg and bury it with full military honors while hanging the rest. The battlefield monument becomes Harsher in Hindsight when you realize that General Gates taking all the credit for Arnold's actions at Saratoga was one of the many Kick the Dog moments that drove Arnold to treason in the first place.
• The Nazis did this too: In 1937, Goebbels was removed from a photo with Hitler and Leni Riefenstahl. The reason for his removal is unknown, and Goebbels did remain by Hitler's side to the very end. They also suppressed, and tried to destroy, Leni Riefenstahl's documentary Victory of Faith for presenting SA leader Ernst Rohm as Hitler's most loyal follower. A few prints managed to escape destruction.
  • A more downplayed version of this was taken into action a month before the Holocaust officially started, when Nazi high command issued the Nacht und Nebel decree. All manner of war prisoners were made to vanish, and all mention of them in records was expunged. The downplaying comes from the fact that only the Nazis acted as if the person did not exist: The families of the prisoners were made well aware of the fact that one of their own had been disappeared, and the Nazis expected that the uncertainty about the person's fate would deter them from further resistance.
• The Soviet Union did this often; Nineteen Eighty-Four's use of it is a direct allusion.
  • Josef Stalin was the biggest practitioner of this as alluded to in the main article, manipulating historical accounts and photographs to remove certain people, or, more rarely, insert people (usually himself). Lev Trotsky, former head of the Red Army, is probably the most◊ famous case of this.◊
  • The page picture from the main page for this trope demonstrates this with Nikolai Yezhov, who was the head of the NKVD (the precursor of the KGB) at the time the photograph was taken in 1937. Yezhov was NKVD chief for a little over two years (from September 1936 to November 1938), a period known as the Yezhovshchina which coincided with some of the worst excesses of Stalin's Great Purge. Stalin eventually found it expedient to attribute blame for the excesses of the Great Purge to Yezhov, and Yezhov himself was eventually purged—first eased out of control at the NKVD by his deputy Lavrentiy Beria, then demoted to People's Commissar for Water Transport—a position Yezhov held for a year—before being arrested, "tried" for a series of crimes (which ranged from things he was actually guilty of, to things he was guilty of because Stalin wanted him to do them, to the usual litany of bizarre accusations of being a counter-revolutionary foreign agent, saboteur, and conspirator) and eventually (in February 1940) put to death. After Yezhov's downfall and execution, Stalin ordered all evidence of his existence removed.
  • After Stalin died the Soviet Union did this to Stalin (to a limited extent) after they remembered how much they should hate him. For example, say Stalin had inserted himself into a movie with himself playing a historical role he never did using the actor Aleksei Dikiy as himself. The de-Stalinized version would have the Aleksei Dikiy edited out, perhaps in one scene being covered up by a new unnamed extra.
  • A lesser example occurred during Brezhnev's time when a movie about Yuri Gagarin was being made, and they needed footage without Khrushchev. Due to the latter's ego, the only samples of such footage were found in the trash.
  • Soviet actions frequently utilized this in Warsaw Pact countries, usually when leaders in nations such as Hungary dared to propose a more efficient form of communism that dealt with problems through means other than repression.
  • Everyone who did not agree with Soviet collectivization policies, along with anyone associated with a suspected rebel was subject to relocation to the Gulag. This led to huge numbers of people in the western regions of the Soviet Union (the Baltic states and western Ukraine in particular) falling to this.
  • A particularly sad example is Vladimir Clementis, who helped lead a Communist Revolution in Slovakia, but was later hanged in a show-trial. Before the coup, Clementis had stood next to Klement Gottwald (who later became leader of Czechoslovakia) during a photoshoot, and lent him a fur hat. Clementis was unpersoned after the purge, and the only evidence of his existence for decades was the picture of his hat. Clementis has been reclaimed by history, but the image became a metaphor for Eastern European history, and Milan Kundera used it at the beginning of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
  • Poet Robert W. Service was an un-person for the Soviet literary science and literary criticism. Soviet officials were so enraged by Service's narrative poem The Ballad of Lenin's Tomb that he wasn't just branded as "anti-Soviet" or "anti-Communist"— his name and poetry were forbidden to mention at all.
  • One of the reasons there are many disproven stories about "lost cosmonauts"—cosmonauts who allegedly died during missions above and beyond the known fatal missions of Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11, occasionally depicted as being involved in overt suicide missions—is because the Soviet Union actually tried to un-person a group of three rejects from the early cosmonaut corps. Those three candidates were Grigory Nelyubov, Ivan Anikeyev, and Valentin Filatyev. They got in an incident with a patrol in Moscow while drunk in the spring of 1963. For whatever reason, they refused to apologize, so they were drummed out of the corps. Nelyubov subsequently became an alcoholic, and threw himself in front of a train in Vladivostok^note Yes, Vladivostok, as in Siberia. Not everyone sent to Siberia went to The Gulag, just as not all gulags were in Siberia. Some people were simply stationed there so they would be Out of Sight, Out of Mind. Sometimes, as was the case for Nelyubov, that wasn't enough. Of course, Vladivostok is not in Siberia (it's located near the Russian/Chinese/North Korean border, on the Sea of Japan), making the first sentence of this note incorrect and the next two sentences irrelevant in February 1966. The three were air-brushed out of official photos and erased from Soviet records specifically to cover up Nelyubov's suicide. Their existence, and the circumstances behind Nelyubov's death, weren't admitted to until glasnost in the 1980s.
• Happened in Tsarist Russia, too. When in 1741, the child emperor Ivan VI and his regent mother were ousted in a palace coup that brought Empress Elizabeth to power, the new empress decreed that any documents from his year-long rule mentioning him as the emperor were to be collected and either destroyed or classified. Officially, these documents were called "documents bearing a certain title" to avoid mentioning Ivan VI by name. But what about all the coins minted during that time and bearing the emperor's name and title which were circulating in the country? Simple: Starting from 1745, Elizabeth made the posession of such coins a felony, puinishable with torture and exile to Siberia. As for the boy himself, he was separated from his family, put under house arrest, and given a different name, Grigory. When he turned 16, he was transferred to the castle of Shlisselburg, where he was stripped even of that name and known to his guards only as "certain detainee" or "unnamed prisoner". Such drastic measures were due to his claims to the throne being much stronger than those of Empress Elizabeth and, later, Catherine the Great, who both feared for years that another palace coup might use Ivan VI as a figurehead. While stopping short of direct regicide, Elizabeth ordered the guards to kill the "unnamed prisoner" if anyone would try to free him, even if they would pretend to act on her own orders. This was carried out in 1764 when lieutenant Vasily Mirovich attempted to liberate Ivan VI by force, thus ending his Fate Worse than Death at the age of 24. Out of all the Romanov ever reigning, he is arguably the least known, and even 150 years later, at the Romanov Tercentenary celebrations, his name appeared neither on the Alexander Garden Obelisk, nor on the Romanov Tercentenary Fabergé egg.
• North Korea has erased the Soviet Union from the history of their country's founding. While the earliest North Korean propaganda portrayed the Soviets as paternal figures, it wouldn't last long. In 1958, Kim Il-sung decided he didn't like the Soviet Union anymore and ordered history revised so that the nation was founded by him alone. Subsequently, every pro-Soviet and pro-Stalin monument in the country was destroyed. A couple decades later, the founding of the Korean People's Army was moved from 1948 to 1932, tying it to Kim's earlier anti-Japanese guerrilla activities and erasing its Soviet origin. In 2009, North Korea amended its constitution to remove all references to communism, largely due to its foreign origins (despite North Korea itself being a neo-Stalinist nation in all but name). It wasn't until 2012, however, that the portraits of Marx and Lenin were finally removed from Kim Il-sung Square.
  • After Kim Jong-Un's uncle Jang Song-thaek was declared an enemy of the state and executed, his image was edited out of a North Korean documentary.
• Lin Biao, Mao Zedong's Chessmaster Sidekick, was unpersoned after his unauthorized departure from China on 12 September, 1971... for just two days, as Beijing thought he defected to another country. Two days later, when it became obvious (outside of China) that Lin died in a plane crash in Mongolia, China ceased to unperson him "to dispel rumours," such that there was no leadership activities during National Day celebrations on 1 October. Report of his death, plus a smear campaign, only started when the propaganda people have a game plan, a month after Lin died.
• During the Pinochet regime in Chile from 1973 to 1990 people would randomly disappear; so much so that the verb "disappear" became transitive, as in "he was disappeared." Most simply never returned and their homes/possessions were taken by the government, but in a few cases, some of those who were disappeared would also lead to their family and anyone who spoke of them to disappear as well, effectively removing a person's existence. Official estimates are around 3,000 people but some believe as many as 5-10,000 people had gone missing, with most speculating that "disappearing" was a Deadly Euphemism for being killed by the Pinochet regime. They came to be known as "Los Detenidos Desaparecidos" (The Detained (and) Disappeared)
• The government of the late Argentine President Nestor Kirchner (2003-2007) sought to discredit all former military rulers of Argentina by removing any official reference to their "presidencies" from government records and history, including the removal of several portraits from halls of presidents around the nation. Similarly, all the info about the terrorist guerrillas of the 1970s, especally the "Montoneros", was downplayed due to his wife and successor Cristina Fernandez (2007-2015) being a former member.
  • This was a case of Laser-Guided Karma. Tens of thousands 'disappeared' in Argentina under the rule of the military junta. Even today you can still find fresh graffiti in some areas with messages like "Free all political prisoners!" despite the government's assurance that all prisoners have been freed. This is because only about 9,000 of the 30,000 people estimated to have been disappeared by the dictatorship have been accounted for and speculation that some may still be alive continues to this day.
  • Speaking of Argentina, the Peróns were this for 16 years after the military junta that led to Juan Domingo Perón's exile. His wife Eva's embalmed body was moved by the military to a tomb in Italy. The body was later returned to Argentina after the junta rule ended, and Juan Perón himself made a political comeback with a third election in 1973 (though he died just nine months into it), with Peronism still going strong today, even surviving a second military junta in the late '70s/early '80s. During Perón's exile, Peronism was proscripted and the very mention of Perón's name was forbidden; the media had to use terms like "the runaway tyrant" when needing to say something about him.
• It's popular for monarchists in Commonwealth countries such as Canada and Australia to argue that "stealth republicans" are systematically removing references to the British Royal Family in government and the popular culture, in order to downplay an institution they supposedly loathe. Though not nearly as widespread as monarchists often imagine, it is true that public acknowledgement of the monarch as head of state is considerably less conspicuous in many Commonwealth countries than it was in the 1960s and '70s when the monarchy was far less controversial. Significantly, however, Canada is actually an exception to this, in large part because former Prime Minister Stephen Harper—something of an arch-monarchist—went on a roll of putting royal names back on things that had been removed in the 1960s-70s (largely by his successor's father), and few complain because the monarchy is one of the few things clearly delineating Canada from the big republic down south.
• After the successful operation to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011, the White House released a photo◊ of the President and his associates watching a live feed of the assault from the situation room. Newspapers were given strict orders to not alter the photo in any way, but Der Zeitung, a Yiddish newspaper stationed in New York catering to the ultra-Orthodox, Photoshopped Hillary Clinton and one other woman out of the photo◊ due to their standards against showing women in any photos.
• Subverted ultimately with Spiro Agnew, Vice President of the United States (1969-1973) under Richard Nixon. During Agnew's term, he had to resign from office because of bribery and tax evasion charges during his time as governor of Maryland. From 1979 until 1995, he was not allowed to have his portrait in the Maryland State House Governor's Reception Room due to those scandals. It wasn't until 1995 that Governor Parris Glendening allowed Agnew's portrait to be put up; he even invoked Nineteen Eighty-Four by saying it wasn't right to alter history.
  • Similarly, there is a portrait gallery in the Illinois State Capitol of all former Illinois governors, except for Rod Blagojevich, who was impeached, removed from office, and then convicted and sentenced to federal prison for bribery and trying to sell Barack Obama's former Senate seat. While there is no official restriction on his portrait being added, the state has declared that he would have to pay for it himself. In a straighter example, a number of signs he had put up around the Illinois Tollway system were removed immediately after his impeachment. ^note His successor Pat Quinn also doesn't have a portrait up, but it just hasn't been created yet.
• Lyndon Johnson used this as well early in his political career. As a young Congressman in 1937, he had been photographed shaking the hand of President Franklin D. Roosevelt with Texas Governor James Allred◊ between the two. In later campaigns, Johnson would have the picture altered to remove Allred.
• While they didn't forbid mention of him, the authorities were quite eager to see anarchist and Presidential assassin Leon Czolgosz forgotten and sweep the matter of William McKinley's assassination under the rug as quickly and as cleanly as possible, to the point where they destroyed Czolgosz's remains by pouring sulfuric acid into his coffin as he was buried in the precincts of the prison where he had been electrocuted, and his clothes and possessions were burnt so as to prevent any exhibition of his life. Small wonder he's less well known than any of the three other Presidential assassins.
• Only one Doge of Venice does not have a formal portrait in the gallery of Doges' portraits. That doge, Marino Faliero, was executed for treason after he tried a coup d'etat to get real power and punish his enemies. (Doges of Venice were more often than not ceremonial, not actual, rulers.) Because of this, his preexisting portrait was painted over, and now simply depicts a black shroud bearing the Latin message "This is the space for Marino Faliero, beheaded for crimes."
• Former United States Secretary of Labor Robert Reich had suggested going above and beyond impeachment and doing this to President Donald Trump in implicit accordance with the Constitution if it was found, through overwhelming and indisputable evidence, that he had direct involvement in the Russian interference in the 2016 election, in the sense that his very presidency is unconstitutional on the grounds that he had conspired with Vladimir Putin to rig the election in his favor. These accusations were later proven to be unfounded after an extensive investigation.
  • After the end of his term, and particularly after the January 6, 2021 riot there was a tendency to avoid any mention of his presidency and even his name (being often referred to as "the former guy", most notably by his successor Joe Biden), with several works excising any appearances he did (beginning with his cameo in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, which was edited out by an Internet group, receiving the approval of Macaulay Culkin). Interestingly, Comcast and NBC have denied ever engaging in business of any kind with him since 2015 after he left The Apprentice and sold them the Miss Universe pageant, as a result of his controversial presidential campaign.
• A half-hearted attempt was made for Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria after his Murder-Suicide at the Mayerling hunting lodge. The lodge itself was converted into a convent by Emperor Franz Joseph ^note Rudolf's father. His personal belongings were moved to the Imperial Furniture Collection (a rather out-of-the-way destination for tourists, as opposed to Vienna's intense marketing of his parents' image and relationship). His quarters in the Schönbrunn Palace were converted into the Children's Museum. A railway line named after him was also renamed. Stuff, places, and organizations bearing Rudolf's name can still be found around Vienna (including the 15th district, Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus) thanks to Plausible Deniability as there were a few other famous members of royalty by that name. There are a few aversions, such as the Kronprinz Rudolf apple.
• After Brenton Tarrant killed fifty-one people and injured 49 more in the March 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern publicly announced that she would render Tarrant nameless and urged the public to speak the names of the victims instead. The video and manifesto Tarrant uploaded to the internet have also been (mostly) removed in the aftermath. In August 2020, Tarrant was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.
• Similarly, the judge always referred to the perpetrator of the 2018 Toronto van attack, who was a member of the misogynistic "Incel" movement, as "John Doe", and he is facing an effective life sentence for mauling to death 10 people, eight of them women.
• After the brutal 1993 murder of two-year-old James Bulger, the two perpetrators Robert Thompson and Jon Venables have been pursued by lynch mobs since the moment their identities were released to the public, which continues to this day. In an effort to protect them (and anyone sharing their description) from vigilantes, the British government issued a global injunction legally enabling them to erase any photographs or descriptions of them from any form of media in the world. Mere mention of any physical attributes of theirs is grounds for arrest in Britain, and for foreigners, posting images of them online can lead to banned social media accounts.
• Iran is a hard-line Islamist state that will not recognize the sovereignty of Israel. This policy goes so far as to prohibit its own athletes from facing off against Israeli athletes in any competitive sports under the threat of imprisonment and death.
  • This has tended to backfire on said athletes because while it is fairly rare for it to happen, the Israelis can exploit it when it does. Either the Iranian athlete can compete against the Israeli and win or lose but face persecution at home, or they can concede and let the Israeli win by default; either way Israel scores a political victory and likely a competitive sports victory.
• After he was accused of murdering Emperor Lê Thái Tông and executed (along with three generations of his family), Nguyễn Trãi got this treatment for 22 years. Much of his literary and scientific work was destroyed, some remaining lost to this day. Emperor Lê Thánh Tông (the deceased ruler's son) revoked this and appointed Nguyễn Trãi's surviving relatives to governmental positions, but the damage was done.
• The city of Bristol in England was a centre of the slave trade, the middle point of a triangle linking Africa and North America. It remained so until Britain abolished slavery. Today's Bristol is a multi-ethnic city with a significant Afro-Caribbean minority. A recurring controversy over what to do with a prominently placed statue of Edward Colston, a locally based slave trader and politican, came to a head in June 2020 when protesters at a Black Lives Matter demonstration lost patience with official prevarication, tore the statue down, and UnPersonned Colston in the most emphatic way possible, by heaving the bronze statue into the harbour that once dealt in slaves.
• The English Counter-Armada, which was basically Queen Elizabeth I's attempt to dominate the seas after the Spanish Armada had first been defeated. The end result was such a catastrophic defeat (she lost just as much men as Philip did) that whatever advantages Elizabeth had by defeating the Spanish Armada was undone, and King Philip II managed to return to naval dominance the decade after that. There's a reason why this particular piece of history was ignored in works concerning Elizabeth I. The Queen who defeated the mighty Spanish Armada sounds more badass than, also she lost her own armada and nearly depleted her carefully saved up treasury in an attempt to gain naval dominance despite Spain failing TWICE more in invading England due to the weather. Elizabethan casual fans might be surprised to find out that there were three Spanish Armadas that tried to invade England but the loss of the English was that bad that people just focus on the first one only.
• There has been a trend towards this in regards to how the public will address the cases of a Serial Killer or school attacker, both usually dynamite cases that tend to be reported endlessly in the news. However, due to the fear of copycats and encouraging other attacks by giving people publicity, the emphasis has shifted to discussing the attacks and victims while downplaying references to the attackers.

Anime & Manga

• This is culturally mandatory in Japan, especially in corporate ambiance for face-saving reasons, and there have been many cases of this:
  • Norio Imamura, the original voice of Emporio Ivankov in One Piece was blacklisted after his arrest in July 2010 for showing off tattoo body art on the internet (which in Japan is considered indecent exposure in addition to having possible mafia correlations). Ivankov was later replaced by Mitsuo Iwata starting from episode 461 and all subsequent reruns including DVD releases.
  • Noriko Sakai's drug-abuse scandal in 2009 caused her record label Victor Entertainment and Sun Music to drop her from their rosters. The Pikachu and Pichu short from Pokémon: The Series also became a Missing Episode in Japan.
  • Haruki Kadokawa's cocaine scandal is the most infamous example, since as soon as the allegations arose he resigned from Kadokawa Shoten to establish his own company, and one of his movies was banned by its distributor, Shochiku, simply for having his name attached to it. Presumably his other 59 works became much more difficult to find as well.
  • Ryo Asuka (not that one), of the musical duo CHAGE & ASKA, was arrested in 2014 on drug possession. In addition to his music label dropping him, Walt Disney Japan recalled a Studio Ghibli movie collection that featured the music video On Your Mark, which they collaborated on (this decision would later be reversed, and the music video has appeared in subsequent Blu-ray releases).
  • When Pierre Taki was arrested on the suspicion of drug use, Sony Music dropped his band, Denki Groove. Furthermore, his voice work was removed from Judgment and the Japanese dub of Frozen (and by proxy, Kingdom Hearts III). In the former case, Sega went as far as to replace his character's likeness.
  • After Studio Gainax representative director Tomohiro Maki was arrested on the charge of quasi-forcible indecency, Hideaki Anno's production company Studio Khara disassociated themselves from Gainax. Even before they knew about Maki's crimes, Khara was already in the process of unpersoning Gainax; after winning a legal battle for the Evangelion rights in 2014, Khara began using their brand name for merchandise of the franchise and rereleases of the anime and manga adaptation while scrubbing all traces of Gainax's name. Notably, the Blu-ray re-release, the Nippon TV re-broadcast as well as the Netflix digital stream switched the original story credit from Gainax to Anno himself.
  • Manga writer Tatsuya Matsuki got hit with this on both sides of the Pacific after his arrest for, and confession to, indecent acts with minors, becoming a One-Book Author in the process. Not only was his only manga act-age canceled in its home country and later evicted from Weekly Shonen Jump corporate history and banned within the month, Viz Media also pulled its translation of the manga after two volumes and deleted all digital prints of it from their websites and apps. Shueisha has also sent sending takedown notices against Western pirate sites to try to keep the manga buried on the Internet. According to the manga's artist Shiro Usazaki, its unpersoning was made out of concern that the Act-age intellectual property as a whole would become triggering for Matsuki's victims.
  • ALI, the multinational band famous for providing theme songs for Beastars and Jujutsu Kaisen, was put on 'indefinite hiatus' from April to November 2021 after their drummer Kadio "Kahadio" Shirai was arrested for fraud ^note Specifically, he was caught participating in a "refund scam" where he and several friends posed as government officials and offered to 'refund' an elderly woman's medical expenses in exchange for her transferring 2.31 million yen to their bank account. The theme song they performed for The World Ends with You anime adaptation was scrapped and during their hiatus, most of their music was unavailable for streaming or purchase online. Their music videos have since been re-uploaded with the drummer edited out.
• Subverted by former Funimation voice actor Scott Freeman; while it's been made clear that after his child pornography conviction there is no place in voice acting for him and all of his roles are in the process of being given new English voices, his prior work for the company will remain intact and available in stores for the foreseeable future, largely for reasons of practicality.
• Also subverted in the case of Vic Mignogna, who was accused of sexual impropriety of fans and colleagues in early 2019. Like with Scott Freeman, the works Mignogna already did voice-over for would remain available for reasons of practicality, but he would be released from Funimation and Rooster Teeth's employ, with most of his voice roles being Darrin'd to other voice actors (one notable example being Broly in Dragon Ball Fighter Z: while Mignogna's voice remained intact for the original version of Broly, the Super incarnation of the character would be voiced by Johnny Yong Bosch).
• In 2016, Sentai Filmworks suddenly recast all of Krystal LaPorte's recurring roles, and in their 2020 re-release of Beyond the Boundary, they also removed her credit and redubbed all her lines in the series with Kira Vincent-Davis (who originally replaced her for the movies). LaPorte does not know why this happened, but Chris Ayres (who was also a director for Sentai) alleges that Sentai executives blamed her for his deteriorating health at the time.

Films

• Following Heaven's Gate and the subsequent sale to MGM, Transamerica did this to themselves as far as the United Artists library was concerned; however, some United Artists films have shown up with the respective original logo, including the Hexagon logo used by UA before being bought by Transamerica, restored/intact.
• David Schmoeller, director of Puppet Master, accused Charles Band of doing this to directors of Full Moon's productions (including himself—he actually stated that Band wouldn't let him do a commentary for the aforementioned film when it was released on DVD) in an online interview.
• Maria Ford was THE B-movie star in the 1990s, praised by Quentin Tarantino and even auditioning for mainstream work like Baywatch, Basic Instinct, Casino and L.A. Confidential. Then she appeared in the 1998 documentary Some Nudity Required, covering that industry while offering a biting attack on moguls Roger Corman and Jim Wynorski and their overreliance on sexual content, with Ford's statements venting about how often she got solely roles based on her looks and how she felt pressured to do nudity. Corman and Wynorski were NOT amused, but while the creator of Some Nudity Required were already out of the industry (and thus out of reach), Maria wasn't, and thus the two took the movies she made for them, her image on covers were replaced, her billing displaced or omitted and, in many cases, had her scenes were trimmed or outright cut. She also became a Persona Non Grata, with the only people who would hire her were porn directors or for roles in extremely bit parts. Eventually, outside of the occasional minor role, she left acting all together. Unlike other examples she is being gradually re-personed, with digital copies of her films restoring her scenes and replacing her billing.
• Sexual disgrace can do this to anyone in the industry no matter how important they were before the ugly revelations came to light. Here are just a few examples:
  • Since being accused of multiple sexual assaults spanning three decades, Harvey Weinstein has been fired from the film studio bearing his name; kicked out of BAFTA, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the Producers Guild of America; and has had his Democratic political donations diverted to charity. Even his biggest allies in the industry, including Kevin Smith and (unsurprisingly) Quentin Tarantino, have turned on him, with Tarantino going so far as to shop his Manson Family script (later known as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) to other studios, eventually settling on Columbia Pictures.
  • Kevin Spacey was taken down in the whirlwind of the Weinstein allegations when several men came forward to say he had sexually harassed or assaulted them over many years. In the aftermath, the cast, director and Tri Star Pictures unanimously decided to write him out of All the Money in the World and replace him in his role as billionaire J. Paul Getty with Christopher Plummer, with Ridley Scott adding an additional Take That! by saying he wanted Plummer anyways to begin with, but Tri-Star wanted a 'name' actor in the role.
  • Sex scandals can even lead to a movie getting Unpersonned. After Louis C.K. admitted to sexual misconduct allegations made against him following the Weinstein and Spacey scandals, he was kicked out of everything he had been working on up to that point. This included the film I Love You, Daddy — about a 17-year-old girl falling in love with a 68-year-old man — which was pulled just days before its scheduled release, most likely due to the inevitable comparisons between the film's premise and the allegations against C.K. His cameo role in Gravity Falls as "the Horrifying, Sweaty, One-Armed Monstrosity" was also dubbed over by Alex Hirsch for all subsequent releases and re-runs.
  • Claude Jutra was considered one of the most important filmmakers in Canadian (and especially Quebecois) history, with his career and legacy compared to the likes of David Cronenberg and Norman Jewison. That changed in 2016, thirty years after Jutra's death, when a Quebec journalist released a book alleging that he had a history as a pedophile, followed by an article in a Montreal newspaper detailing an account by one of his victims. Immediately after the allegations were printed, Canadian film academies which put Jutra's name on their awards announced that they would be renamed.
  • As a direct result of sexual assault allegations against producer Brett Ratner, the DVD and Blu-ray release of Justice League (2017) plasters over the logo of his production company RatPac with that of its parent company, Access Entertainment.
  • In at least one case, it even led to a film being "orphaned"! After Wonder Park director Dylan Brown was fired for sexual harassment allegations levied by numerous female animators, Paramount decided against giving him any credit for the film despite the fact that he had directed more of it than his replacement did.
• A unique example in terms of adult animation: South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut was released in 1999, and garnered significance as the first computer-animated film to be rated R. However, because the computer animation was rendered to resemble the 2D stop-motion animation the show utilized, and because of the lack of a 3D look to the film, it does not fit the modern popular consensus of what computer-generated imagery means. As a result, when Sausage Party was announced in 2013, it was labeled as the first computer-animated film to be rated R, effectively exiling Bigger, Longer, and Uncut from that designation. (Sausage Party fits if it's narrowed down to 3D computer animation.) One of the main reasons Bigger, Longer, and Uncut was made in computer animation was because it would have been cheaper and quicker to do it that way rather than the traditional way, and Matt Stone and Trey Parker pointed out in the Blu-ray commentary for the movie that the final product was more "middle ground" than fully computer-animated.
• After Disney purchased 20th Century Fox in 2019, the latter's studio lot (which wasn't part of the sale) had all references to the former major studio removed, including memorabilia of their classic films in their various sound stages and gift shops, and all studio logos on the lot - the consensus is that because, under Rupert Murdoch, the "Fox" name got an unfortunate connotation, particularly due to Fox News. A banner reading "Welcome to Fox" was put up on the first day post-merger to indicate that the Murdochs still owned the lot and that it was no longer home to a movie studio. The only remnants of 20th Century Fox's presence that remain are the iconic murals of its various movies and shows painted on the soundstages. The Fox network also removed the iconic 20th Century Fox fanfare from its generic themes at the end of their programs, as Disney now owned the rights to that music. At the News Corp. Building in New York, a statue of Bartman designed by Bart Simpson's voice actress Nancy Cartwright in 2015 that stood outside the building was removed after the acquisition.
  • Disney itself began purging the Fox name out of the main studio the following year, with other Fox-branded properties that were acquired soon to follow. This was seen by many as an effort to keep people from continuing to associate them with the Murdochs, who only kept Fox's broadcasting, news, and US sports assets. It was later reported that the name changes were a requirement in the merger precisely to avoid that confusion. By that same time frame, a good number of Disney-owned Fox businesses that legally kept the 21st Century Fox or Fox names saw them changed with "TFCF" or "20th Century", subtly hiding their former association with Fox. By 2021, the international Fox channels (the American ones remained under Murdoch) were renamed by Disney under the brand Star, which was also previously owned by News Corp. - the exceptions are FX, given that it's not as obvious (the name is Fox without an "o", but also an acronym\homophone for "effects"), and Fox Sports, which is mostly being merged into Disney's fellow sports channel ESPN.
• Despite playing the lead character, actor Ryosuke Yamada was removed from an online poster for the Fullmetal Alchemist (2017) live-action film for being affiliated with Johnny and Associates, a Japanese talent agency which is notorious both for xenophobia to the point where Yu-Gi-Oh! hasn't yet received a complete official uncut release outside of Japan, and for a "no-photo" rule which caused Yamada's removal from the poster in the first place.
• Nomadland and the entire 93rd Academy Awards were censored in China after it was discovered that Chloé Zhao had made comments critical of China in an interview with a magazine.

Television

• The 700 Club, hosted by televangelist Pat Robertson, has done this a few times throughout its run:
  • The original co-host of the show was Jim Bakker, who had a poor working relationship with Pat and eventually left the ministry. He and his wife Tammy Faye went on to co-found TBN with Paul and Jan Crouch, but similar issues ended their times there as well. After the Bakkers' own PTL ministry collapsed amidst a fraud scandal, both The 700 Club and TBN erased the Bakkers from their official histories.
  • Another co-host, Danuta Soderman, was on the show for five years in the late Eighties, then was fired after writing an autobiography detailing her longtime affair with a married man. Afterwards, she spoke publicly about her dissatisfaction with the show's conservative politics (she was a feminist in a TV ministry run by men) and faded into obscurity. The 700 Club makes no mention of Soderman, even during anniversary specials.
  • There is also Pat Robertson's son Tim, who co-hosted the show while Pat ran in the 1988 Republican presidential primaries. Tim did not share his dad's charisma and ratings and contributions for the show suffered, necessitating Pat's return when he left the race. Tim moved to behind-the-scenes work but has also never been acknowledged as a former co-host.
• It practically happened to Masashi Tashiro, a famous television personality and singer. After a string of sexual harassment and drug-related incidents starting from the nineties, his name and face are censored on television; even his former associates would disown him and essentially treat him as an outcast.
• Cee Lo Green was given this treatment by TBS after he expressed controversial views regarding rape on his Twitter page related to a 2012 sexual battery incident he was accused of. His comedy show The Good Life was canceled before production of a second season could begin, and TBS then yanked the show from the schedule and On Demand services, took down the show's website, and removed it from the TBS mobile viewing app. TBS did everything to ensure that their ties with Green were cut off for good.
• Once dozens of rape allegations against Bill Cosby came to light, TV Land not only pulled all reruns of The Cosby Show from their schedule, but they removed all mention of the series from their website, taking down any links to the show's section on the site. ^note This is an extraordinary step; usually when a series is not currently being rerun, it is removed from the website but a knowledgeable computer user can still often access an archived version of the page. Not so with The Cosby Show. Only time will tell if he will be unpersoned in a similar manner as Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris and Jian Ghomeshi; however, Cosby has already stepped down from several of his positions and has also been forced to cancel or reschedule several of his performances. Following his admissions to obtaining Quaaludes with the intent of giving them to women he wanted to have sex with in July 2015, there was more Cosby unpersoning after cable channels "Bounce" and "Centric" pulled Cosby Show reruns from their schedule and Disney removed their statue of him.
• Comedian Michael Bentine, a founder-member of The Goon Show, alleged right up until his death that the BBC had blacklisted him for refusing to insert political satire he disagreed with into his TV shows. He also pointed to virtually his entire archive of TV work having been erased as proof of this. While this might have been paranoia - Bentine's extremely conservative views did not sit well with a liberal-left-leaning BBC - after objectively considering what happened to Chris Langham and the Goodies, it does open room for wondering. The BBC also erased virtually every early Goon Show episode in which Bentine performed, leaving the impression that the Goons were only ever Milligan, Secombe, and Sellers. Spike Milligan may have encouraged this, as "creative differences" were the cause of Bentine leaving the group. Milligan always underplayed Bentine's contribution to the Goons. In a TV interview on Wogan with guest presenter Joanna Lumley in October 1989, when Harry Secombe paid tribute to Bentine's contribution to getting the Goon Show up and running, just for a second Milligan's expression could have curdled milk... Secombe then dropped the subject and Lumley hastily moved to a different topic.
• After the end of Conan O'Brien's run on The Tonight Show, NBC proceeded to remove every single trace of his career at the network from their website and video sites across the internet. With the exception of an episode of Saturday Night Live he hosted and a first season episode of 30 Rock in which he and his show play an integral part in the plot, no other Conan footage appears on Hulu or NBC.com. However, a portrait of O'Brien (still credited as host of Late Night) at the Universal Studios Tour waiting line remained for at least a while longer. This was somewhat reversed when a new regime came into power at NBC and Jimmy Fallon took over as host, with Conan being mentioned as a previous host in commercials. However, there still aren't any official videos or anything online. 30 Rock was at least able to sneak in a cameo for Conan in its Grand Finale, albeit with rather painfully obvious green-screening.
• After Craig Kilborn left The Daily Show in 1999, Comedy Central did everything they could to ensure he is never mentioned on the program again. The official Daily Show website has no Kilborn-era episode clips (besides a small flashback in one episode from the Jon Stewart era), no VHS or DVD release has showcased Kilborn's run, and fans have to rely on home recordings in order to continue enjoying them. The mixed reception of the series during that era as well as Kilborn making crude jokes about Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead in an Esquire magazine interview didn't help matters. Comedy Central did allow Kilborn to have a cameo in Stewart's final episode, in which he insults Stewart for taking his job, but that was it.
• Only a year after succumbing to pneumonia, the once-beloved British TV presenter Jimmy Savile was unmasked as a gigantic sexual predator in one of the biggest scandals of its kind. The result was an extensive damnatio memoriae: memorials, street names, statues, archive recordings, his gravestone, two charity organizations carrying his name, and honorary degrees were all removed, renamed, or disbanded. The BBC, who he worked with for decades, scrubbed all references to him, among other things pulling episodes of Top of the Pops that he hosted from circulation (and he was a regular host for twenty years), removing footage and references to him from bios and documentaries, and reediting the Jim'll Fix It/Doctor Who crossover "A Fix With Sontarans" to replace his part with a new ending. While he was also knighted and given an OBE medal, these accolades died with him since knighthood is for life, and only for life, and there is no knighthood to be stripped (this has been misunderstood in the past by people who criticize the monarchy for not stripping him of his honours). That said, some traces of Savile remain online in the form of YouTube videos uploaded prior to the revelation of Savile's darker life.
• After being convicted of sexual offenses against underage girls in July 2014 — as a result of investigations begun in the wake of the Savile scandal — Rolf Harris underwent the unperson process. His art (including what was then an original royal-commissioned portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, which she genuinely liked) was withdrawn from public view, honours stripped, TV programmes featuring references to him or his music pulled off the air, and plaques around Australia and the UK taken down. Additionally, guest vocals by Harris on Kate Bush's 2005 album Aerial were overdubbed in the 2018 remastered release by Bush's son, Albert McIntosh (meanwhile, his instrumental parts both there and on Bush's earlier album The Dreaming were kept, since he didn't contribute any vocals in those capacities).
• The drag performance group The Kinsey Sicks were heavily featured in promotional material for Season 3 of America's Got Talent but after the producers found out more about the group's history and politics, their performance was scrubbed from the show and they were un-invited from the second round of performances.
• After their reputation was destroyed by a legion of scandals, Canadian animation studio Cinar resurfaced as Cookie Jar Entertainment. As Cookie Jar, they erased all references to the Cinar name from all their shows. They also replaced the old Dic Entertainment logos with Cookie Jar logos after they bought the company in 2008 and got the rights to all their shows.
• The [adult swim] series Million Dollar Extreme Presents World Peace burned through their six episodes in late summer 2016 without much buzz, holding middling million-viewer ratings on a Friday night slot, but remained in contention for a second season. However, once it was found out that the MDE comedy troupe had trafficked in racist, misogynistic and homophobic humor in the past, had somehow gotten through things like a blackface sketch which had to be edited considerably by Standards and Practices, and eventually became heavily involved in the alt-right scene online, things quickly went downhill. Network stalwart Brett Gelman quit working with the network in disgust because of how he saw the network promoting the humor of MDE while turning down several women-led projects, the network faced hostile reaction during the show's run from their staff, and more S&P editing had to be done to get through the run, including the removal of subtle swastika imagery. Even the show's musical guests regretted their appearances; all but one performer/band (and that one just couldn't be found) distanced themselves from the show, repudiating the views of MDE in whole. Adult Swim washed their hands of the show in December 2016, for a short time removing all signs that it existed from its website. It returned later in the month, and it remained there until June 12, 2020, when, in light of the Black Lives Matter protests, the show was removed from both the website/app and from iTunes. It still remains available for digital download on Amazon and Vudu.
• Robot Wars: The VHS release of Series 1 removed all footage of and reference to then-presenter Jeremy Clarkson. No tie-in media mentions him at all, and Series 1 has never aired in the US. Clarkson was an unpopular presenter who was infamously harsh and insulting to the losing contestants.
• Harvey Weinstein's name is being erased from The Weinstein Company's latest television programs after he was removed from the company in disgrace following sexual harassment allegations dating back nearly three decades.
• After its judge Johnny Iuzzini got caught up in a similar series of allegations, ABC pulled The Great American Baking Show in the middle of its 2017 season, and announced that it would not air the remaining episodes.
• Nickelodeon gave both The Ren & Stimpy Show and Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon" the Chris Benoit treatment for a period in 2018 following the publication of a BuzzFeed report where two female animators accused show creator John Kricfalusi of attempting to prey on them while they were teenagers in the mid-'90s. Reruns were pulled from NickRewind (then NickSplat), the Nick website dropped all references to it, all "retro" merchandising for it was discontinued and digital outlets stopped selling the series. Even the episodes that Kricfalusi wasn't involved in were pulled due to his mere association with the characters. NickSplat's social media accounts stopped mentioning the series, and official videos on YouTube featuring the series were taken down, including the show's opening theme. On top of all that, when Nick launched the NickSplat streaming service in August 2018 on the VRV service showcasing much of their classic programming, The Ren & Stimpy Show was nowhere to be found, underscoring Nick's then-desire to bury any trace of Kricfalusi, and by extension the show, completely. While Ren & Stimpy returned to Nick's spotlight a few months later, Kricfalusi remains persona non grata; his photo was removed from the "wall of creators" in Nickelodeon Studios, and the 2021 Comedy Central reboot announcement openly declared that he would neither be involved in production nor received any royalties from it.
• After Roseanne Barr posted a racist and Islamophobic tweet against former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, ABC canceled the revival of her show (after initially renewing it for another season), removed all references to it from their website, and replaced its summer reruns with episodes of The Middle, which had ended its run a week earlier. Roseanne was also pulled from syndication on networks such as CMT and Paramount Network (though later on Viacom suddenly forgave Roseanne and put it back into syndication on TV Land like nothing happened). The unpersoning became complete when ABC commissioned The Conners, a continuation of the series without Roseanne.
• The third season of Hell's Kitchen initially cast 13 contestants (as opposed to the advertised 12), one of whom was a male contestant named J.R. who was never mentioned on the show. His unpersoning came into play after he was caught behind the scenes spreading rumors about a fellow contestant having an affair with her very high-profile former boss. Likely viewing him as a liability after catching wind of this, the show's producers decided to not only demand that J.R. forfeit the competition, but also to edit him out of nearly all footage recorded up to that point. This was done to the extent that only a few brief glimpses of him remain visible in the first episode of the finished season – after this, he is never seen again.
• Remember all those great children's programs that aired on Fox Kids and 4Kids TV? Well, Fox doesn't. Ever since both blocks ended in 2002 and 2008, respectively, Fox has hardly, if ever, acknowledged broadcasting of some of the most popular children's programming of the '90s and '00s, including Batman: The Animated Series, Animaniacs, Bobby's World, the Power Rangers franchise and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003), among many other shows - by refusing to acknowledge the existence of the blocks. Most tellingly, the network's "Flashback" section on their website doesn't even mention either Fox Kids or 4Kids TV nor list a single program from either block, and neither does Fox's 25th anniversary special from 2012, with not a single clip from any of the above-mentioned shows being shown. More likely though, this was just to save money; for all intents and purposes, their involvement with the former ended with the 2001 sale of Fox Family Worldwide (which included the then-Fox Family Channel and Fox Kids itself) to Disney, and even a diversion to mention Fox Kids was deemed superfluous to the special. The latter was merely a time-lease by 4Kids of the Saturday morning timeslot, and which ended on negative terms; the general criticism of that block's infamous lousy dubbing of Japanese-sourced series made it an easy call to avoid mention of it as well.
• When the recap series Ultra Chronicle Z: Heroes' Odyssey aired, people began to notice that in a glaring omission, Daigo Madoka and Shin Asuka were nowhere to be seen.
  • In the case of Hiroshi Nagano (Daigo), it was because his talent agency, the aforementioned Johnnys' and Associates, have been extremely stingy with his likeness in the past.
  • With Takeshi Tsuruno (Asuka), no proper reason was given. Despite rumors of him supporting Hong Kong democracy in 2019 (with Tsuburaya Productions even accused bootlicking China), this was disproven as the company still uses Tsuruno's image in printed publications to this day, with reruns of Ultraman Dyna on YouTube and TBS even had the actor's image.
• Don Vito was a regular cast member on Viva La Bam and was mainstay in the CKY videos. However, in 2006 after he was arrested for groping two teenage girls in public, his sentence included barred him from using his public persona, as well as forbidding any footage of him to be released to the mass public. Because of this, his stunts for “Jackass Number Two” were cut out (one of them being where his tooth gets pulled by a Lamborghini, which was later recreated with Danger Ehren instead for “Jackass 3D”), as well as him not being able to appear in the spin-off of “Viva La Bam”, “Bam’s Unholy Union” besides a Blink and You’ll Miss It shot of him at the wedding. He hasn’t appeared in any other material for Jackass or any related material since, especially after his death in 2015.
• If PBS' rights to a certain show expire, it will be treated like it never existed. It will be removed from reruns, promos, and the official website. Dragon Tales and Lamb Chop's Play-Along are two such examples of this erasure.
• A similar fate befell a number of cartoons on Max, as Infinity Train, Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart, and OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes were abruptly yanked off of the service, with even Tweets about them being deleted. However it was later revealed this was because of WB Discovery and Cartoon Network was just as confused as the fans.
• Harry Friedman retired as executive producer of Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune at the end of the COVID-19-shortened 2019-2020 season. Mike Richards, who had then recently left The Price Is Right, took his place on both shows. After the passing of Alex Trebek, Mike was tasked with finding a suitable successor on Jeopardy! When the successor turned out to be himself, the fan base was not pleased. News sites wasted no time reporting the sketchiness of his character, especially after journalists discovered a podcast where he frequently made off-color remarks. Mike stepped down from hosting and eventually was let go from both shows in August 2021. Sony then wasted no time burying any involvement with Mike, banning the three weeks of Jeopardy! he hosted from re-runs.
• Jeopardy! gave three former contestants this treatment.
  • Barbara Lowe retired undefeated in March 1986 with $35,192 in winnings. After her shows were taped, the producers discovered that she appeared on another game show within the probationary period. Since this violated her eligibility requirements, she was barred from competing in that year's Tournament of Champions. However, it gets dicier from there. According to then editorial associate producer Harry Eisenberg, Lowe was snobby and a bad sport who induced plenty of angry fan mail. She drew the ire of Alex Trebek when she disagreed with him on a ruling over the air. When the actual episode surfaced, it turned out that Lowe was simply confused over the judgment call. Lowe was told that her winnings were withheld because the show stopped taping to accommodate a stomach issue she experienced which cost time and money^note This also happened when she was a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, although it's implied that the staff there was much more accommodating. She threatened a lawsuit and settled out of court, ending up with a fraction of her winnings. Regardless, Lowe is nowhere to be found on the show's official records, and her episodes have never aired in reruns. Home recordings finally surfaced in late 2022, after the deaths of Trebek and Eisenberg.
  • Season 30 five-time champion Jerry Slowik was arrested for sexually assaulting a minor after his shows aired. This happened after he received his winnings but before the next Tournament of Champions took place. He was removed from the competition and replaced with four-time winner Mark Japinga.
  • Jeff Kirby, who played in Season 16, managed to slip through the audition process and play on another show nearly ten years later. He might have gotten away with it if not for a fan on the official boards pointing out that he was wearing the same exact tie from his first game. The show barred Kirby's repeat appearance from re-runs, and he was denied his $1,000 third place prize.

Religion

• In The Bible, Jesus Christ is said to have had four brothers (and a couple sisters), but despite their significance in His personal life and his brother James going on to become one of the first saints, they're rarely mentioned. As a result, Catholics and Orthodox believe they weren't His literal siblings while most Protestants follow Occam's Razor and assume they are, but the latter is contradicted by their absence from major events in His life such as the Finding in the Temple when He was 12. Biblical scholar Robert Eisenman theorized that Luke himself edited out Jesus' family as much as possible in order to emphasize His importance.
• Shunning is used as a severe punishment in many religions, including Christianity and Scientology.
  • It's an especially strong punishment in Amish communities since individual Amish often have no social connections outside the Amish community. Enough to drive the individual in question to suicide in severe cases. And, as shown in an episode of Genealogy Roadshow, they even went so far as to not keep records of the one who was shunned, thus adhering to the part of this trope where all traces of their existence are erased.
  • In the same way, exile could be a very severe punishment in tribal societies, not much better than execution.
• After Pope Benedict XVI confirmed that Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, was really a pederast who sexually abused numerous underage seminarians and fathered at least three children with two women, created a "system of power" built on silence and obedience that enabled him to lead an "immoral" double life "devoid of scruples and authentic religious sentiment" and allowed him to abuse young boys for decades unchecked, the Legionaries of Christ, an ecumenically and politically powerful Catholic organization have divulged new norms regarding their founder: They will not display any photo of him in their installations, they will not sell any of his writings nor cite him as the author when giving a sermon, they will not celebrate his birthday or the anniversary of his death, they will not build a mausoleum in his tomb.
  • This rule is not universal, however. On the Legion's website, they do acknowledge Maciel as their founder and do display a small photo of him in a timeline charting the group's history. At the same time, they pull no punches on showing just how off the rails he went, and describe his actions as "gravely reprehensible", among other terms.
• Religions and Christian denominations which in some eyes verge on being cults have been accused of this with regard to previously-held beliefs now considered theologically or socially inconvenient/embarrassing.
• In some sects of Christianity, the eschatological concept of the Rapture and any act of preaching, predicting, or even believing in the Rapture can be defined as sinful and heretical (and thus an offense punishable by excommunication) because the Rapture has never existed in any sanctioned scriptures and probably never will be accepted in any legal capacity. As stated before in many verses: "No mortal being, no Angel, and not even the Son can ever learn or know about the arrival and unfolding of Judgement Day for only the Lord himself can know when, where, and how that time will come."
  • Harold Camping, the man who is best known as "The False Prophet of the May 21, 2011 Rapture", has been completely disavowed by Family Radio through the cancellation of his programs and the erasure of his audio recordings. As one of its original founders, Harold used Family Radio as the platform for his rapture warning campaign and had spent a lot of money on advertisement (and on personal things for himself) to spread his word across the country. The rapture warning began to snowball, generating a large influx of revenue for Family Radio but also steadily increasing its operating expenses. And when the 6 P.M. May 21st, 2011 rapture deadline had passed with no world-ending catastrophe, the gravy train began to derail until it completely disappeared long before the end of 2011, forcing Family Radio to dramatically downsize to avert a financial crisis due to accumulating at least 26 million in operating costs from the rapture scare. A lot of people were very disillusioned and angry at Family Radio and Harold for disrupting and even ruining their lives with their swindling deception.
  • Note that this is NOT Universal. Some other sects of Christianity are devoted almost entirely to the Rapture, and numerous books have been written attempting to predict it. Others point to the fact that the Rapture was completely unknown as any sort of theological construct prior to the nineteenth century and is such a recent idea, based on such minimal Biblical exegesis, that it becomes highly dubious as faith and belief, compared to the core tenets of the Christian faith.

Sports

• Atlanta and the National Hockey League:
  • After the Atlanta Spirit Group sold the Atlanta Thrashers (now known as the Winnipeg Jets) to True North Sports and Entertainment, Atlanta Spirit erased most, if not all, references to the Thrashers, including their only divisional title banner and a mural from when the team hosted the 2008 NHL All-Star Game from Philips Arena (now State Farm Arena). Also, several Canadian hockey outlets tend to disregard the existence of the former Thrashers; however, many hockey traditionalists tend to be biased against any Sun Belt NHL team. Some Atlanta hockey fans treat the current Winnipeg Jets this way, refusing to acknowledge their existence.
  • Similarly, when the Atlanta Flames moved to Calgary and became the Calgary Flames, their past existence in Atlanta is very rarely acknowledged, only by keeping the team name and using the Atlanta Flames logo as the symbol for alternate captains. Whenever a milestone anniversary is celebrated by the franchise, it always pertains to the year that the team moved to Calgary, not when they were created. Unlike the Winnipeg Jets, there are still some fans of the Flames in Atlanta.
• In 1912, athlete Jim Thorpe participated in the Summer Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden, earning gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon. In 1913, a newspaper reported that Thorpe had played baseball with a minor league team in North Carolina and received meager pay. Unfortunately, the Amateur Athletic Union had strict standards against what was considered professional sports (including minor league games), and the AAU and International Olympic Committee decided to strip Thorpe of his amateur status, medals, and awards. Thorpe later went on to play professional baseball for the New York Giants, Cincinnati Reds, and Boston Braves. He also started to play professional football with the Pine Village Pros of Indiana, followed by the Canton Bulldogs, and Oorang Indians (Ohio), later playing 52 NFL games for 6 teams from 1920 to 1928. After Thorpe's death, replicas of his gold medals were presented to two of his children, and his amateur status was restored. However, the IOC wouldn't restore his Olympic wins until July 15, 2022.
• In April 2014, when the Chicago Cubs celebrated the 100th anniversary of Wrigley Field (their stadium), they brought back many of their past greats for the celebration. One glaring exception: Sammy Sosa, who hit 60 homers in three different seasons with the team (though allegedly with the help of steroids), and was the face of the Cubs in the late 1990s and early 2000s, wasn't invited. He had left the team on bad terms in 2004.^note  By the end of his time with the Cubs, he had alienated most of his teammates. The final straw was when he sat out the last game of the 2004 season, left the stadium before the game was over, and then tried to lie about it publicly.
• Following investigations that implicated poker player Russ Hamilton in what is perhaps the largest instance of online gambling fraud ever committed (his company, Ultimate Bet, would eventually refund over $22 million that was taken from its members by "cheating software"), Hamilton has been shunned by the World Series of Poker, who covered up his portrait from when he won the main event in 1994 and declined to invite him to an anniversary event that all other living main event winners attended.
• Since being charged with murder, Aaron Hernandez was cut from the New England Patriots^note He was actually cut before being charged, but after being arrested, his player stats were temporarily blanked at NFL.com (they are back now, but his photo is gone), he lost all his endorsement deals, the Patriots briefly allowed fans to exchange jerseys bearing his name for any other player, and a photo of him was removed from the Pro Football Hall of Fame. By the time Hernandez committed suicide in prison in 2017, he had been completely scrubbed from the history of the team.
• Penn State Nittany Lions football:
  • Following allegations of child sexual abuse against Jerry Sandusky, Penn State went to great lengths when it came to obliterating him completely: not only has his image been removed from the school's mural◊, an ice cream named after him was also pulled by the university's ice cream parlor.
  • Even Joe Paterno himself, the coach on whose victories Penn State enjoys its reputation, was purged. The Penn State administration even debated pulling down a statue of him, then did so. The only exceptions were buildings such as libraries that his family (and not him personally) had funded. Given his death not long after the allegations came to light, however, and the public outpouring of grief, this may wind up being a subversion of this trope, and after the statue was removed there was a vocal minority, led by Roger Ebert (of all people), that condemns the removal in light of Paterno's death.
  • In addition to a bevy of other punishments, the NCAA ordered Penn State to vacate 14 years of victories, thus effectively stripping Paterno of the record for most wins by a head coach. The governor of Pennsylvania instigated a legal battle to fight against many of the NCAA's sanctions since quite a few of them penalize innocent students; the wins were restored in January 2015.
• Other NCAA members:
  • The NCAA also essentially did this to both Reggie Bush and O.J. Mayo by the University of Southern California. Both were found to have illegally taken money from agents while they were playing at USC, and as a result of NCAA sanctions, USC cannot recognize either of them in any way. Their names could not appear in any school record books (not so bad for Mayo, as he only played one season of basketball before moving onto the NBA and probably didn't even want to be there in the first place; however a much bigger deal for Bush, up until then one of the best college football players of all time), the university could not display any images of them or hang their jerseys anywhere, nor could Bush or Mayo assist in recruiting or be in any way involved with USC. In addition, they were forced to vacate any victories and awards while Bush and Mayo were playing for their respective teams. In Bush's case, this included the 2004 National Championship and his 2005 Heisman Trophy.
    • In 2019, the NCAA changed its rules regarding this point. Records of such players remain vacated—for example, USC still lists Bush in its record books, but flags all of his entries with prominent notes indicating that the NCAA does not recognize his records (which is sufficient to satisfy the NCAA). When it comes to disassociation from said players, the NCAA no longer enforces this after 10 years, leaving it up to the schools involved to maintain or lift bans as they see fit. Once the 10 years ran out in 2020, USC re-personed both Bush and Mayo, once again allowing them the same access to the program as other alumni.^note Bush actually returned to USC before he was officially re-personed, but did so only in his capacity as a Fox football analyst, and had no significant contact with any current USC personnel during those visits.
  • The NCAA effectively did this to Morehouse's men's soccer program for 2004 and 2005 after particularly egregious rules violations. Two Nigeria-born players were allowed to play despite previously having played professional soccer, and were also allowed to play before enrolling at the school. Other players were allowed to play without proper paperwork, and for a time not even the athletic department knew a soccer program even existed. The so-called "death penalty" is now rarely used due to the fallout from the only football team (SMU) to be slapped with the death penalty back in 1987, including the disbanding of the Southwest Conference. The NCAA has imposed the death penalty five times, according to The Other Wiki, but only once on a D-I football squad (in the aforementioned SMUgate); however, there had been talks about slapping the death penalty on Miami (due to massive improper benefits provided by booster and convicted Ponzi schemer Nevin Shapiro) and Penn State (due to a possible cover-up of Sandusky's crimes), and in 2002 they stopped short of slapping the death penalty on Alabama for using a booster to reel in a Memphis player after receiving a tip from Alabama rival Tennessee's then-coach, Phillip Fulmer.
  • As it turned out, neither Miami nor Penn State received a death penalty. Penn State did receive crippling sanctions, though after the school showed clear progress in the cleanup process, the sanctions were eased. As for Miami, they received only modest scholarship reductions and "show-cause penalties"^note essentially blackballing a coach from employment with other schools for some assistants. The NCAA badly botched the Miami investigation, and the school self-imposed postseason bans in 2011 and 2012 despite being bowl-eligible in both seasons.
  • It's highly unlikely that the measure will ever be used again in the future (at least on a football program, due to the popularity of the sport). After SMU's sentence was laid down in '87, it took close to 20 years for their program to recover, and it is highly unlikely that it will ever enjoy the same kind of prominence it once did; this naturally makes the NCAA wary of such a harsh measure.
  • In May 2011, the NCAA investigated improper benefits violations involving some of the university's football players during the previous season. In the aftermath, coach Jim Tressel resigned, Ohio State self-vacated their wins from the 2010 season and the NCAA imposed a five-year show-cause penalty on Tressel.
  • In 2018, following the ouster of men's basketball coach Rick Pitino for soliciting prostitutes for players and recruits, the Louisville Cardinals were forced to vacate all of their wins from 2011-2014 including their 2013 National Championship title. As of this writing, they are the only school to vacate a national title in tournament history.
  • In April 2021, following an investigation into the LSU athletic program stemming from multiple instances of sex crimes and lesser sexual misconduct, mostly within the school's flagship football program, the school banned former star running back Derrius Guice, who had been accused of sexual assault by at least two female students and sexual misconduct by another, from the program. LSU also stripped his statistics from its record books.
  • In 2022, Florida removed backup QB Jalen Kitna's bio and roster spot due to being arrested for possession of child pornography and distribution of child exploitation material.
• In February 2013, trading card manufacturer Topps erased all mention of disgraced slugger Pete Rose from its 2013 Major League Baseball trading card series, which has several mentions of players chasing famous lifetime records. Rose himself has not appeared on any officially licensed MLB product since his lifetime ban in 1989.
• "Replacement players" who participated in Spring Training in 1995 (during the 1994 players' strike) are similarly treated because they cannot be members of the Major League Baseball Players Association. Their names cannot appear on any merchandise, they cannot have official baseball cards, and they are replaced with expies in MLBPA-licensed video games. Four of the replacement players ^note Shane Spencer, Damian Miller, Brendan Donnelly, and Kevin Millar would later be part of World Series-winning teams but were not allowed to appear in any official commemorative memorabilia as a result of crossing the picket line in 1995.^note Millar, who was part of the popular 2004 championship Boston Red Sox team, wound up being represented under a variety of aliases in MLB video games.
• Chris Webber was disassociated from the University of Michigan for his illicit association with booster Ed Martin from 2003 to 2013. The basketball team will remain stripped of its 1992 and 1993 title game appearances, and all wins in the 1992-93 season will remain vacated. Maurice Taylor, Robert "Tractor" Traylor, and Louis Bullock received similar sanctions for their involvement with Martin, though they were allowed to associate with the school again in 2012 (although Traylor died in 2011). The team wins from 1995-1999 were also vacated, although the Wolverines were awarded a win by forfeit for the 1995-96 season due to Purdue's own recruiting scandal, even though they were swept by the Boilermakers that year.
• Lance Armstrong has become this in cycling. Between 1999 and 2006 he won the Tour de France seven times, a record! In the 2010s, however, it turned out he had used doping to obtain this goal. The official Tour de France committee has effectively stripped him from his titles, without saying who won the tours in those years, but did comment: "There is no place in cycling for him."
  • This has extended to other appearances: PBS removed two episodes of Arthur from syndication (and even remade one entirely without him) because he guest-starred in them, and also removed an episode featuring an Expy of him.
• The Baltimore Orioles baseball club was originally the American League St. Louis Browns, before being moved following the 1953 season, with the Browns being most notable for being an utterly abysmal team. The Orioles were so determined to make a clean break from their loser past that they officially disavow any connection to their time in St. Louis (including their only pennant there from 1944), leaving it to their former in-city rivals, the St. Louis Cardinals, to honor the Browns' hall of famers and records.
• In 1895 The Northern Rugby Union, later to become the Rugby League, seceded from the Rugby Football Union over the thorny issue of compensation to players who lost wages in order to play. Up to that point, Yorkshire had dominated the County Championship with players drawn from the coal mines and textile factories of that county, and the well-heeled amateurs in the south of England were very unhappy about this. For the next hundred years, the Rugby Union had a massive sulk, banning for life any player who had so much as enquired about changing to the, by now very different, game of Rugby League. Nobody who had ever played so much as a park kickabout game of League was permitted to sully the Union game. In the Club Room at Twickenham, HQ of the Rugby Football Union (which governs union in England), photographs of County Championship-winning teams had players who had transferred to League painted out. This ended in 1995 when, under pressure from leading Union countries New Zealand and South Africa, the game finally went professional with Wigan Rugby League and Bath Rugby Union teams playing each other at both games. Wigan trounced Bath at League and Bath won more closely at Union.
• A minor case of this happened in Round 2 of the 2017 Stanley Cup Playoffs, between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Washington Capitals. Things were business as usual until early in the third game when Capitals Matt Niskanen and Alexander Ovechkin ended up giving Penguin Sidney Crosby a concussion. Penguins goaltender Marc-André Fleury had made and was wearing a mask with the names of his favorite Penguin comrades on it, amid rumors it would be his last season with the team; in time for the third game of the series, he had taken a Sharpie to the mask to add Niskanen - as "Nisky" - post-hoc as Niskanen had been a Penguin until he was signed to the Capitals in the 2014 offseason, and had been left out of the original list on the back of the mask. Come Game Four, however, and with Crosby out of commission for the time being, Fleury had conspicuously used masking tape to cover Niskanen's name. The tape was roughly the same color of the mask itself, but it was still visible. It was likely to send a message to "Nisky" that Fleury was not pleased with what had happened; he had said just after the third game that he hadn't seen the replays, so he didn't know exactly what went down, but at some point between games he apparently did and did not like what he saw of Niskanen. He didn't seem keen on discussing it after the fourth game, either, though it was making headlines before the game was even over.
  • Later, when the championship documentary came out, Fleury finally broke his silence as he gave the simple answer that it was him sticking up for his comrades, but that he doesn't hold a grudge.
• In 1992 the Canadian Soccer League (CSL) closed down and Canada was left without a soccer league. The Ontario-based National Soccer League thus became the largest league in Canada, renaming themselves as "Canadian National Soccer League". However, the league was mostly centered around Ontario, was semi-professional, and didn't had any sanction from the Canadian Soccer Association (CSA), the FIFA-affiliated governing body of Canada. In 2010 the CNSL (now "Canadian Soccer League") finally received sanctioning from the CSA, work started to promote the CSL as a first-division league with plans to expand to all the country... except when the CSA revoked the CSL's sanction in 2013 due to various match-fixing scandals, and later in 2018 the CSA would found a separate league named the "Canadian Premier League". The CSA would then completely ignore the existence of the 2010s CSL or their sanctioning, and officially claim Canada didn't have a fully professional first division league since 1992 with the original CSL.
• After firing head coach Dick Jauron midway through the 2009 NFL season, the Buffalo Bills attracted some notoriety for editing him out of the team photo.
• After former head coach Jon Gruden's racist emails were leaked, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers removed his name from their Ring of Honor. Soon afterwards, Madden 22 announced they would remove him from the game, instead replacing Gruden with a "generic likeness".
• The Stanley Cup had only one name stricken out that didn't fit the trope - a mix-up resulted in Basil Pocklington, father of Edmonton Oilers owner Peter Pocklington, being engraved on the Stanley Cup (rather than receiving a miniature Stanley Cup replica as intended) in 1984; once the error was discovered, it could not be gracefully fixed, so Basil's name was clumsily struck out with X's (think manual typewriter). This was, in the entire history of the Stanley Cup, the only time somebody's name was deleted until 2021, where the discovery that one of the names engraved with the 2009-10 Chicago Blackhawks, video coach Brad Aldrich, had sexually assaulted player Kyle Beach led the team to ask the Hockey Hall of Fame to remove him, which they did.
• Following the George Floyd protests in 2020, the Washington NFL team, in addition to dropping the "Redskins" moniker, did this to team founder George Preston Marshall. This was due to Marshall's overt racism that helped keep black players out of the league from 1932-1946 and Washington was notably the last team to integrate their roster in 1963. Marshall's statue was removed from FedEx Field and his name was removed from the team's Ring of Fame. The team is now known as the Commanders.
• A similar case happened to Tom Yawkey who owned the Boston Red Sox from 1933 until his death in 1976. Yawkey became better known for alleged racist history, most notably for overseeing the Red Sox becoming the last of the original Major League teams to integrate. Yawkey Way, where Fenway Park is located, had its name changed back to Jersey Street in 2018. A plaque bearing Yawkey's name at Fenway was removed, and Yawkey Station was renamed Lansdowne Station.

Video Games

• Shouzou Kaga, creator of Fire Emblem left Nintendo for undisclosed reasons shortly after the release of Fire Emblem: Thracia 776. He went to fund his own game company, Tirnanog, and released TearRing Saga. Nintendo and Intelligent Systems sued him and his company over it, but they failed to stop the sales of the game. Since then, Nintendo has gone to great lengths to not make references to Kaga in any way, the best example being the fact that Kaga wasn't even mentioned in the The Making of Fire Emblem 25th Anniversary book, despite being the mastermind behind the entire franchise. This is also why Tear Ring Saga's sequel, Berwick Saga was radically different as well. (Fun Fact - this attributes to many "dev leaves company to create spiritual successors" such as Destiny (Bungie), Mighty No. 9 (Keiji Inafune), Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (Koji Igarashi) and so on.)
  • In Super Smash Bros. Melee, the "Original Game Staff" section of the credits pays tribute to the key creative people behind the original games from which Melee takes elements from. Not only is Kaga's name omitted from the section, but that of the late Gunpei Yokoi as well (the creator of the Game & Watch games that served as the basis for Mr. Game & Watch, as well as the producer of Metroid, Ice Climber, Dr. Mario and the aforementioned Fire Emblem).
• Konami removed Hideo Kojima's name from every game he (and his production company) worked on following his departure in 2015. This included all the Metal Gear games and the Zone of the Enders HD Collection, among others. This also extended to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: while Snake was brought back to the roster, his series icon was changed from the FOXHOUND insignia (which Kojima used for his development studio before being ousted from Konami) to a generic exclamation mark. When Konami re-released the Metal Gear series in 2023's Master Collection Compilation Re-release, Kojima's name was not included in the game's new credits (only being retained in the credits of the original games due to them being ports), with it thanking "all original Metal Gear series staff and fans."
• Dwarf Fortress is a game that runs on Video Game Cruelty Potential and Black Comedy. They used to have a thread on the worst things players did in-game, dedicated to Crossing the Line Twice, until one particular dwarf (known as Obok Meatgod), had such brutality that it went too far, even for the Dwarf Fortress community. The thread was expunged, and the dwarf is not spoken of.
• Following allegations (and subsequent confirmation) of sexual impropriety and NDA violations in July 2019, Nintendo announced that the original dub voice actor of Byleth in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Chris Niosi, would be replaced with Zach Aguilar. A datamine of Fire Emblem Heroes originally named Niosi as Male Byleth's voice actor, but the name was scrubbed shortly afterwards. Nintendo further announced that, even though Niosi's voice was featured in Three Houses, a future patch would replace his voice with Aguilar's. Additionally Aguilar would start voicing the character in later games and spin-offs.
• In the March 2019 update for Minecraft, Microsoft removed all references to its original creator, Mark "Notch" Persson from the in-game menus and splash screens though his name remains in the credits. He was also not invited to the game's 10 anniversary celebration after his controversial and inflammatory Tweets regarding race and gender. Some members of the game's fandom has since adopted this trope, and jokingly considers Minecraft to have been made by Hatsune Miku.
• Following several of its employees being forced to resign in disgrace from Activision Blizzard in mid 2021 over widespread sexual harassment, the company washed their hands of and scrubbed out any references about them in their games. For example, a major city in World of Warcraft and a prominent character in Overwatch, both formerly named after Jesse McCree, were Renamed to Avoid Association to Eredath and Cole Cassidy, respectively.
• Following the abysmal failure of Balan Wonderworld, Yuji Naka went on a protracted Creator Backlash that included celebrating the anniversary of NiGHTS into Dreams… with a tweet that (very poorly) edited fellow Sonic Team alum Naoto Ohshima, whom Naka held a feud against following the Troubled Production of Balan Wonderworld, out of an old picture. The audacity of this did not go unmissed, particularly since Ohshima was responsible for the character design of their magnum opus Sonic the Hedgehog. Also going unmissed was the cruel Irony following Naka's arrest and conviction for insider trading while, at the same time, Ohshima's company Arzest was approached by Sega with developing Sonic Superstars, bringing the target of Naka's wrath back into the spotlight.

Web Animation

• hololive: Members who have their contracts terminated not only have their Youtube channels scrubbed of content (meaning everything is privated and made inaccessible), but they are also completely unacknowledged on the official Hololive website. The key point seems to be "terminated", as members who graduated (i.e. retired) are acknowledged as alums on the official site, even those who suddenly left the company like Vesper and Magni of Holostars English.
  • Uruha Rushia had her contract terminated on 22nd February 2022, with Cover Corp.'s official notice citing leaking of confidential information. As mentioned above, her channel was scrubbed in early March. She is still occasionally brought up by her genmates in Gen 3 and various members took pains to stress to their viewers her name isn't taboo (e.g. both Calliope Mori and Kureiji Ollie were linked to Rushia due to their own associations with death). Her departure at the time caused quite a stir, as it occurred just before the HoloFes (the big festival for celebrating Hololive Productions as a whole). During the event, the costumes of all members active at the time were displayed, but naturally Rushia's was not seen. An unfortunate mistake resulted in Himemori Luna being unpersoned from the official banner instead of Rushia ^note  The general suspicion is that the person tasked with erasing Rushia accidentally erased Luna due to both names beginning with the character ル and having similar lengths. This was understandably very upsetting to many of the talents (Luna's genmate Tokuyami Towa cried when recalling it, and even Tokino Sora, known for her patience, was said to have been very irate).
  • Yozora Mel had her contract terminated on 16th January 2024. Like Rushia, the official reason given was leaking of confidential information ^note  Mel herself via an alternate account would explain that she'd been talking to a friend and accidentally let confidential information slip that later got out . Her channel was scrubbed in February 2024, with her original songs being taken off of various platforms. In addition, the Augmented Reality app Hololy (which allowed fans to take pictures using their official models) removed her from the list of available characters almost immediately after her termination was announced, and an apology was issued to people who'd bought her alternate costumes for use in the app ^note  Hololy generally has the talent in their original outfits, but alternate costumes are offered for a limited time around special occasions like Christmas or Halloween. Unlike the case with Rushia, based on the reactions of others like Cover Corp. president Yagoo or Friend A (both of whom posted messages thanking Mel for all her work over the years), it appears the leak was acknowledged by the company as being accidental, but because it was still a major breach of contract Mel had to be subjected to the most serious penalty. Cover took pains to allow Mel to post a farewell message on her official Twitter account, and in their official notice on her termination even updated the English translation to stress that her termination was only done after consulting with Mel herself, in order to make it clear that this was a very reluctant parting.
  • The absolute best example of this would be Hitomi Chris, who was originally meant to be part of the first generation in 2018. Her contract was terminated a mere three weeks after she first debuted, with her only streaming once. Unlike the likes of Rushia or Mel, she has never been acknowledged or referred to (though in fairness, at the time Hololive didn't really invoke Cast Herd, meaning unlike later generations she and her genmates didn't train together to develop strong bonds).
  • It should be pointed out that several former members are likewise unacknowledged officially, including the likes of Mano Aloe, or Suzaku and Kaoru of Holostars. In their case, it seems to be more about how they weren't part of the company for very long rather than some sort of wrong-doing ^note  Aloe was infamously the victim of internet bullying when she accidentally doxxed herself, to the point she decided to retire rather than return from a two week suspension for the accidental leaking, Suzaku quit only a few months after debuting and long before Holostars really began to take off, while Kaoru's departure, also only a few months after debuting, was said to have been caused by the cancellation of his contract due to personal circumstances .
• Nijisanji: Compared to their main rival Hololive, Nijisanji is inconsistent with how far they go with unpersoning talents. Like Hololive, severe breaches that result in termination also cause the talent's channel to be completely scrubbed. However, with some departed talents, their channels are kept up with all the content intact, with others the channel is still up but most or all content is privated (for example, Suzuhara Lulu's channel only has her farewell stream, while Gundou Mirei's channel is completely devoid of content), and with others still the channel is outright deleted (Otogibara Era's channel no longer exists) ^note  This inconsistency is part of the reason some fans view Nijisanji as a "black company", as it gives the impression that Nijisanji goes out of its way to completely unperson those talents who leave on bad terms with the company. Suzhara Lulu, for example, decided to graduate after receiving threatening letters despite new outfits for her being in development, leading to suspicions Nijisanji's management were displeased with her for leaving. Nijisanji does apparently have a rule that once a talent graduates, their channel will be left up for a couple of years before being privated, but this is evidently not strictly or consistently enforced.
  • In early February of 2024, Selen Tatsuki of Nijisanji English had her contract terminated, the statement alleging multiple breaches of contract ^note  On her own previous channel, Selen herself mentioned being the victim of bullying and harassment, to the point she even attempted suicide. Part of the cause of this was because many of her projects and efforts seemed to be undercut by Nijisanji management itself, to the point she was paying out her own pocket to artists and the like. She had even attempted to simply depart Nijisanji due to this, but was denied . Fans noticed that her channel began being cleared out before the termination notice had even been posted, and she was also completely removed from the official Nijisanji website. This led to some very irate fans, as the channel was completely cleared out before there was a chance to archive or download streams and videos. Selen was a well-beloved talent who also held numerous collaborations with not only other Vtubers but other content creators as well, so to not be able to preserve those collaboration streams was an especially sore point. ^note  Even worse, however, was the discovery that Selen herself did not know she had been terminated until she saw the termination notice posted.
• VOMS Project:
  • In February 2021, just a month short of VOMS' one year anniversary, Jitomi Monoe was released effective immediately due to "breach of contract". Her Youtube channel had all its content privated, but while she is no longer acknowledged on the main page of the official VOMS Project website there is still a link to her profile and design notes. However, in other regards she's been completely unpersoned: when two new members were introduced to VOMS they were labelled 03 and 04 instead of 04 and 05.
  • On 31st March 2023, Amano Pikamee graduated from VOMS Project. Unusually, the unpersoning was done at her own request, with all the content on her Youtube channel and social media either privated or wiped. Like Monoe, she's no longer acknowledged on the official VOMS Project website's main page, but a link is still available to her profile and design notes. In addition, numerous clips and collab videos of her are still widespread, as her status as a bilingual Vtuber (speaking both Japanese and English) led her to doing collaborations and making contact with numerous other content creators (including Ina of Hololive English Myth or Kson On-Air of V-Shojo).

Other

• Industrial engineer C. V. Wood not only chose the location for Disneyland in the early 1950s, but was also the park's chief developer during its construction and the man most responsible for bringing in outside sponsors to fund it, and due to his success was named the first vice president and general manager of the park. He probably would have gone on to become one of the most important people in Disney's history — if he hadn't been caught embezzling money from Disneyland's corporate sponsors just months after the park opened. While he had some success from the 1960s to the 1990s billing himself as "The Master Planner of Disneyland" and designing several Disneyland knockoffs around the world (including the first Six Flags), Disney's expunging of him from their records has relegated him to obscurity among even the most hardcore theme park fans. The Freedomland episode of Defunctland heavily features Wood.
• Jōhatsu is a phenomenon where a runaway unpersons themself from the lives of everyone around them and leaves no means of contact in order to escape shame and/or have a fresh start.
• Psychologist and founder of the self-esteem movement Nathaniel Branden had this happen to him after the collapse of his affair with Ayn Rand. Rand removed the dedication to him on the title page for Atlas Shrugged and his voice was edited out of taped lectures by her.
• After Goelitz purchased the rights to Jelly Belly, they removed any mention of the candy's inventor, David Klein, despite Klein having numerous television and magazine appearances in the 1970s as "Mr. Jelly Belly." Klein's son made the documentary Candyman to set the record straight.
• Japanese universities have a procedure called "houkou", which expunges the records of a current student back to and including their application forms, if that person caused enough bad rep for the university concerned. For example, Kouzou Okamoto, one of the attackers of the Lod Airport massacre, was given this treatment since he was at the time a sophomore of the Kagoshima University. This means that legally, he can only say he's a high school graduate.
• Scott "Jark" Jarkoff, DeviantArt's co-founder, was fired by the current CEO Angelo "Spyed" Sotira. At one point, Wikipedia was edited to say that he had no involvement in the site's founding, whereas Sotira did.
  • Jark kinda sorta did the same thing to Spyed within the site itself: he claimed that Spyed had nothing to do with DeviantArt until about 2003 or so. Also, after he fired Matthew "Matteo" Stephens (another co-founder) in 2003, he regarded Matteo as an unperson...until he was fired; then he suddenly revived Matteo's relevance and made it look like Spyed fired him. Finally, in December 2003/January 2004, he tried to get anime and anthro artists banned from what was then called the "Daily Top Favorites", but it didn't work. The controversies surrounding Scott Jarkoff are incredibly ugly.
  • The same thing happened to Wikipedia itself as Jimmy Wales attempted to distance the site from departed co-founder Larry Sanger. Lampshaded hilariously here.
• This happens all the time on the Internet, though rarely for nefarious purposes. Anything you delete is gone from the only official record that it ever existed (The Internet Archive exists as an attempt to keep old versions of pages available, but its abilities are limited). It's particularly prevalent whenever people delete their own profiles in social media, though posts and comments tagging the deleted username are still present even though they don't link to valid accounts (and on Reddit, the posts and comments are still there, only with an unclickable [deleted] in place of the username). On the other hand, between backups and the highly interconnected nature of the web, while you may personally delete and erase a specific instance of something, it's more than likely that a copy exists somewhere for some reason.
• The DRM system used by Amazon's Kindle e-book service allows Amazon to remove books that its users have already purchased. Appropriately, this actually happened — to Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. It turned out that Amazon had not properly secured the copyright to either book. Users were refunded the purchase, but it's one of the more frightening aspects of the push from owning physical copies to accessing digital ones over the Internet.
• There is an interesting case of this in Colombia. In 1985, the Palace of Justice of Colombia and its workers were taken hostage by the guerrilla movement M-19. After much gunfire, the government was finally able to gain control of the place. A few of the low-class workers were stated to have died in the gunfire. Cue to the 2000s and some recordings are made public showing that the military forces did take those people out all fine and alive. Good luck trying to find out what they did to them.
• LG Corp tried to do this to the PlayStation 3 in the Netherlands over a patent dispute with Sony, though that backfired spectacularly as the Dutch injunction on PS3s was lifted before it could happen, and LG wound up having to pay a fine for their aggressiveness.
• Due to an injunction in Germany, Samsung can't even advertise its Galaxy Tab 7.7" at the IFA or on the German branch of its own website. In fact, it's illegal for them to even mention the tab in Germany.
• Here's◊ a less drastic example: while the person was not removed from history, he was still cut out of a photo for political reasons: On the left, we see Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, Queen Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, and King George VI. The doctored photo on the right was used on an election poster for the Prime Minister. It is thought that he removed King George VI so that he was shown in a more powerful light.
• In Augusta, Georgia, students, alumni, and other supporters of the former Augusta State University were not happy with the adopted name of the merger between them and Georgia Health Sciences University, Georgia Regents University, since it removed "Augusta" from the consolidated university's identity; the unpersoning of Augusta State became blatantly apparent when GRU removed the Augusta State name and logos from its athletic teams' uniforms in a university brochure. As a reversal, the university was rebranded, for the third time in only five years, as Augusta University after two years under the "Georgia Regents" name.^note Known as the Medical College of Georgia from 1833 to 2011, the university was rebranded as Georgia Health Sciences University, later became Georgia Regents University with the merger of Augusta State in 2013, and finally rebranded as Augusta University in 2015
• McDonald's regards Ray Kroc, not the McDonald brothers, as the company founder. During Kroc's lifetime, the brothers were mentioned in the official company history only as users of multiples of the milkshake machines Kroc was selling. Since Kroc's death, it's become fairer but still glosses over things like the fact that the brothers had begun franchising at several locations before Kroc entered the picture.
• Early in British Royal Marine training, each company takes a group photo while at full strength. As training progresses and recruits start getting "backtrooped" (either due to injury or not making the cut), the CO will black out each man who washes out. Because Royal Marine training is infamously long and arduous (it's rare for a commando to make it through training in one try), there are often more blacked-out men than not in the photos by the time of the much smaller company's passing out parade.
• IMDb was known to do this to users who engage in egregiously bad behavior, not only deleting their accounts but also everything they ever posted in the site's forums.
• Blocking people on Facebook results in the other person being unable to see your profile or posts. A Revealing Cover-Up, aside from other people mentioning their names, comes from "likes": if only the blocked one did so, hovering above the hand makes it disappear! Past conversations with the person have them with a blank avatar and "Facebook user". Even worse if it's a deleted profile, as the things they said can be replaced with an error message.
  • If Facebook deems an individual has broken the Community Rules and deletes an account, then that person vanishes forever from FB, together with any postings or photographs they have posted there. There is a notional appeals process, but this is Kafka-esque, long-winded, slow, and torturous. And since Facebook membership can be used as a short means of logging onto/registering for so many other sites - well, just try logging into other sites you belong to if your FB presence is removed.
• In the US state of New York, anyone sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for a crime automatically becomes an unperson in the eyes of the law. Any existing contracts they made (such as marriages and last wills) are automatically cancelled under New York law and these convicts are barred from entering into any future civil contract. The most notable people to face this punishment are fallen film mogul Harvey Weinstein, who if convicted of certain charges could've had this applied to him, and R. Kelly.
• Happened to a woman in Texas. When she left home with the help of her grandparents, she found she had no identification records whatsoever. She was born at home, after which her parents, both fundamentalist Christian anti-government types, didn't file for either a birth certificate or a social security number, she was homeschooled and therefore has no school records and she has never been to a hospital and is without medical records. Furthermore, her parents refused to help her in any way. She was informed that she should apply for a delayed birth certificate, but she can't go to court to get records without already having the records she needs to go to court to get.^note Fortunately, thanks to her grandfather, her attorney Bill Morris, state representative Marsha Farney, and the Government of Texas she can now prove she exists. Way to go, Alecia Pennington!
• After popular CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi was alleged to have sexually assaulted several women and entered multiple affairs, the CBC not only fired him, but removed almost every trace of him from Q's website and the CBC's history (his radio interviews are still up, but time will tell if they will be removed if he is convicted). They even considered renaming his former show Q to distance it from him: when Shad K. took over at host, they did ... except they re-titled it q (yes, lowercase). It should be noted that Ghomeshi was never actually convicted of the charges against him, though.
• 60 Minutes did a segment on the US Social Security "Master Death List" and people who were accidentally declared dead (for example one guy tried to notify them that his wife had died but discovered they had somehow listed both of them as deceased). Because they're "dead" they can't open bank accounts or get their social security checks and this can take years to sort out.
• After Subway pitchman Jared Fogle admitted to possessing child pornography and engaging in sexual acts with minors, Subway removed all traces of him from the franchise. Advertisements and commercials featuring him were pulled from rotation and all mentions of him were removed from their website.
• Comic actor Chris Langham has been airbrushed out of BBC history following his conviction for possessing child pornography despite his not insignificant contributions to British comedy, including being a founder member of the Not the Nine O'Clock News team and several series in his own right^note his spoof documentary series People Like Us may well have inspired The Office (UK), Langham was portrayed as a temperamental prima donna with mental health issues in a BBC comedy documentary. In addition to the BBC, Disney omitted the episode of The Muppet Show that he guest-starred in (during its fifth and final season) from the show's Disney+ release.
• Convicted murderer Malcolm Webster is completely airbrushed out of the history of his first wife, Claire Morris, who he killed. Not only was her gravestone altered to use her maiden name, he is even legally forbidden to be buried next to her.
• Following the court-ordered integration of Arkansas's schools, the town of Sheridan became an all-Caucasian community, at least until The '90s. They bulldozed and buried an African-American school to the point where it was as though the school never even existed to begin with. If not for one woman going in to salvage old records, as her son recounted in an episode of POV StoryCorps, the school probably wouldn't even be remembered by anyone, let alone in the present generation.
• For an unknown reason, the current Williams Electronics would prefer to downplay their pinball history as much as possible, despite it being one of the most prolific, most well-liked, and longest-lasting creators in the industry. Until recently, the only mention of pinball on its site was its founder Harry Williams and his invention of the tilt bob, a device to penalize players who shake the machine too much. Otherwise, as far as the present-day Williams Electronics (now known as WMS) is concerned, it has always been a gambling machine company and never made pinball at all. Though there is plenty of documentation on Williams's pinball machines, as well as many machines still out available to play in public, all of this information is gathered independently without Williams's involvement. Most of their pinball and video game properties are now controlled by their sister company and former competitor Bally. (Not that they mind much anyway—unlike some other companies that choose to scrub something they did from their history and will go after people trying to investigate, Williams seems to just ignore anything pinball-related. Except for its copyrights and trademarks.)
• After the closure of Nickelodeon Studios in 2005, Universal Studios Florida (which Nickelodeon leased for the studio space) removed whatever traces of the network they could find in the park, although Jimmy Neutron's Nicktoon Blast remained open for a few more years until 2011. The only remnants of Nickelodeon's production history at Universal are located in Stage 19 (off-limits to the public), which had a number of Nickelodeon murals left intact, dating all the way back to the '90s. YouTube user adamthewoo made a video of the remnants left behind after closure in 2012. For a long time, there were plaques outside Stage 19 outlining all of the Nickelodeon programs that were shot in Nickelodeon Studios, but in 2016 the plaques were removed. As of 2019, practically all the aforementioned traces of Nickelodeon have since been wiped (the murals found by adamthewoo have been painted over). The only remnants in the park are the appearances of Dora the Explorer and SpongeBob SquarePants characters at various locations of USF, and a SpongeBob store outside E.T. Adventure that opened in 2012.
• Nick Robinson was once a very prominent feature in multiple web shows for Polygon, but after he was found to be abusing his newfound fame to sexually harass fans on Twitter, he was very quietly dropped from the site. While footage of him wasn't removed from the site, many fans treat him (and content he was featured in) like he was never there to begin with. The last episode of "Video Game Theatre" also doesn't feature any of the shows with him in it (Car Boys, Touch the Skyrim, and CoolGames Inc.) among their "Polygone But Not Forgotten" montage of cancelled/ended shows.
• A member of the MLP Analysis group, ToonKriticY2K, has since become this after revelations of pedophilia and outright dishonesty between even his closest friends came about. None of the people he's collaborated with want anything to do with him, with a good chunk of them outright deleting their crossovers with him, and many future videos with Toon's presence have been either discontinued or cancelled altogether. With maybe a few exceptions here and there.
  • Shortly after ToonKriticY2K's scandal, a MLP fan project voice actor known as Performance Major was revealed to have been doing much the same, including engaging in erotic RP with minors. When news broke, there was quite an uproar, resulting in Major being dropped from several projects, and several in-progress episodes of said projects finding replacement voice actors for his roles, such as the audio drama of The Apprentice, the Student, and the Charlatan, and some even going so far as to replace his earlier participation as well.
• Subverted with Chris Hardwick. For a time, Nerdist refused to acknowledge Hardwick as its founder after he was accused by his ex of sexual harassment. This was later reversed following an internal investigation.
• IGN's Nintendo Editor Filip Miucin was accused of plagiarizing a review of Dead Cells wholesale from a Youtuber in mid-2018. Shortly after, it came to light that most of Miucin's reviews were also plagiarized, leading to him being fired and IGN going over his reviews with a fine-toothed comb, unpublishing everything he wrote. Because of how many reviews he wrote, this resulted in a lot of games needing revised reviews.
• In September 2018, several women came forward describing sexual harassment that they suffered from Mack Leighty, a former columnist for Cracked and editor-in-chief of another website, The Modern Rogue, under the pseudonym of "John Cheese". In the days that followed, Leighty stepped down as EIC of The Modern Rogue, and both websites he contributed to unpublished all of his articles, columns, and other material.
• For unknown reasons, George R. R. Martin's biological grandfather has been airbrushed out of his family's history, as revealed during the Season 5 premiere of Finding Your Roots.
• Guns N' Roses did this to "One in a Million" as of the 2018 Deluxe Edition of Appetite for Destruction. As far as they're concerned, W. Axl Rose's failed critique on the ugly side of white America never happened.
  • Downplayed as the song is still available for purchase on its original album G'N'R Lies.
• As far as Hasbro (and Parker Brothers before them) are concerned, Monopoly was invented in 1935 by Charles Darrow; there is no reference to Elizabeth Magie's The Landlord Games, or any of the people who modified and developed it prior to Charles Darrow learning about the game. Despite a court case in the 1970s revealing this previously 'lost' history, not to mention a thorough Wikipedia article explaining said origins easily available, Hasbro only acknowledges Charles Darrow's contribution to the game in both official media and even the game's manual!
• There is an old photo of Argentine theater actors Susana Gimenez and Ricardo Darín, as there is an extra hand in it that doesn't seem to belong to anyone (see here). Darín claims that the hand belongs to Arturo Puig, another actor standing behind them; and that he was removed to use it as a publicity photo (but forgetting about Puig's hand).
• This tends to happen on DeviantArt when a user gets accused of something dastardly (e.g. sexual harassment and/or pedophilia). One notable is fetish artist BlueCatRiolu. After he was chased off the website one last time due to another round of pedophilia accusations and was (allegedly) arrested, some of his friends and some other Deviants pulled a Chris Benoit and scrubbed his persona and OCs from their projects.
• Hazel Scott was once one of the biggest names in jazz, having appeared in multiple movies, playing with other jazz legends, and even having her own TV show. But when she stood up for herself after she was accused of being a communist sympathizer in 1950, she went from being a mega-star to being virtually unknown and her career never properly recovered after that. Her show was cancelled, she could hardly get concert or even nightclub gigs, and her albums were pulled from shelves.^note We also don't have a page for her. If you haven't heard her name alongside those of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, this is why.
• A variant happened to Yoshitaka Fujii, a Japanese anesthesiologist whose specialty was the PONV (postoperative nausea and vomiting - a frequent complication of recovery from surgeries that can be life-threatening). He received his PhD in 1993 and began publishing prolifically. In 2000, a number of his colleagues realized something is seriously fishy: not only were the results of his experiments always extremely good, confirming his hypotheses to a T, but also they suggested he designed, prepared and performed new experiments at a rate several times faster than any of his colleagues ever came close to. They notified the journals about likely scientific misconduct going on, but the response was lukewarm. As a result, they took the matter into their own hands and un-personed Fujii: his numerous publications received virtually no citations whatsoever, he was not invited to (or outright banned from) any serious scientific conference, and his work was not mentioned in any textbooks and guidelines on the subject. Finally, in 2010, British anesthesiologist John Carlisle started pushing the journals about a likely fraud; when the leading journal told him to come back with definite proof, Carlisle not only taught himself advanced statistics, but also designed a useful analyst tool to find cases where the results were statistically unrealistically good. When he proved that, for example, the probability that the side effects are virtually identical in 47 different experiments - as Fujii's publications claimed - is smaller than one in 150 million, the journal finally launched a coordinated investigation, followed by Fujii's alma mater, the Toho University. Finally, Fujii admitted that many of the experiments he claimed to have done never took place, and those that were performed had severely doctored results; he was instantly dismissed from his post. In a subversion, the guy made sure his name will be forever remembered; as of June 2020, he is an undisputed leader of all time in the amount of retracted scientific papers, with a stunning number of 183 retracted articles under his belt (putting things in perspective, the number 2 on that list - German anesthesiologist Joachim Boldt - had just hit his 100th retraction at the time, although he eventually overtook Fujii in 2023).
• After former Harvard student Adam B. Wheeler was found to have plagiarized and forged documents to gain admission to Harvard, he was expunged from their records and ordered to pay back all the financial aid he received.
• Ryan Haywood had spent the best part of a decade working at Rooster Teeth as a programmer, machinima animator, voice actor, and chiefly as one of the six main hosts of Achievement Hunter. He was exposed in October 2020 as a serial predator who repeatedly groomed young female fans with mental health problems into having sex with him in an abuse of power - and he was married with children the whole time it happened. After he resigned in disgrace, both Jack Pattillo and Michael Jones came forward and declared that both AH and RT would be excising Haywood from their history - outright removing some videos of theirs and editing a ton of others, dropping any and all merchandise inspired by him and so on.
• This happened to Jeffrey Epstein's parents after he died in prison under controversial circumstances while awaiting trial. After he was buried next to them, their crypt was remarked with a blank marker.
• After Prince Andrew was implicated in the Epstein scandal, Elizabeth II's favorite son was stripped from all his Royal Duties and his Royal Protection and the Crown's official web page quietly changed all mentions of him to the past tense.

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