Follow TV Tropes

Following

Context OvershadowedByControversy / RealLife

Go To

1[[foldercontrol]]
2%%%
3%%%
4%% IMPORTANT NOTE BEFORE EDITING: For most of the examples listed here, there is a mandatory six-month waiting period after the incident happens to add it as an example here, as any time beforehand is too soon to judge if it qualifies for this item. Incidents that are too soon to add include:
5%% Jonathan Majors and his assault convictions, which should not be mentioned until May 18, 2024
6%%%
7%%%
8
9* OvershadowedByControversy/{{Academy Awards|Ceremonies}}
10
11[[folder:Heads of State and Politicians]]
12%%
13%% As a particularly contentious subject, an extended period of 10 years after leaving office is required for this folder.
14%%
15!!Classical Times
16* The ancient Egyptian Pharaoh UsefulNotes/{{Akhenaten}} is a divisive and polarizing figure to many Egyptologists. Depending on who you ask, he was either a humanitarian visionary responsible for creating Atenism, one of the first monotheistic religions or an incompetent, selfish ruler who ignored his subjects and Egypt's closest allies. Some argue that Akhenaten was history's first dictator by noting that his actions bore many disturbing similarities to those displayed by modern dictators, such as censoring imagery dedicated to other gods, persecuting polytheists and framing Atenism around himself in a manner akin to a cult of personality. What everyone agrees on, however, is that Akhenaten's radical reforms went a long way towards causing Egypt's geopolitical influence in the Near East to decline while rousing resentment from nobles and commoners alike, who set about destroying records bearing Akhenaten's name after his death.
17* Even though he died millennia ago, the brutal legacy of the ancient Greek lawmaker and politician Draco still lives on through the English word ''"draconian''", often used to describe very strict or harsh laws. A more than appropriate descriptor for his Draconian Constitution, the first laws codified in the city-state of Athens and applied equally to everyone, which were so extreme that even minor offenses like stealing food became punishable by death. Within twenty-five years after Draco's legislation, Athens soon found itself on the verge of a civil war due to living conditions becoming so terrible for many impoverished Athenians due to the Draconian Constitution, which left the Athenian government no choice but to have the Constitution rewritten by fellow lawmaker Solon, who revised it into something more moderate.
18* Many of [[UsefulNotes/TheRomanEmpire Rome]]'s Emperors have become subject to this trope thanks to developing reputations for being decadent tyrants, totalitarian warmongers, and sadistic egomaniacs incapable of, or uninterested in, their governing responsibilities. This lot, however, stand tall among the rest for being the worst of the worst:
19** Tiberius was the first Emperor to succeed Augustus, but he did not want to do the job he inherited. He let the Senate rule in his absence only to return from his villa in Capri to try and execute those he accused of being traitors or opponents. It is said that in his villa in Capri, he held constant orgies where he trained little boys to swim under his thighs and bite him. Even in his late life, having sex with young boys was his favorite pastime.
20** Not many reliable accounts of UsefulNotes/{{Caligula}}'s reign exist. Even if the many, many stories surrounding him are made up, he would have to be pretty unpopular to generate that kind of slander in the first place. According to those records, Caligula was cruel, indulged in weird sexual indulgences that offended his people, and would murder anyone who disagreed with him. Caligula's insanity went even further than that as he proclaimed himself as a god and demanded that people worship him as such. Small wonder that his own Praetorian Guard would later murder him.
21** UsefulNotes/{{Nero}}'s very name has become synonymous with profligacy, paranoia, and decadence of an extreme nature. He distrusted anyone near him and had them executed - both those close to him and dissenting him. Many Romans believed that he started the Great Fire of Rome to build the Domus Aurea for himself; in any case, he blamed the fire on Christians with absolutely no evidence. These acts angered the citizens so much that they started to revolt against him. Unrest spread throughout the Roman Empire and turned the tables on Nero. Facing being reviled as a public enemy who was about to be executed, the Emperor took his own life.
22** Domitian is notorious for his cruelty to ensure his power-base and spearheading one of the most brutal attempts to purge both Christianity and Judaism in history. He revoked the legal rights of Christians and Jews, encouraging citizens back to traditional worship of the old Greco-Roman gods. His rule saw the razing of churches and synagogues, destruction of religious texts, and prohibition of Christians or Jews from worshiping along with large-scale purges.
23** UsefulNotes/{{Hadrian}} is the Roman Emperor associated with the longest period of peace and often labeled as one of the ''"Five Good Emperors''". Nevertheless, it is true that his reign witnessed the brutal [[UsefulNotes/JewishRevolts Bar-Kokhba Revolt]] in Judea, which partly stemmed from him reneging on a promise to rebuild the Jewish Temple and resulted in over half a million victims and the majority of Judea's Jewish population getting killed, exiled, or enslaved. Hadrian himself forbade Jews and Christians from entering Jerusalem and changed Judea's name to Syria-Palestina to erase any relationship between Jews and their homeland. Some view his actions as so brutal that they should be classified as genocide, and theorize that Hadrian became the prototypical antisemitic "Evil King" in Jewish lore and rabbinic teachings, which often mention Hadrian with the epitaph "may his bones be crushed".
24** Even before Creator/JoaquinPhoenix portrayed him in ''Film/{{Gladiator}}'', Commodus was already infamous as a psychopath unable to hold the Empire's reins. Many historians deem his reign as a significant cause of the Roman Empire's steady decline, and Cassius Dio marked Commodus' rule as to when Rome went from a "''kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust.''" These sentiments stem from Commodus' lack of interest in expansionism while characterizing his unstable tenure with hedonism, corruption, bankruptcy, despising the Senate, selling public offices to make money, and imagining himself as Hercules' reincarnation.
25** Septimius Severus' rule saw a significant number of Christian and Jewish executions in the Roman Empire occur, rising from 1,000 to 3,000. Septimius saw the Roman law in a draconian light, which tolerated no religion other than the pagan one. For him, people who followed any religions other than the Roman religion should get persecuted outright. He had no fear of anyone except for his army, who could rebel against and depose him.
26** Caracalla was not insane but spiteful and sadistic because he started his reign by killing his brother Geta in front of their mother and lying to the Senate that Geta wanted him dead. Nobody believed him at all, so he started an old-fashioned purge targeting most of his brother's supporters. According to Cassio Dio, the citizens of Alexandria, Egypt, ridiculed his actions with a public play. When Caracalla found out about it, he traveled there with an army ordered to perform the systematic slaughtering, plundering, and raping of Alexandrians.
27** Even if Elagabalus' name doesn't ring any bells, it is still worth knowing why he was as terrible as his predecessors. Elagabalus became Emperor at only 14-years old, kicking off a reign remembered only for sex scandals, religious controversy, and devaluing the Roman currency -- not what you'd expect from someone still in puberty. Elagabalus' many antics included marrying a Vestal Virgin (sworn by Roman law to celibacy for 30 years), lavishing sexual favors on male courtiers, prostituting himself in the Imperial Palace, and sacrificing young children to his namesake, Elagabal, a local sun god from the Syrian town of Emesa. His behavior alienated the Praetorian Guard, Senate, and ordinary people alike, leading to his assassination. [[Theatre/ThePiratesOfPenzance The original Modern Major-General]] would later take great pride in "[quoting] in elegiacs all the crimes of Elagabalus", among other basic and/or irrelevant achievements on his resume.
28** Maximinus Thrax was the very first ''auxilium'' (a non-Roman legionary) to become an Emperor and never to set foot in Rome. Despite this, modern historians mostly know Thrax for consolidating power by resorting to violence; assassinating political rivals or advisors, and thrusting Rome into a warring era that led to social instability. As a result, Maximinus doubled the pay of legionaries while raising taxes to the point that tax collectors had to use violence when collecting taxes, making Maximinus unpopular amongst overtaxed subjects and the Senate, leading him to undertake an ill-fated march on Rome that ended in his death. To this day, his brutal and heavy-handed administration is seen as one of the key factors that contributed to the Crisis of the Third Century.
29** Diocletian has a place in Christianity's beginnings as a persecutor of the Early Church due to masterminding the Diocletianic Persecution, the culmination of nine previous attempts to purge Christians from Roman society. While Christianity existed during the start of Diocletian's reign, the Diocletianic Persecution occurred in the Emperor's twilight years and spread across the Empire with bloody violence for eight years. Instead of destroying Christianity, however, the persecution served to strengthen the Church even more.
30
31!!Middle Ages
32* Diarmait Mac Murchada, former king of Leinster, would've become an almost obscure figure in the medieval period of Ireland's history... if it wasn't for the fact that he sought aid from [[UsefulNotes/HenryTheSecond King Henry II of England]] to recover his kingdom, which kickstarted the Anglo-Normans' successful invasion of Ireland. Centuries later, Diarmait's remembered by the Irish by the unflattering nickname Diarmaid na nGall (Irish for "The Foreigner Diarmait") as a traitor responsible for causing his people's oppression and the destruction of their culture under eight hundred years of English rule.
33
34!!The Renaissance
35* UsefulNotes/PopeAlexanderVI is more remembered for allegedly admitting to fathering several children by his mistresses, his papacy being widely regarded as one of the worst of all time, and his family, the infamous Borgias, being the poster child for nepotism and libertinism than the fact that he was a Pope at all. Most people are now familiar with him as the BigBad of ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreed2'' or his portrayal by Creator/JeremyIrons in ''Series/TheBorgias'', if they're at all familiar with him, cementing how far his legacy has fallen.
36* UsefulNotes/TheDukeOfAlba is mainly remembered for his repression of a Dutch revolt that eventually snowballed into UsefulNotes/TheEightyYearsWar. Although his tenure as governor of the Netherlands was undoubtedly iron-handed, enemy propaganda inflated his bloodthirst over the years until attributing him a borderline depopulation of the land.
37
38!!18th & 19th Century
39* Elbridge Gerry was a major figure in the early history of the United States, having signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, served in the inaugural US Congress, helped draft the Bill of Rights, been elected to Governor of Massachusetts, and ultimately becoming the fifth Vice-President. And yet today the only thing he is remembered for is being the namesake for the practice of Gerrymandering, or drawing up voting districts for partisan advantage, which is especially irksome for history buffs, as Gerry actually ''opposed'' the practice but was forced to sign off on the districting plan as Governor because there was little precedent at the time for Governors overruling a state legislature.
40* Charles Trevelyan's governance of Ireland remains tainted by his questionable handling of the UsefulNotes/IrishPotatoFamine in the 1840s, causing one million deaths and forcing the emigration of another two million people to avoid starvation. While the failure of the potato crop due to blight triggered the famine, the continued exporting of food out of Ireland and Trevelyan's apathy to the Irish's sufferings exacerbated it (as one popular Irish saying went: "God made the blight, Trevelyan made the famine"). To make matters worse, Trevelyan had a history of making racist remarks about the Irish, and in one such statement, he outright stated they deserved the famine. This led Irish nationalists and a small but vocal minority of historians to think that Trevelyan engineered the famine to exterminate the Irish people.
41
42!!20th & 21st Century
43* UsefulNotes/BorisYeltsin is most remembered internationally today for his very visible and embarrassing [[VodkaDrunkenski alcoholism]] [[https://www.history.com/news/bill-clinton-boris-yeltsin-drunk-1994-russian-state-visit problems]] during public appearances than for any of his policies as President of Russia, or even the fact that he was the first President of Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.
44* UsefulNotes/{{The Pope}}s:
45** Despite being venerated as a Saint in the Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II's name has been tainted by claims of negligence or cover-up during allegations of sex abuse by priests. While he declared it as a grave felony in Canon Law, he is still looked at with suspicion due to his association with convicted child molester Marcial Maciel. Not helping matters was his election of Theodore [=McCarrick=] as Cardinal given the allegations that he ignored warnings from Vatican and Church officials over [=McCarrick=]'s history of sexual assault.
46** Pope Benedict XVI, having a short pontificate sandwiched between John Paul II and Francis, probably wouldn't have been remembered for much in any case (at least outside of Catholic circles), but he had the bad luck to be on the throne when decades of [[PedophilePriest child sexual abuse by priests]] were exposed, which also implicated him in a massive cover-up to save the Church's reputation (though there's some evidence that John Paul was complicit as well). He's also known as the Pope Who Quit, i.e., abdicating his seat while still alive (not unprecedented but extremely rare; the previous most recent Pope to do it of his own free will was Celestine V in ''1294''), paving the way for his successor. References to him in popular culture that aren't related to the scandal or his uncanny resemblance to [[Franchise/StarWars Darth Sidious]] are few and far between. His membership in the Hitler Youth also got some attention, though it was downplayed as it was mandatory for German boys of his age, and he reportedly took pains to be as little involved as possible.
47* British Prime Minister UsefulNotes/TonyBlair's political legacy has been largely overshadowed by his highly unpopular foreign policy. Despite Blair's domestic accomplishments like reducing poverty, refunding schools and hospitals that were previously gutted by the Conservative Party, expanding LGBT rights, introducing a minimum wage and overseeing a peaceful end to UsefulNotes/TheTroubles, his reputation took a massive hit following his unpopular hand-in-glove support for the American Government during UsefulNotes/TheWarOnTerror. Blair's decision to deploy UK troops during the US-led Iraq War was especially controversial due to the war's rationale being discredited and the conflict further destabilizing the Middle East. To this day, many in both the Labour and Conservative parties vilify Blair as either a war criminal or a lapdog to internationals.
48%%Reagan was cut per cleanup thread discussions such as the following: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=15417159170A60176600&page=88. Please discuss at the cleanup thread before relisting.
49* Several [[UsefulNotes/ThePresidentsOfTheUnitedStates Presidents of the United States]]:
50** UsefulNotes/WarrenGHarding's relatively short presidency is best remembered for its heavy corruption, with many members of his inner circle being investigated for bribery and fraud. The most notorious incident, the Teapot Dome scandal, in which his Interior Secretary accepted an enormous bribe to sell government-owned oil deposits (previously reserved for the Navy) to a private oil company, is widely considered by historians to be the biggest American political scandal pre-Watergate and resulted in Harding's name becoming synonymous with political corruption for half a century. Beyond that was rampant corruption relating to Prohibition, the sale of government-owned military supplies to insiders at a huge discount, and America's first RedScare.
51** UsefulNotes/HerbertHoover's reputation was irreconcilably tainted by TheGreatDepression beginning on his watch and the perception of him being unable to properly address it, which in turn led to him ultimately losing badly in his re-election attempt in 1932. The crisis was so terrible that it wiped out any public goodwill towards Hoover after he helped saved millions after World War I. Nowadays, he is largely only remembered as the one-term president that badly mishandled the Great Depression.
52** UsefulNotes/RichardNixon's reputation as president is almost entirely defined by the Watergate Scandal. The affair was regarded as the biggest American political scandal in US history (to the point where it named [[{{Scandalgate}} a trope]]), ended in Nixon becoming the only president to resign (once Republicans in Congress made it clear that he was about to be impeached and there weren't enough votes to keep him from being thrown out of office), and resulted in him being consistently rated as one of the nation's worst presidents. Like Harding, his name became synonymous with political corruption in the ensuing decades.
53** While his tenure was considered mostly unremarkable, UsefulNotes/GeraldFord's legacy is heavily defined by his decision to pardon Nixon after his resignation. The decision was met with staunch criticism at the time and played a direct role in his re-election loss to UsefulNotes/JimmyCarter in 1976, and if Ford isn't brought up today to joke about his clumsiness, usually it's to mention the Nixon pardon. That or the fact that he's to date the only president to hold office without winning an election (he was appointed as Vice President by Nixon to replace UsefulNotes/SpiroAgnew, who had resigned in the wake of an unrelated scandal, and per the U.S. Constitution automatically became president when Nixon resigned.)
54** Though UsefulNotes/BillClinton's presidency was marked by a myriad of both accomplishments and flash-in-the-pan scandals, the most notable element of his reputation is his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The scandal surrounding it led Clinton to become only the second president ever to be impeached, and though he was acquitted and became ''more'' popular for a couple decades afterwards, it continues to be an elephant in the room in regards to his legacy. In the wake of [=#MeToo=], the presidency of UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump (who had been accused of similar, if not worse, sexual misconduct right before his election), and the increased scrutiny on his and Trump's ties to billionaire sex offender and procurer Jeffrey Epstein, this has become even more controversial.
55** UsefulNotes/GeorgeWBush's reputation as president is almost entirely defined by his poor handling of the Iraq War, largely due to the most commonly stated reasons behind it later being debunked as false and due to the political turmoil it caused in the Middle East. Even in the face of other negative events during his tenure that led to a record-breakingly-low approval rating, his mishandling of Iraq continues to be the most defining element of his political legacy. He is now retroactively seen as at best a fool whose unfortunate combination of good intentions and lack of foresight led to disaster (and according to some people he was really a puppet for some members of his administration like his even more unpopular Vice-President UsefulNotes/DickCheney), and at worst a vile war profiteer who destabilized a significant region of the world in the name of a quick buck for himself and various crooked friends.
56* John Edwards, former U.S. Senator from North Carolina and two-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, is best known for committing political suicide by having an extramarital affair with Rielle Hunter (a filmmaker hired to work for his 2008 presidential campaign) and fathering an illegitimate child with her. While adulterous politicians are nothing new, the fact that this happened while his wife Elizabeth was dying of breast cancer turned him into a pariah. She died in December 2010, only a few weeks before the end of their legally mandated year long separation period (since their two younger children were still minors) that would have allowed her to file for divorce. He was charged with improperly disclosing campaign funds to cover up the affair but the 2012 trial ended in a hung jury and declared a mistrial. They couldn't agree if the money paid to cover up the affair was for the presidential campaign or keeping it a secret from his wife. He quietly went back to his legal practice after that.
57* Enoch Powell was a respected MP and academic for some time. Then in 1968, he made the infamous Rivers of Blood speech, where he strongly criticized mass immigration to the United Kingdom (especially from the Commonwealth) and a proposed anti-discrimination bill. In this speech, he compared Great Britain letting in large numbers of immigrants to "a nation... heaping up its own funeral pyre" and likened journalists who supported the bill to pro-fascist journos of the 1930s. Ever since, the conversation about Powell has been dominated by the speech, and whether or not he should be considered racist and/or xenophobic because of it. It doesn't help that he has been held up as a shining example by certain right-wingers such as former UKIP Leader Nigel Farage, with "Enoch is Right" being a rallying cry among the far-right's anti-immigration stance.
58* The career of UN Secretary-General and Austrian president Kurt Waldheim will forever be eclipsed by the 1986 revelations that he had lied about his military record and may have participated in Nazi war crimes. While nothing was ever proven, the scandal effectively made him ''PersonaNonGrata'' on an official or informal basis in nearly all foreign countries outside the Arab world.
59* Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a French politician and the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, is infamous for his involvement in several financial and sexual scandals. The most well-known of these scandals was an incident in 2011 where a hotel maid accused him of [[AttemptedRape trying to rape her]] while he was staying at the Sofitel New York Hotel. While the charges were dismissed, there are still people who believe him to be a sexual predator.
60* British MP John Profumo will forever be known for a sex scandal known as the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profumo_affair Profumo affair]]. In the early 1960s, Profumo, at the time UsefulNotes/HaroldMacmillan's Secretary of State for War, was engaged in a sexual relationship with a 19-year-old would-be model named Christine Keeler. To add to the grievances, Keeler was simultaneously involved with a Soviet naval attaché named Yevgeny Ivanov, which meant there was a possible security risk involved. When the scandal broke in 1963, Profumo resigned from the government and Parliament. The repercussions of the scandal were a contributing factor to Macmillan's resignation later that year and to the Conservative Party being defeated by Labour in the 1964 general election.
61* Rod Blagojevich, former Governor of Illinois, is best known to the general public for being corrupt even by the standards of Illinois politics, which culminated in an attempt to sell UsefulNotes/BarackObama's soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat after Obama won the 2008 presidential election.
62* Pat Buchanan is a paleoconservative politician and commentator who worked in three presidential administrations, ran for POTUS three times, founded ''The American Conservative'' magazine, and was a commentator on MSNBC for a decade. Many people, however, know him for the allegations that he is an anti-Semite who denies the Holocaust (especially since many of these allegations have come from fellow American right-wingers like Charles Krauthammer and Creator/WilliamFBuckleyJr which causes them to have greater perceived legitimacy as more than just typical political mudslinging), as well as his decision to title a chapter in his book ''Suicide of a Superpower'' "The End of White America". Then there was Buchanan's infamous "culture war" speech relating to the Los Angeles riots at the 1992 Republican National Convention, which many saw as thinly-veiled racism, and was seen as a decisive factor in UsefulNotes/GeorgeHWBush losing re-election to UsefulNotes/BillClinton that November.
63* Most discussions in Irish politics about Irish republican Seán Russell inevitably concentrate less on Russell's tenure as commanding officer of the IRA until the Irish War of Independence ended and more on his collaboration with Nazi Germany in World War II, which has led to many arguments revolving around whether he was genuinely a Nazi sympathiser or simply using the Nazis to bankroll and arm the IRA. And as a testament to his polarising nature, Russell's statue in Fairview Park, Dublin, has gotten vandalised on a number of occasions by activists on both sides of the political spectrum.
64* Canadian MP David Stupich is mostly known for being the central figure of the Bingogate scandal, where he ran kickback schemes in which donations to charities were refunded to the Nanaimo Commonwealth Holding Society, an organization he established to raise money for the New Democratic Party. The scandal caused the resignation of the then-Premier of British Columbia Mike Harcourt, even though he had no personal involvement in it.
65* Kevin H. White served four terms as the Mayor of Boston and many historians credit him with revitalizing several of the city's key districts, but more often than not he's remembered for the corruption investigations into his administration that resulted in more than 20 city employees being indicted for various crimes, including perjury, bribery, and extortion. While White himself was never charged with anything, the scandal caused him to not seek a fifth term and he never really escaped the perception that his administration was rife with corruption.
66* Kwame Kilpatrick, regarded as a rising star in the Democratic Party in the mid-2000s, is nowadays reviled as one of the most ridiculously corrupt people in the history of U.S. politics. Elected mayor of Detroit on a promise of reform in 2002, Kilpatrick almost immediately became embroiled in scandal after scandal once in office. There was the wild party Kilpatrick reportedly held at the Manoogian Mansion (the official residence of the mayor) in which his wife allegedly assaulted an exotic dancer for giving him a lap dance; the dancer later died in an unsolved drive-by shooting. There was Kilpatrick carrying on an extramarital affair with his chief of staff using the city's official text-messaging system (and later committing perjury by denying it). There were the numerous instances of cronyism, with Kilpatrick placing unqualified acquaintances in important positions in his administration. After leaving office, Kilpatrick was sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison for fraud and racketeering, though his sentence was commuted by President Trump in January 2021.
67* French Minister of Defence Charles Hernu has had his career forever tainted by the sinking of the Greenpeace ship ''Rainbow Warrior'' off the coast of New Zealand, which killed photographer Fernando Pereira - the ship was evacuated beforehand, but Pereira climbed back aboard for a forgotten camera without the evacuators noticing. He resigned in disgrace after it became clear that the French government was responsible, and to this day the first thing that comes to mind when anyone talks about him is the sinking.
68* The Supreme Court of the United States has had plenty of controversial justices:
69** Chief Justice Roger Taney is remembered most for his decision in the ''Dred Scott v. Sanford'' case, in which he declared that blacks had no rights under the Constitution and Dred Scott was a slave. His decision in the case caused an associate justice to resign after intense criticism and bolstered the anti-slavery Republican Party, which won in the 1860 election against Taney's preferred candidate John Breckenridge. Today, the ''Dredd Scott'' decision is widely considered one of the factors that led to UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar.
70** While Hugo Black was one of the longest-serving SCOTUS justices in history and one of the most influential of the 20th century, it is hard to talk about him without bringing up the racist and anti-Catholic views he held as well as his membership in the UsefulNotes/KuKluxKlan. While he did quit the Klan in 1925 -- over ten years before he took the bench -- he still supported racism and religious intolerance to a degree, writing the majority opinion in ''Korematsu v. United States'' which upheld the internment of Japanese-Americans during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII. To his credit, however, Black [[FormerBigot made efforts to move past his prejudices]] later on.
71* UK Conservative Party MP Peter Griffiths is best known for his unexpected victory over then-Shadow Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker in the 1964 general election. However, this is less for the upset itself, and more for the accusations that his victory was largely due to racist and xenophobic sentiment in the area. Local Tories were even accused of using the slogan "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour". While Griffiths didn't coin the phrase or use it in his campaign, he refused to condemn it, and his reputation has been extremely polarizing ever since.
72* Roland Burris became the first African-American elected to statewide office in Illinois when he was elected Illinois Comptroller in 1978, and in 1990 he became the second African-American ever to be elected State Attorney General anywhere in the United States. Had he stopped there, those achievements would have been all he was remembered for. However, Burris repeatedly sought a higher office, and after several failed campaigns to become Governor of Illinois and Mayor of Chicago, he finally got appointed to the United States Senate to replace UsefulNotes/BarackObama in 2009 after Obama became President. Unfortunately for Burris, this appointment came from then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who at the time was under investigation for selling cushy political appointments for money, and thus Burris was strongly suspected of having bought his seat, a charge to which Burris lent credence when he admitted that Blagojevich had solicited him for fundraising help before his appointment. Wiretaps from Blagojevich's phone proved even more damning, with tapes revealing that Burris had offered to write a personal check. While Burris managed to narrowly avoid any criminal charges, his reputation never recovered and he ultimately decided not to run for a full term in the 2010 election.
73* Spanish politician Luis Bárcenas is known less for any accomplishments he made as a senator or as party treasurer for Partido Popular and more for using an illegal slush fund to make under-the-table payments, a crime for which he received a 33-year prison sentence and a fine of 44 million Euros.
74* Former Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány is best known for the infamous "Őszöd speech", a private speech where he told his colleagues in the Hungarian Socialist Party that they had lied to the people about the state of Hungary to win the elections, how they had done little (if anything) in the previous four years, and how they "fucked up" and needed to get themselves together to make things work again. When the speech leaked out to the general public, it sparked massive protests, and the resulting fallout was one of the main reasons the Hungarian Socialist Party lost more than 130 seats in the subsequent parliamentary elections, even though Gyurcsány had already resigned as Prime Minister by that point.
75* French general and politician Philippe Pétain is known solely for his collaboration with the Nazis after the Fall of France, with his earlier accomplishments (such as his success at the Battle of Verdun and his preventing a potential collapse of the French Army by negotiating with mutinous soldiers) being relegated to footnotes at best. More recent opinions tend to be a little more lenient on Petain's legacy, however, as by the time of France's surrender he was already 84 years old, and there is evidence to suggest that he may have had some degree of dementia by that point, as by 1949 he had completely lapsed into senility.
76* Gerry Studds, who represented Maine in the House of Representatives from 1973 until 1997, was America's first openly-gay Congressman, and a popular champion for the environment and civil rights who managed to be re-elected six times after being censured by Congress in 1983. Nowadays, however, the thing most people remember him for is the reason why he got censured - he confessed to having a consensual sexual affair with a 17-year-old Congressional page. Not even helping matters is how his husband revealed Studds (who died in 2006) didn't regret his relationship with the page and the fact that in a 2018 lawsuit, he was posthumously accused of sexual misconduct toward students at St. Paul's School while he's a teacher there in the 1960s.
77[[/folder]]
78
79[[folder:Actors, Filmmakers, and Presenters]]
80* Creator/WoodyAllen's reputation as a witty yet serious filmmaker has been affected in recent years by allegations that he molested his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, in the early 1990s when she was aged 7.[[note]] Despite Allen not being charged for any wrongdoing and a medical investigation finding no evidence of the alleged abuse, she has maintained her story to this day and wrote an open letter in 2014 calling out many celebrities, including Creator/DianeKeaton, for continuing to support Allen.[[/note]] To make things even worse, in 1997, Allen married Soon-Yi Previn, another adoptive daughter of his ex-girlfriend Creator/MiaFarrow. While he had never legally adopted Soon-Yi, Allen had known her since she was seven and had played a fatherly role to her. Many feel this places Allen's frequent casting of women much younger than himself as his characters' love interests[[note]]Before Allen decided to cast himself in his movies as age-appropriate mentors or cranky old guys around the turn of the millennium[[/note]] in [[HarsherInHindsight a quite disturbing light]]. And then his son Ronan Farrow became one of the architects of the [=#MeToo=] movement, which led to the allegations against Allen to be taken more seriously than ever before, causing several people involved in his more recent films to apologize for being involved in them, and Amazon Studios to end their distribution contract with Allen.
81* Mexican Voice Actor Creator/MemoAponte started his career in dubbing with the Latin Spanish dub of WesternAnimation/FindingNemo as a child, and had a pretty prolific career thereafter, with some of his most recognizable roles including Phineas Flynn in WesternAnimation/PhineasAndFerb, Dash Parr in WesternAnimation/TheIncredibles1 and Cody Martin in the Series/TheSuiteLifeOfZackAndCody. However, most of his career has since been overshadowed by accusations of sexual abuse by many of his former girlfriends, which caused [[RoleEndingMisdemeanor his work offers to immediately cease]], and mostly because of the content he uploads unto his [=YouTube=] channel, including appearances from underage girls[[note]]One of which admitted to being sixteen ''on camera''[[/note]] and most infamously his cosplay videos, which are often panned for involving doing overly sexual and digusting stuff while being dressed as characters whose target audience is ''[[WhatDoYouMeanItsForKids children]]'', which has also managed as of recently to cross over to the United States.
82* Silent movie comedian [[Creator/FattyArbuckle Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle]]'s legacy has been tainted by his involvement in a party/orgy where an up-and-coming actress named Virginia Rappe died, with the tabloid press [[IfItBleedsItLeads accusing him of having raped said girl to death]]. Even though there was never solid evidence to support this and his name was eventually cleared, the affair destroyed his career and public image. He was given the chance for a comeback, [[DiedDuringProduction but died the day after signing a new deal]]. Nowadays, ''if'' he is remembered at all, it is more for this public image than any of his films.
83* Creator/AsiaArgento fell victim to scandal when Jimmy Bennett accused her of sexually assaulting him when he was 17[[note]]in California, a state in which the age of sexual consent is 18[[/note]] and revealed she agreed to pay him to keep him silent. Argento had met Bennet when he was a child and developed a bond that they both described as maternal, leading to accusations of [[WifeHusbandry grooming]]. Argento had a falling out with fellow [=#MeToo=] activist Creator/RoseMcGowan and was fired from her position as judge of Italy's ''[[Series/TheXFactor X Factor]]'', appearing in the seven earlier episodes of the ongoing season before being replaced afterward.
84* Creator/AdamBaldwin has become better known since 2014 for his staunch support for [[{{Scandalgate}} Gamergate]], most notably creating its namesake hashtag and being accused of using his following to spread the harassment associated with the campaign far wider than before, and his outspoken right-wing political views, such as claiming that ""leftists" were imposing "political crap" on gamers". The ensuing controversy was likely why he has received progressively less work since, most notably Creator/WarnerBros recasting him for Hal Jordan/Green Lantern in ''VideoGame/Injustice2'' and having Creator/GeorgeNewbern take over from him as Superman in ''VideoGame/DCUniverseOnline''.
85* Actress and comedienne Creator/RoseanneBarr was well-known for being the creator and lead actor of the eponymous ''Series/{{Roseanne}}'' (which first replaced ''Series/TheCosbyShow'' as the #1 show on US TV). Since 2016, Barr has been overshadowed by her support of UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump (which was written into her portrayal of Roseanne Conner for ''Roseanne'''s revival) and for a racist Tweet insulting former White House aide Valerie Jarrett. ABC subsequently fired Barr from her own show, killed Roseanne Conner off, and renamed the series ''Series/TheConners''.
86* Alia Bhatt was a fairly well-liked Bollywood actress, at least untill she claimed to be unaware of Sushant Singh Rajput on the Talk Show "Coffee with Karan". This caused her to be one of the actresses hit the hardest by the Bollywood Nepotism controversy that started after the latter committed suicide in 2020.
87* Creator/JessicaBiel had her potential CareerResurrection after her highly popular AdamWesting role in ''WesternAnimation/BoJackHorseman'' come to an abrupt end when she lobbied against a bill to limit exemptions from vaccines in California. With the anti-vax movement in many people's crosshairs after they caused a massive measles outbreak, many vaccine activists condemned the move, and for her own part, Biel insisted she wasn't against vaccines but didn't help herself much with her long-winded InsaneTrollLogic about why she was against the bill.
88* Creator/RobertBlake's long, distinguished acting career (including his starring role in ''Series/{{Baretta}}'') has been eclipsed in the public consciousness by his arrest on charges of murdering his second wife, Bonnie Lee Bakley. In an uncanny echo of the UsefulNotes/OJSimpson case, he was acquitted of murder in criminal court but found liable in civil court for her wrongful death.
89* The Booth family was an English American theatrical family in the 19th century, with its members including Junius Brutus Booth, the patriarch of the family; Edwin Thomas Booth, one of the foremost American Shakespearean actors of his day known for his role as Hamlet; and UsefulNotes/JohnWilkesBooth, a brother of Edwin's who starred in less serious fare and achieved infamy for being the assassin of UsefulNotes/AbrahamLincoln. After Lincoln's assassination, the infamy associated with the Booth name forced Edwin to take a break from the stage for many months. He also had been feuding with John Wilkes before the assassination (Edwin was a Unionist while John Wilkes supported the Confederacy) and disowned him afterward, refusing to have his brother's name spoken in his house. He even wrote a public letter apologizing for his brother's actions. Junius Brutus Booth, for his part, wrote a series of angry drunken letters to UsefulNotes/AndrewJackson, one of which demanded the release of two pirates, lest he cut the President's throat while asleep. He recanted the letter, and given that he and Jackson were good friends, the "threat" was likely a clumsy joke attempt.
90* Rhea Chakraborty was another actress who found herself at the center of the Sushant Singh Rajput controversy, due to being in a relationship with him at the time of his death. The hate against her was so intense that she was labelled as a murderer (she had been accused of driving him to suicide) and she had to be placed under house arrest for her own safety.
91* Creator/LouisCK's longtime career as a comedian and actor took quite a toll in November 2017, when he got caught in the [=#MeToo=] movement after numerous women accused him of sexual misconduct, which he eventually admitted to. He tried to make a comeback afterward, but in December 2018, leaked audio from a Long Island stand-up set revealed him apparently making jokes at the expense of transgender people and the victims and survivors of the 2018 Parkland shooting. As a result, this killed off whatever respect the public (specifically his former fans) had left for him. He self-released his 2020 special ''Sincerely Louis C.K.'' to generally favorable reviews, but its eventual win for Best Comedy Album at the 2022 [[MediaNotes/GrammyAward Grammy Awards]] led to strong controversy[[note]]it occurring not long after Creator/WillSmith's altercation with Creator/ChrisRock at the UsefulNotes/{{Academy Award}}s and its ensuing fallout didn't help matters either[[/note]], seemingly indicating that his reputation has yet to fully recover.
92* Creator/KirkCameron became famous for his role as [[BreakoutCharacter Mike Seaver]] on the popular DomCom ''Series/GrowingPains''. But during his time on the show, he became a [[TheFundamentalist particularly hardline]] born-again Christian and argued with the producers and writers over the show's scripts, going so far as to accuse them of being "pornographers". This caused him to be far better known for his contentious religious views than for his acting. Not helping matters is how public he is about his views, as well as the fact that since ''Growing Pains'' ended, Cameron has mostly been involved with conservative Christian-themed films-- one of which, ''Film/SavingChristmas'', earned its own entry in the [[OvershadowedByControversy/LiveActionFilms Live-Action Films section]] for this trope.
93* Creator/NaomiCampbell has earned significant notoriety for outbursts of anger that rival Bob Knight's infamous episodes. Campbell has been convicted of assault on four occasions, and former rival Creator/TyraBanks has admitted to being terrified of her even after the two buried the hatchet.
94* Creator/NickCannon's resume was temporarily eclipsed in the popular consciousness by a podcast he made with Professor Griff where he endorsed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories (saying Jews were in control of world finance and had stolen the identity of black people as "true Hebrews"), called white people inherently evil savages who were "closer to animals", and promoted the Afrocentric and pseudoscientific [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanin_theory melanin theory]]. [=ViacomCBS=] swiftly fired him from his own TV series, ''Wild 'N Out''. That being said, Cannon became [[MyGodWhatHaveIDone ashamed of what he said since then]], and has since taken steps to make amends, which allowed him to keep his job on ''Series/TheMaskedSinger'' and return to hosting ''Wild 'N Out''.
95* Creator/GinaCarano has become extremely polarizing for her support of anti-mask and anti-vax movements during the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic, conspiracy theories regarding the 2020 US presidential election and virulent homophobia. However, her already divisive reputation would be fractured even further after sharing an Instagram post comparing the perceived treatment of American conservatives [[GodwinsLaw to the persecution of Jewish people in Nazi Germany]], which resulted in her [[RoleEndingMisdemeanor losing her role]] in ''Series/TheMandalorian''.
96* Creator/ChevyChase is nowadays known less for his comedy chops and more for his volatile attitude and his reputation for burning bridges, enough that nowadays the only work he gets is in direct-to-video movies.
97* Creator/JeremyClarkson, while famous for his former role as a presenter of ''Series/TopGear'', is infamous for his unruly behavior and numerous accusations of bigotry both on and off-stage. His behavior resulted in him being expelled[[note]]he wasn't ''technically'' fired, but the BBC wouldn't renew his contract[[/note]] from the show in 2015 through an angry outburst where he physically assaulted a producer for serving him cold food.[[note]]Said food was made during the late night, and at the time, only one cook was working at the restaurant where it was made. Some have justified Clarkson's outburst as he had just come back from shooting an extremely unpleasant challenge for the show that involved him accidentally driving into freezing-cold water and having to [[BringMyBrownPants piss himself]] to stay warm.[[/note]] Even his co-host Creator/JamesMay admits that while he likes working with Clarkson, he is "a bit of a knob".
98* Whenever Creator/IronEyesCody is brought up, the first thing that comes to most peoples' minds is the fact that he was a man of Italian and Sicilian heritage who falsely claimed to be a Native American.
99* Nowadays, any discussion of Creator/StephenCollins will inevitably turn to him being recorded on tape admitting to having molested children.
100* The long, successful, historically significant, and inspirational career of Creator/BillCosby has forever been overshadowed by the fact that he was eventually accused of sexual assault by many women and would later be convicted of three counts of aggravated indecent assault. NBC and Netflix dropped projects they had with Cosby like hot potatoes, and he was all but erased from popular culture à la Creator/JimmySavile. One of the things that have been cited in terms of the public backlash against Cosby is his long-standing HolierThanThou image as a straight edge comic and social critic.[[note]]Which occasionally led to some more minor controversies, such as the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_Cake_speech "Pound Cake speech"]] where Cosby [[StopBeingStereotypical discouraged African-Americans from engaging in behavior that he felt was giving black people a bad name]].[[/note]] As such, Cosby set himself up for a greater fall from grace than more "edgy" and "eccentric" figures accused of sexual misconduct such as Woody Allen and Creator/RomanPolanski. Further controversy erupted in 2021 when Cosby was released from prison on a technicality after he was originally convicted for his assault allegations.
101* Creator/JoanCrawford's long career in Hollywood, which spanned several decades and included several award-winning movies (including ''Film/WhatEverHappenedToBabyJane'') has been largely overshadowed by the accusations laid out in ''Literature/MommieDearest'' that she was a mad alcoholic who abused her oldest adopted daughter Christina. That the book was released after Joan's death, leaving her unable to give her side of the story, didn't help, nor did the fact that the book was adapted into a movie that became a CultClassic with a reputation for being SoBadItsGood in 1981.
102* Comedian Creator/ChrisDElia had his reputation tarnished in the summer of 2020 by accusations of sexual misconduct and grooming of underage girls, which led to him getting dropped by his agent and caused all of his scenes in Creator/ZackSnyder's ''Film/ArmyOfTheDead'' [[TheOtherMarty to be reshot]] with Creator/TigNotaro.
103* Creator/JimDavidson's career has been tarnished by numerous controversies, from accusations of bigotry (both onstage and off), his turbulent love life, accusations of DomesticAbuse, drug addiction, bankruptcy, and being arrested as part of Operation Yewtree (though he was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing).
104* Creator/JohnnyDepp has been best known in the second half of the 2010s less for his acting and more for his erratic behavior, excessive drinking, and messy divorce from Creator/AmberHeard. The latter spun off into a defamation suit over Heard implying Depp abused her in an article for ''The Sun'', costing Depp several roles in Hollywood; the ensuing legal battle (and additional allegations that Heard abused Depp) created a massive public stir, and Depp became more of a figurehead for issues related to domestic abuse than a noteworthy actor. %%Do not add the outcome of the trial or other developments until six months afterward.
105* Comedian Creator/AndyDick is far more known for his substance abuse and being indirectly responsible for Creator/PhilHartman's murder[[note]]He got Hartman's wife Brynn re-addicted to cocaine after she had previously managed to kick the habit, resulting in her murdering Phil while high before later taking her own life. Andy proved to be entirely unrepetant about it, making jokes about their deaths to the point where he got into physical altercations with Hartman's friend Creator/JonLovitz over it[[/note]], and frequent sexual harassment, which led to him getting fired from two separate projects in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal.
106* Three male cast members of the first season of the revived series of ''Series/DoctorWho'' have been hit by scandals that dog their work on the show and beyond:
107** Bruno Langley (Adam Mitchell) was accused of sexual harassment in 2017, which led to him being dropped from ''Series/CoronationStreet''.
108** Creator/NoelClarke was accused by ''twenty'' women of sexual harassment, inappropriate behavior and bullying which tarnished his reputation as a leading talent in the British film and television industry.
109** Following Clarke's scandal, Creator/JohnBarrowman's habit of exposing his penis to cast members onset (which was already public knowledge, but previously treated as a joke) was thrown under much greater scrutiny, leading to Barrowman being dropped from the interactive theatre event ''Doctor Who: Time Fracture'', and AudioPlay/BigFinishDoctorWho releases featuring him being postponed.
110* Reality show personality Josh Duggar of ''Series/NineteenKidsAndCounting'' had his reputation tainted by the revelation that he molested four of his sisters as well as their babysitter. Consequently, TLC fired Duggar and re-tooled ''19 Kids'' as ''Counting On.'' And then, in 2021, ''Counting On'' was cancelled in the wake of Josh Duggar's arrest for possession of child pornography; he would be convicted in December of that year. It is safe to say that TLC has severed all ties with the Duggar family after that.
111* While Creator/JaneFonda has had a respectable film career, many people still remember her for her photo-op in North Vietnam in protest of the war, as well as her press conference at the Hanoi Hilton, in which she called American [=POWs=] "opportunistic liars" when they described the [[ColdBloodedTorture torture]] they were put through in the Vietnamese prison camps. Not helping matters was the feud she had with Music/JoanBaez over Baez's criticisms of communist Vietnam's human rights abuses. To this day, many supporters of the U.S. military consider her a traitor.
112%%* British actor Laurence Fox seems to be on a one-man crusade to make sure that his acting career is eclipsed by his controversial actions and statements. From calling a ''Question Time'' audience member racist in response to calling him a "privileged white man" to complaining about a Sikh soldier in ''Film/NineteenSeventeen'', to supporting All Lives Matter in response to the Black Lives Matter movement[[note]]All Lives Matter is a white supremacist dog-whistle strawman of Black Lives Matter that suggests [[InsaneTrollLogic that the absence of the word "too" at the end]] [[FeelingOppressedByTheirExistence implies the word "only" at the beginning]][[/note]], to boycotting Sainsbury's over their support of the movement, to calling people who disagreed with him paedophiles (which resulted in two of them taking legal action) to being anti-mask and disobeying social distancing rules during the COVID-19 pandemic (even taking part in anti-lockdown protests) and unsuccessfully running for Mayor of London with a new party dubbed "UKIP for culture".
113* Creator/ScottFreeman had his career overshadowed when he was arrested and convicted of eight counts of possession of child pornography, resulting in Creator/{{Funimation}} severing all ties with him.
114* Creator/MelGibson had by the late 2000s his film career taking a backseat to his chaotic personal life, most infamously the incident where he went on an anti-Semitic rant while being arrested for drunk driving. [[https://web.archive.org/web/20151125061654/http://moviebob.blogspot.com/2015/05/whos-real-speed-bump-on-fury-road.html As Moviebob put it]], this made ''Film/LethalWeapon'' and ''Film/MadMax'' not go along in the 80s nostalgia wave, and the latter's successful revival in ''Film/MadMaxFuryRoad'' went out of its way in the promotion to show Gibson wasn't involved.
115* Voice actor Elliot Gindi, previously best known for his role as the English voice of Tighnari from ''VideoGame/GenshinImpact'', has had his reputation damaged following allegations of him grooming underage girls (mostly teenagers), among other things (such as mocking Chloe Eves, the VA of Rukkhadevata and Haypasia, for playing [=NPC=]s, as well as being a general piece of work to deal with). This resulted in various voice actors, both in and out of the Genshin community, denouncing and removing any mention of him. Creator/{{miHoYo}} themselves eventually cut ties with Gindi and [[TheOtherMarty recast his character]] with Creator/ZacharyGordon. Any mention of his short-lived voice acting career is eschewed in favor of discussions about his predatory behavior, and how he used his fame to abuse unsuspecting fans for his own gain.
116* Creator/KathyGriffin, no stranger to controversy already, got herself in even bigger trouble in May 2017, when a picture of her holding up a "bloody" mask of President Creator/DonaldTrump's head surfaced on Twitter. Griffin claimed in a caption below the picture that it was a reference to Trump's putdown of one of his detractors, Megyn Kelly, where he said that "blood was coming out of her eyes, out of her 'wherever'," which was widely derided as sexist, but the general public, unaware of the context, took it as a call for Trump to be assassinated. Griffin lost her co-hosting duties on CNN's annual New Year's special as a result. The right-wing media's continued attempts to portray her as symbolic of everything wrong with Hollywood (which is located in a blue city) has helped contribute to her losing more jobs; in particular Creator/DebraMessing, a very staunch Trump critic herself, vowed never to speak to her again, let alone work with her, [[https://instinctmagazine.com/kathy-griffin-reveals-she-debra-messing-made-up-after-her-2017-trump-incident/ although they have since reconciled.]]
117* Bill Grundy is almost exclusively known for a notorious 1976 interview with the Music/SexPistols, where he contemptuously encouraged a barrage of profanity from the Pistols, not-so-subtly hit on [[Music/SiouxsieAndTheBanshees Siouxsie Sioux]] and was allegedly drunk throughout the whole thing. While the interview significantly raised the Pistols' profile, it resulted in Grundy's show being canceled and effectively destroyed his career.
118* Voice actor Creator/IllichGuardiola is best remembered for being accused of abusing and having a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old female student of his in 2014. Even though the charges were dropped, this scandal effectively destroyed his voice-acting career.
119* Creator/MikeHaimoto - a voice actor for anime dubs at Creator/{{SentaiFilmworks}}, Creator/{{Funimation}}, and Creator/{{Netflix}} - saw his relatively short-lived voice acting career effectively nuked when fellow voice actress Creator/AverySmithhart released various forms of evidence of him committing DomesticAbuse towards her.
120* English television personality Stuart Hall, best known for presenting ''It's a Knockout'', had his reputation tarnished forever in 2014 when he was convicted of child sexual abuse as part of Operation Yewtree.
121* Creator/ArmieHammer's acting career has been eclipsed in the popular consciousness by allegations in 2021 that he engaged in abuse, sexual misconduct, and even cannibalistic fantasies.
122* While Creator/ButchHartman's brand of [[SadistShow humor]] and style of [[RapidFireComedy writing]] have been divisive for a long time, Hartman himself was generally respected and he still had a dedicated fanbase for a long time. However, beginning in 2016, Hartman became involved in numerous controversies that tainted his once-respected legacy:
123** He began alienating some fans via his [=YouTube=] channel due to his overuse of clickbait, grandiose attitude, his very conservative Christian views, TotallyRadical meme pandering, and apparent [[CantTakeCriticism inability to take criticism]].
124** In June 2018, Hartman launched a Kickstarter titled "OAXIS Entertainment", which he initially stated was to start his own family-based entertainment service. Many fans doubted this would be successful, but few thought it was worth making a big deal out of. Then in July of that year, a leaked video seemed to show that he was actually selling OAXIS Entertainment as a network to convert children into Christianity. Once this was made public, Hartman was the subject of severe backlash and was painted as a liar and manipulator in the eyes of many longtime fans, with even Christians joining in the backlash. The possible nadir of his staunch Christian beliefs was an event he attended, hosted by his wife, [[https://twitter.com/pieguyrulz/status/1271206664843284480 promoting the ideas]] that Christian prayer can cure diseases, even including autism as one of those diseases. His close friendship with controversial televangelist Andrew Wommack didn't help matters, either.
125** Around the same time, numerous other revelations about Hartman started coming to light, such as a poor taste "joke" he made on his podcast stating that Creator/MaryKayBergman died by suicide because of Creator/TaraStrong,[[note]]this was especially tasteless, considering the two women were close friends before the former's suicide[[/note]] several comments that mocked a fan with LetsSeeYouDoBetter, alleged transphobia, and liking videos promoting pro-alt-right themes. All these factors combined with his other controversies quickly turned Hartman from being one of the most beloved animators in the industry to one of the most hated. While he released a letter on Twitter stating that he did not intend to make OAXIS Entertainment to be religious propaganda and apologized to [=DuelingDuelistDrew=] for mocking him on Stream, he already lost the respect of many. Most notably, Butch Hartman had begun [[PromotedFanboy working with]] Kuro the Artist, the creator of ''Webcomic/FiveYearsLater'' (a crossover comic featuring one of Butch's shows, ''WesternAnimation/DannyPhantom''), but his controversies on top of not paying him [[BrokenPedestal devastated]] Kuro and led to him excising a cameo appearance from Butch from the motion comic adaptation of ''5 Years Later''.
126** [[https://www.insider.com/butch-hartman-accused-plagiarizing-commission-art-mikasa-drawing-trace-ackerman-2021-2 Butch is also dogged by plagiarism claims]]. This raised particular ire among career artists, as he ripped off a much smaller-profile Japanese fan artist to resell the work as a commission, a double-whammy of bad form.
127* Creator/AmberHeard's career was overshadowed in the late 2010s and early 2020s when she first accused ex-husband Johnny Depp of domestic abuse, then was accused by Depp of physically abusing him, with recorded conversations of her physically threatening him leaked to the tabloids. This led to a massive controversy about who was to blame in this dispute, and any discussion of Heard's acting will inevitably attract debates about her alleged abuse. Depp later sued Heard for defamation and took her to court in Virginia, United States, where the jury found Heard liable for defamation and evidence of her abusing Depp.
128* Creator/CharltonHeston got hit by this when he became President of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in TheNineties, turning one of the most beloved actors in Hollywood to one of the most divisive political figures, especially after the UsefulNotes/{{Columbine}} massacre brought [[UsefulNotes/AmericanGunPolitics the issue of gun control]] back into the public consciousness. For a time, it was unsurprising for the NRA to be mentioned just as much as his acting career any time Heston was brought up, and even after he died in 2008, his anti-gun control activism remains a particularly polarizing issue in regards to his legacy.
129* Actress and comedienne Victoria Jackson is now known less for her work as a performer and more for her ultraconservative Christian views, spreading conspiracy theories about politicians (most notably UsefulNotes/BarackObama), and for making statements widely regarded as faithist and homophobic.
130* Creator/JayJohnston, once a respected character actor and comedian best known for his roles on ''Series/MrShow'' and ''Series/TheSarahSilvermanProgram'' and guest spots on other shows like ''Series/ArrestedDevelopment'', is now less known for his acting and more for his involvement in the 2021 Capitol riots instigated by supporters of Donald Trump, which also resulted in him being fired from his voice role as Jimmy Pesto on ''WesternAnimation/BobsBurgers''.
131* Creator/JeffreyJones has seen his reputation permanently tarnished by his conviction for soliciting a minor after paying a 14-year-old boy to pose for nude photographs, especially since he was required to register as a sex offender. Not helping matters is the fact that after said conviction, he was twice arrested for failing to update his sex offender status. Ever since it happened, it's been very hard to talk about him without bringing up his legal troubles.
132* Creator/SalmanKhan is one of Bollywood's most successful actors with a career that spans over thirty years. However, he's as well-known for the numerous controversies of his personal life as much as he is for his filmography. His controversies include a hit-and-run case that killed one person and injured three others in September 2002, accusations of harassing Creator/AishwaryaRai after their break-up in 2002, and an infamous poaching incident in 1998 when he poached a blackbuck antelope in the forests near Jodhpur while filming ''Hum Saath-Saath Hain''. While he still remains a popular actor in Bollywood with plenty of fans, he is still a rather polarizing figure in the entire industry, no thanks to these controversies.
133* Any discussion of Creator/KlausKinski will inevitably turn to his [[ThePrimaDonna prima-donna behavior]], his [[AxCrazy insanity]] and [[TheSociopath sociopathy]], or his daughters' claims that he [[ParentalIncest molested]] them.
134* While Creator/JohnKricfalusi's achievements in the field of animation were undoubtedly impressive, his reputation in the popular consciousness was tarnished for a long time by his ''extremely'' opinionated nature, his caustic personality, his reputation for burning bridges and being difficult to work with, and claims that he hadn't been entirely honest. The TroubledProduction of ''WesternAnimation/CansWithoutLabels'' only exacerbated his reputational problems. However, both his career achievements and previous controversies were completely eclipsed by allegations of ephebophilia and sexual misconduct that surfaced in March 2018. After the allegations broke, most of Kricfalusi's remaining defenders abandoned him, many people started saying [[MyRealDaddy Bob Camp deserved more credit for his successful projects]], and any hope he had for a CareerResurrection was gone forever.
135* While Creator/StanleyKubrick is still widely praised among cinephiles and film historians as one of the greatest and most innovative directors in the history of cinema, he's also just as well-known for his extreme perfectionism and manipulative ControlFreak tendencies that escalated to the point of being emotionally abusive towards some of his actors and showing no remorse for his actions to the day he died. His treatment of Creator/ShelleyDuvall on the set of ''Film/TheShining'' is a particular subject of attention for the fact that he allegedly traumatized her to the point of giving her the lasting mental instability that led her to an early retirement and [[ReclusiveArtist reclusion from Hollywood]] (an allegation that, for what it's worth, [[https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/searching-for-shelley-duvall-the-reclusive-icon-on-fleeing-hollywood-and-the-scars-of-making-the-shining Duvall herself largely dispelled]]).
136* Creator/JohnLandis is the director of several influential comedy movies, such as ''Film/AnimalHouse'', ''Film/TheBluesBrothers'' and ''Film/TradingPlaces'', but his reputation has been tarnished by the helicopter accident on the set of a segment of ''Film/TwilightZoneTheMovie'' that resulted in the deaths of Creator/VicMorrow and two Vietnamese children. He actually directed many other famous movies after the incident, such as ''Film/SpiesLikeUs'', ''Film/ThreeAmigos'', ''Film/ComingToAmerica'', and ''Film/BeverlyHillsCopIII'', but after his career started to decline, the helicopter crash came to overshadow his career.
137* John Landis's son Creator/MaxLandis first came to fame for writing ''Film/{{Chronicle}}'' and for his short films ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PlwDbSYicM The Death and Return of Superman]]'' and ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbq86V6x5LM Wrestling Isn't Wrestling]]''. Since then, he has been dogged by various accusations of misogyny and sexual abuse, with his highest-profile work after the aforementioned being the highly-divisive ''Film/{{Bright}}''.
138* Ex-porn star Traci Lords was once one of the most popular adult film stars in the mid-1980s. However, her reputation was soon eclipsed when it was discovered that she was actually underage and had used forged documents, a revelation that came just three weeks after her 18th birthday. The revelation ended her career in porn and got all but one of her films banned. While Lords has since become a mainstream actress, any discussion of her will inevitably mention her being an underage porn actress.
139* ''Series/FullHouse'' co-star and former Hallmark Channel regular Creator/LoriLoughlin has had her reputation tainted by being one of the many people accused of using their wealth and fame to bribe prestigious colleges to accept their children despite their low SAT scores, in one of the biggest college admission scandals in American history. Hallmark subsequently terminated their contract with her, plus Loughlin and her husband/collaborator Mossimo Gianulli might face jail time. This is especially shocking considering Loughlin was previously identified with playing the sweet, lovable Aunt Becky. Loughlin's daughter Olivia Jade Gianulli also found herself thrust into being the public face of all the recipients of the scam, due to her highly popular beauty tip vlogs, in which she had earlier stated that she didn't even take her classes seriously at all. She and her sister quickly dropped out of the University of Southern California without even waiting for a decision on whether they could stay, and she is now estranged from her parents in the wake of the permanent damage done to her reputation.
140* It is difficult to talk about Creator/RobLowe without bringing up an infamous 1988 sex tape that showed him having sex with a 16-year-old girl he had met in an Atlanta nightclub the night before that year's Democratic National Convention. While he was never charged with any crime (since the age of consent in Georgia was 14 at the time), the resulting scandal seriously damaged his reputation and career going into the 1990s and to this day remains one of the most well-known things about him.
141* Actress Creator/AllisonMack has seen her career eclipsed by her involvement in NXIVM, a multi-level marketing company that was later discovered to be a front for a sex-trafficking cult.
142* Japanese actor Mitsuyasu Maeno is best known for his far-right and ultranationalistic politics, and for killing himself in a failed suicide attack on political power broker and Yakuza boss Yoshio Kodama. This attack was motivated by Maeno's belief that Yoshio's involvement in the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_bribery_scandals Lockheed bribery scandals]] brought shame to Japan.
143* Model and actress Creator/JennyMcCarthy is primarily known today for her staunch support of the anti-vaccination movement, being credited with using her fame to bring the fringe ideology to mainstream prominence. She has also become infamous for using quack treatments to "cure" her autistic son, even though the idea of a "cure for autism" is considered impossible and unethical towards autistic people, on the same level as the idea of [[CureYourGays curing homosexuality]], and the methods that she claimed to have used have been scientifically shown to either [[AllNaturalSnakeOil do nothing]] or [[WorstAid can result in death]].
144* The aforementioned Creator/RoseMcGowan also falls under this for her controversial statement on trans women and public feuds. On the podcast ''What's the Tee?'', she questioned whether trans women count as real women, which resulted in a subsequent public altercation when a trans woman questioned her at a Barnes & Noble publicity event. Many trans-positive feminists have since disavowed her, though she did eventually apologize. Lately, she's been known for public feuds with other Hollywood figures, including Creator/MerylStreep, Creator/OprahWinfrey, and former ''Charmed'' co-star Creator/AlyssaMilano (the woman most credited with sparking the [=#MeToo=] movement) for being insufficiently feminist. She even turned against journalist Ronan Farrow (a vocal critic against enabling celebrity sexual abusers, given the controversy surrounding his own father, Woody Allen) who helped break her story about Weinstein's rape simply because he called her personal memoir "dark".
145* [[UsefulNotes/TheGoldenAgeOfHollywood Golden Age]] actress Creator/HattieMcDaniel, the first African-American to win an Academy Award, was dogged for much of her life by accusations of [[StopBeingStereotypical selfishly perpetuating harmful stereotypes to advance her own career]], as she usually played submissive servant characters such as {{Mammy}} in ''Film/GoneWithTheWind'', the role that landed her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. [=McDaniel=] for her part saw no shame in it, famously [[DeadpanSnarker quipping]] that if she wasn't ''playing'' a maid for $700 an hour she would probably be ''working as'' a maid for $7 an hour.
146* Creator/VicMignogna's long voice acting career got eclipsed in 2019 when numerous allegations of him sexually harassing con-goers and voice actresses came to light. This led to Creator/RoosterTeeth firing him, Creator/{{Funimation}} blacklisting him, and his numerous appearances at anime conventions getting canceled. Mignogna would later sue Funimation and several of his accusers for defamation, though the cases were dismissed.
147* During the early 2020s, Creator/EzraMiller of ''Film/ThePerksOfBeingAWallflower'' / ''Film/FantasticBeasts'' / ''Film/JusticeLeague2017'' fame became less known for any of their acting roles than for their numerous legal issues including multiple assault and harassment charges, a felony burglary charge, and accusations of grooming environmental activist Tokata Iron Eyes. Eventually, following overwhelming backlash against Creator/DCComics for choosing to proceed with the release of ''Film/TheFlash2023'' in light of the controversies after being in DevelopmentHell for nearly a decade, a representative of Miller issued a statement confirming that they would be seeking treatment for "complex mental health issues," and DC responded claiming that as a result, Miller would be doing limited press for ''The Flash'' and the only promotion they would do was photo ops with fans at the premiere in Hollywood. However, the controversies ended up thoroughly overshadowing both Miller's career and the release of ''The Flash'' so much that it became DC's biggest BoxOfficeBomb to date, with Creator/WarnerBros projected to lose up to ''$200 million'' following its theatrical release.
148* Even among people [[DontShootTheMessage otherwise sympathetic to his politics]], Creator/MichaelMoore has long been criticized for seemingly not being entirely honest in his documentaries (with ''Film/Fahrenheit911'' in particular garnering [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_9/11_controversies many controversies]] over its accuracy and ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans Planet of the Humans]]'', which he produced, getting [[https://news.sky.com/story/planet-of-the-humans-michael-moore-green-energy-documentary-branded-dangerous-by-climate-scientists-11980420 criticized]] as being outdated and misleading).
149* British actor and comedian Arthur Mullard's reputation was soured after his death in 1995 when it was revealed that not only was he physically abusive to his wife (who was later DrivenToSuicide following poor physical and mental health), [[ParentalIncest but that he sexually abused his own daughter]].
150* Creator/JohnNathanTurner was ''Series/DoctorWho''[='=]s longest-serving producer in TheEighties and was known for his showmanship, colourful fashion sense, campy nature, open relationship with the fandom and sometimes questionable creative decisions. Years after his death, the book ''The Life and Scandalous Times of John Nathan-Turner'' contained not only accusations of unprofessional behaviour towards colleagues, but also contained revelations that he and his partner, production manager Gary Downie, preyed on young male fans of the show.
151* Creator/GwynethPaltrow has become more infamous over the years for Goop, her line of female health care products, that have been decried as pseudoscience and quackery by legitimate science professionals, including "magic healing stickers", "leech facials", "coffee enemas", crystals, and jade eggs that are meant to be inserted into vaginas. All these things have led to her becoming a late-night talk show punchline, [[NoSuchThingAsBadPublicity not that Paltrow minds the bad publicity]].
152* Bart de Pauw was a rather notable Flemish actor and [=TV=] producer, who (among other things) is known for writing the script of ''Film/TheLoft'', as well as for (co-)creating series like ''Buiten De Zone'', ''Schalkse Ruiters'', ''Het Geslacht De Pauw'', ''Willy's en Marjetten'', ''Quiz Me Quick'' and for his contributions to ''Series/TheMole''. Nowadays, however, he's best known for the court case named after him, in which he's accused of sexually harassing (and stalking) at least a dozen of his female colleagues / employees. The case, which started in 2018, meant the (provisional) end of de Pauw's media career (and nearly led to the bankruptcy of his production company, Koeken Troef!). It has also cast a shadow over several of the series he produced, as both Maaike Cafmeyer (who played de Pauw's wife on ''Het Geslacht De Pauw'') and Liesa Naert (the only main female castmember of ''Willy's en Marjetten'') were amongst the victims spearheading the case against him in court.
153* Any discussion of Creator/RomanPolanski has been eclipsed by his conviction for statutory rape of an underage girl, and his subsequent flight to France after the judge gave indications that he intended to cancel the plea bargain.[[note]]He had accepted a sentence of 90 days in psychiatric evaluation in Chino State Prison, and was released after 42 days at the recommendation of the probation officer, serving his part of the plea bargain agreed upon by all parties[[/note]] Polański's arrest in 2009 is also an example of a controversy resurfacing after staying dormant (much like Woody Allen's). He had many several films after ''Film/{{Chinatown}}'' and he won the Oscar for Best Director for ''Film/ThePianist''[[note]]A decision which was not nearly as controversial in the public eye at the time as HUAC stoolie Creator/EliaKazan getting a lifetime achievement award a few years before, where half the auditorium refused to stand and clap[[/note]] and more importantly he had traveled back-and-forth between France, Poland and Switzerland for several years without any arrest or fear of prosecution. In 2017, Polański's name made headlines again when, in the wake of [=#MeToo=], at least four more accusers came forward, alleging that they were also molested by Polański while underage. To make matters worse, he began claiming that his 2019 film ''Film/AnOfficerAndASpy'' (about [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair the Dreyfus Affair]]) was an allegory for him being the victim of a "witch hunt" (as in the #[=MeToo=] movement).
154* Matt Prokop used to be well known for his roles in ''Film/HighSchoolMusical3SeniorYear'' and ''Film/GeekCharming'' but in 2014, news came out that Prokop had been verbally and physically abusive towards his girlfriend, Creator/SarahHyland, resulting her leaving him and filing a temporary [[note]]later becoming permanent following the judge's ruling[[/note]] restraining order against him, and not to mention Prokop kept harassing Hyland and sending her threats even after their break-up. Nowadays, he's more well known as a domestic abuser, with his career completely tarnished and being all but retired, as he hasn't appeared on film and TV ever since.
155* Actor Creator/RandyQuaid is better known for the fact that he is an eccentric ConspiracyTheorist who attempted to flee to Canada with his wife because he was convinced that assassins were out to kill him.
156* Actor/comedian Steve Rannazzisi of ''Series/TheLeague'' fame has had his reputation tarnished by the revelation that he lied about having escaped from the South Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11, a story that he had told several times as the moment that led him to pursue stand-up comedy. Even worse, many people were willing to hire Rannazzisi for projects in part because of his story. This led to a huge backlash, with Creator/PeteDavidson, who lost his own father on 9/11, calling out Rannazzisi (though the two later reconciled). Although he still acts and performs stand-up, Rannazzisi has kept a low profile since then.
157* Creator/BrettRatner's career and reputation have been tarnished by allegations of sexual misconduct from at least six women. In response to the allegations, Warner Bros. cut ties with him and his production company [=RatPac=] Entertainment, resulting in the company folding.
158* While his career recovered somewhat, it's still hard to talk about Creator/PaulReubens without bringing up his arrest for masturbating in a porno theater, as well as his 2002 arrest for possession of child pornography (though said "child pornography" turned out to be [[PoorMansPorn teen bodybuilding magazines]] and the aforementioned Rob Lowe's sex tape).
159* Today, Creator/MichaelRichards is best known for two things: playing Kramer on ''Series/{{Seinfeld}}'', and a 2006 performance at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood where he responded to being heckled by a group of black audience members by going on a racist rant. He attempted to apologize for the incident multiple times, but his outburst still haunts him.
160* Creator/LeniRiefenstahl (of ''Olympia'' and ''Film/TriumphOfTheWill'' fame) is highly credited in cinematography for her development of numerous filming techniques used to this day and her visual effects, most of which have become commonplace in filmmaking today. However, it's difficult not to mention that most of her work was Nazi propaganda. Her association with the Nazis (she was found to be a sympathizer instead of a member after World War II) resulted in her directing career ending.
161* Creator/PeterRobbins was the first person to voice Charlie Brown from the long-running comic strip ''ComicStrip/{{Peanuts}}'' and voiced the character from the early Ford Falcon commercials in the 1960s to ''It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown'' in 1969. Nowadays, he's known for stalking an ex-girlfriend and various mental disturbances; his stalking incidents led him to spend the second half of the 2010s in prison, only being released on parole in 2019 before taking his own life in January 2022.
162* Film director Creator/DavidORussell is nowadays more well known for verbally abusing cast and crew (at one point, it escalated to physical during the filming of ''Film/ThreeKings'' when he headbutted Creator/GeorgeClooney after the latter confronted him for his abusive behavior and called Creator/LilyTomlin sexist names and throwing stuff at her during filming of ''Film/IHeartHuckabees'') and sexually assaulting his 19-year-old transgender niece in 2011 than for his own work.
163* The career of filmmaker Victor Salva, best known as the director of the ''Film/JeepersCreepers'' series of horror films, has been eclipsed by his convictions for multiple child pornography offenses, most prominently a 1988 prison sentence for molesting the then-12-year-old actor Nathan Forrest Winters while they were making ''Film/{{Clownhouse}}'', which resulted in that film not seeing any home media releases since 1990. It goes to the point that despite its fame, many online film reviewers (such as James A. Janisse of ''WebVideo/DeadMeat'') have refused to review ''Jeepers Creepers'' due to Salva's crimes, as long as he's still alive to profit off them.
164* Actor, author, and filmmaker Creator/DerekSavage is known less for the content of his output and more for his heavy-handed responses to anybody criticizing or parodying ''Film/CoolCatSavesTheKids'', one of the movies he made. Taking down web reviews of the movie, getting into fights with his detractors on Website/{{Twitter}}, impersonating a nonexistent law firm to intimidate people, threatening to have somebody who made a YouTubePoop of it murdered by terrorists and generally harassing anybody who mocks or pans his movie in any way all saw his reputation go from an incompetent but harmless and somewhat endearing figure to a jackass and (ironically) a bully with an overinflated opinion of himself and his creative output.
165* During his lifetime, Creator/JimmySavile was very popular in the UK as a host and fundraiser for humanitarian causes, even being knighted for his goodwill. He died as a celebrated entertainer and philanthropist, with people gathering to watch his Royalty-scale funeral procession in the streets. Only a year after his death, an episode of the documentary series ''Exposure'' contained accusations that he had molested hundreds of young people -- both male and female -- many of them only children, as well as the disabled and the dead. This led to a massive outcry, and other accusations soon came pouring out. All of this culminated in a police investigation dubbed Operation Yewtree, which declared him guilty of all charges. As a result, [[DepravedKidsShowHost Savile's name became so tainted]] that [[DishonoredDead virtually all memorials, tributes, and statues to him have been removed and destroyed]]. Even archive footage of him, or downright ''references'' to him in comedy shows, were scrubbed from the [[Creator/TheBBC BBC]] site, making him effectively an {{Unperson}} at this point. It seems unlikely that his name or image can ever be shown again without creating controversy, as was the case of one rebroadcast of a ''Series/{{Tweenies}}'' episode from 2001 on [=CBeebies=], that featured one of the characters dressing up as Saville. The controversy also embroiled the entire BBC when it was revealed that many higher-ups at the station knew all along about the allegations against Savile, but kept silent about them to save the network's reputation.
166* The career of Creator/ChrisSavino, creator of ''WesternAnimation/TheLoudHouse'' and a longtime artist on other shows, has been overshadowed by his [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmNnNKIMxQg&pp=ygUGbWV0b29u history of sexually and verbally harassing female coworkers]] and his firing from Creator/{{Nickelodeon}} in 2017.
167* The longtime career of TV producer Creator/DanSchneider has been overshadowed by multiple accusations of him engaging in sexually predatory behavior (not helped by the [[https://twitter.com/samandcat/status/378643898886656000?lang=en infamous tweet]] from the ''Series/SamAndCat'' account that asked the largely-underage fanbase to send in pictures of their feet with a hashtag written on the soles) and verbally abusing several of the child actors in his shows.
168* Creator/RobSchneider is notable not only for being a LowestCommonDenominator comedian (with almost all his films, particularly ''WesternAnimation/NormOfTheNorth'', being negatively received), but also for his [[CantTakeCriticism inability to take criticism]], anti-vaccination campaign, bigoted comments, and [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking blocking]] Creator/SethRogen [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking from his]] Website/{{Twitter}} [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking account for no given reason]].
169* Phillip Schofield was a popular English presenter, notable for presenting ''Series/ThisMorning'', ''Series/TheCube'' and ''Dancing on Ice''. In May 2023, Schofield was forced to resign from the show after ITV discovered that he lied about having an affair with a younger co-worker whom he met while the latter was 15 years old. The backlash led to Schofield being dropped by ITV, and he is now better known for the affair than for the shows he presented.
170* [[Creator/RickSchroder Ricky Schroder]] of ''Series/SilverSpoons'' and ''Series/NYPDBlue'' fame has had his career overshadowed since the late 2010s by a string of controversies that have included getting arrested twice on charges of domestic violence, his role in bailing Kenosha unrest shooting perpetrator Kyle Rittenhouse out of prison[[note]]Rittenhouse was ultimately acquitted on self-defense grounds.[[/note]], and his public anti-mask rants during the COVID-19 pandemic.
171* Creator/StevenSeagal has always been polarizing as an actor (with many criticizing his limited emotional range and prima-donna behavior), but as he has aged, he has become far more notable for his scandal-ridden personal life than his film career. He has been accused of sex crimes dozens of times, up to and including patronizing sex-slavery rings. He is also well-known for defending world leaders generally regarded as dictators, such as UsefulNotes/FidelCastro and in particular UsefulNotes/VladimirPutin, with whom he is a personal friend. Seagal even defended Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, an action condemned by the international community.
172* Creator/CharlieSheen's bizarre behavior and legal troubles have greatly overshadowed his acting, to the point where he became a punchline. Drug abuse, {{domestic abuse}} allegations, sex addiction, hookers, a public meltdown that led to him getting [[ActorLeavesCharacterDies fired with his character uncerimoniously killed off]] from ''Series/TwoAndAHalfMen'', being both an anti-vaxxer and a 9/11 truther and Creator/CoreyFeldman accusing him of raping an underage Creator/CoreyHaim on the set of ''Film/{{Lucas}}'' have all tarnished his reputation.
173* Director Creator/BryanSinger has long been trailed by accusations of rape and sexual abuse towards underage boys throughout his career despite being attached to lucrative successes like the ''Film/XMenFilmSeries'', ''Film/TheUsualSuspects'' and ''Film/BohemianRhapsody''. His career would begin to truly stall and become overshadowed by his personal failings in the New Tens when his accusers sued him and he attempted to bury them, which only drew attention to it. The final straw would come towards the end of the decade when he was fired from ''Bohemian Rhapsody'' for hostile and unprofessional behavior despite retaining credit. An explosive article detailing old and new accusations against Singer was released in the wake of the film's success and awards season tour, which also revealed Singer's unprofessional habits had been around for his entire career. This caused Singer's reputation to become radioactive and resulted in Millennium Films (itself no stranger to controversy) to cancel a planned ''ComicBook/RedSonja'' film with Singer attached after intense scrutiny.
174* Creator/JussieSmollett of ''Series/{{Empire}}'' fame is best known for allegedly staging a racist and HomophobicHateCrime against himself due to a salary dispute with the show's producers, leading to his subsequent arrest in Chicago. The fact that Smollett claimed that the two people who attacked him were Trump supporters didn't help matters, leading to outright condemnation from both Trump supporters for smearing them all by association and Trump detractors for potentially casting doubt on actual Trump supporter crimes. Although Smollett and some of his family and friends continue to insist that he is innocent and that the Chicago Police Department is lying, even the crowd who were sympathetic to him at first have long conceded that the hate crime was almost certainly faked, and while Smollett could conceivably be able to continue his career, it is unknown if he could recover from the controversy surrounding him.
175* Norwegian model Juliane Snekkestad was previously an uncontroversial figure, but due to her statement in 2019-2020 of "I'm actually a boy in a female model's body" which had people questioning if she was really transgender because of how she said it and especially due to her GirlyGirl behavior, with many questioning if it was a PublicityStunt to boost talkability and her image. However, in some countries, it becomes the first thing she's known for, and has tarnished her reputation in some circles.
176* Creator/WesleySnipes is infamous for his prima-donna behavior on the set of ''Film/BladeTrinity'' and for spending three years in prison for tax evasion.
177* Actor Creator/KevinSorbo, star of ''Series/HerculesTheLegendaryJourneys'' and ''Series/{{Andromeda}}'', is nowadays better known for his fundamentalist Christian views, alleged anti-Semitism, embracing of conspiracy theories, and willingness to star in far-right and/or fundamentalist Christian films than for his acting, effectively rendering him PersonaNonGrata among the mainstream sci-fi[=/=]fantasy community.
178* The career of actor Creator/KevinSpacey has been thoroughly affected by the sexual misconduct allegation against him by actor Creator/AnthonyRapp in late 2017, who said that Spacey made a drunken sexual advance towards him when he was 14. Following the allegation, Spacey revealed that [[StraightGay he was gay]], which led to many criticizing him for how he addressed both matters. The allegations worsened when Spacey's brother revealed that he spent years denying the fact that he was gay and continued to ignore his brother's mail, using his stage name to hide behind his troubled childhood, and only got worse when it was discovered that eight of Spacey's crew members from ''Series/{{House of Cards|US}}'', which Spacey was instantly dropped from, and the King of Norway's former son-in-law had made allegations against him. Also, he uploaded [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZveA-NAIDI a video]] to his Website/YouTube channel in December 2018, in which he denied the allegations while in character as Frank Underwood from ''House of Cards'', which caused many celebrities [[https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2018/12/25/patricia-arquette-rob-lowe-react-kevin-spacey-weird-video/2411652002/ to mock him on Twitter]], particularly since it came in the wake of his [[https://www.cbr.com/kevin-spacey-plea-felony-assault/ being accused]] of sexually assaulting a journalist's son (the charge was eventually dropped in July 2019).
179* English comedian Freddie Starr was notorious for being the subject of an urban legend that he ate a hamster and for having accusations of inappropriate behavior thrown at him in the wake of Operation Yewtree.
180* Creator/OliverStone has made several well-received films, but he is also infamous for a large number of incidents in his personal life, including his belief in various conspiracy theories, his support for controversial leaders like UsefulNotes/FidelCastro, UsefulNotes/HugoChavez, and UsefulNotes/VladimirPutin[[note]]the latter of which he would eventually reverse in 2022 amidst Russia's invasion of Ukraine[[/note]], making statements interpreted as anti-Semitic, and allegations of sexual harassment.
181* Creator/JimSturgess is a difficult actor to discuss without mentioning his taking on, and loudly defending his decision to take on, not one but two roles deemed extremely offensive by the Asian community, specifically ''Film/TwentyOne'', where he plays a [[VeryLooselyBasedOnATrueStory heavily fictionalized version of]] [[RaceLift a person who was Asian in real life]], and ''Film/CloudAtlas'', where his character appears in {{yellowface}}.
182* Creator/ElizabethTaylor, while still remembered for her acting and for her activism to fight AIDS in the later years of her life, is probably known even more for her scandalous personal life and her [[SerialSpouse frequent marriages]] (eight overall, twice to the same person). Her most notable relationships were with singer Music/EddieFisher (father of Creator/CarrieFisher), which led to him divorcing Creator/DebbieReynolds and marrying Taylor. Then, on the set of ''Film/{{Cleopatra}}'', Taylor began a passionate affair with Creator/RichardBurton (himself already married to Sybil Christopher at the time), which led to her divorcing Eddie Fisher and marrying Burton. Taylor and Burton made 10 films and a TV movie together, divorced in 1972, remarried in 1974, and divorced again in 1976.
183* Model Chrissy Teigen is well-known for authoring two cookbooks, co-hosting ''Lip Sync Battles'', marrying Music/JohnLegend, and for being outspoken on social media. However, in May 2021, several old tweets of hers resurfaced as she was accused of viciously cyberbullying Courtney Stodden, a media personality and singer, back in 2011, during their marriage as a 16-year-old to Doug Hutchinson, who was 51 at the time. The controversy only worsened when more of her questionable tweets from 2011 resurfaced, where she'd targeted people such as Creator/LindsayLohan and ''Series/TeenMom'' star Farrah Abraham. While she gave an apology to Stodden following the reveal (which many regarded as insincere), the ensuing controversy resulted in Teigen's cookbooks and cookware line being dropped by Macy's, Target, and Bloomingdale's, and Teigen wound up stepping down from a planned voice role in ''Series/NeverHaveIEver'' in the wake of the controversy. Time will only tell if Teigen will ever truly move forward from the backlash she has gotten over cyberbullying a minor.
184* At least some of Creator/ShirleyTemple's films veer into this largely due to ValuesDissonance over her interactions with grown men in the films (for starters, it's more or less impossible to discuss ''Film/BrightEyes'' without the now-infamous "Good Ship Lollipop" scene), and the various abuses she witnessed on- and off-set like in ''Baby Burlesks'' where misbehaving child actors were locked up in a cupboard with a big block of ice and left to freeze, and an incident where an errant MGM producer [[{{Squick}} exposed his penis]] in front of the then-twelve-year-old Temple, the latter [[ChildrenAreInnocent unaware]] of the obscene act being done in front of her. In fairness, she did fare better than the likes of Creator/LindsayLohan and other former child actors after retiring from acting, but the creepiness factor with her films did put off some modern audiences who were uncomfortable about the things the actress went through during her childhood.
185* It is almost impossible to bring up Music/TilaTequila without addressing her support of Neo-Nazism and Adolf Hitler (which many people find strange, [[BoomerangBigot considering she is of Vietnamese heritage]]), which subsequently got her banned from Website/{{Twitter}} and expelled from ''Celebrity Big Brother''. She is far better known for this than for her acting career and television roles.
186* These days, Creator/JoshTrank is known less for his aspirations to become the "next Creator/StevenSpielberg" and more for his egotistical, brash and volatile (if not outright unstable) personality. This is primarily thanks to ''Film/FantasticFour2015'''s [[TroubledProduction hellish production]], which saw Trank turn into an abusive PrimaDonnaDirector who clashed with both [[HostilityOnTheSet his cast and crew on set]] and [[DearNegativeReader detractors online]]. After the film was released, Trank found himself becoming a pariah within Hollywood as a result of getting imprisoned in Movie Jail due to the film's poor financial performance and overwhelmingly negative critical reception, which led him to drop out of/get fired from a Boba Fett-centric ''Franchise/StarWars'' spin-off project. Trank made something of a comeback with Creator/TomHardy vehicle ''Film/{{Capone}}'', which received [[SoOkayItsAverage lukewarm reviews at best]].
187* Comedian James Veitch had a promising career, having given three popular TED talks about his interactions with various unsolicited e-mails. These would prove popular enough that he was given the series ''WebVideo/{{Scamalot}}'' which was all about him making fools out of online scammers. Veitch also made many appearances on ''Series/{{Conan}}'' as a stand-up, and he even got a stand-up special on HBO Max. However, in September 2020 he was accused by many of his classmates at Sarah Lawrence College of rape and sexual assault from his time there. This has resulted in most distributors that produced Veitch's videos taking them down and cutting ties with him.
188* David Verbeeck, a moderately successful Flemish actor and drama teacher, known for voicing Timon in ''WesternAnimation/TheLionKing1994'' (and its spin-offs) and for his role as Vincent in ''Wat nu weer?!'', is nowadays best known for getting a 30-month suspended jail sentence (on the condition that he gets specialized help) for acquisition and distribution of child pornography, as well as for several anti-semitic acts and Nazi worshipping. The case came to light in 2015, when several of his (adult) students found naked pictures of a fourteen-year-old on his phone, as well as a naked picture of Verbeeck doing the Hitler salute. The students informed the police, who found evidence of child porn distribution, as well as photographic and videographic evidence of Verbeeck fanatically committing anti-semitic acts. Verbeeck's explanation for the transgressions was that he was preparing for a role and, therefore, method acting that he was a pedophile and a Nazi-sympathizer. Since his arrest, he has proclaimed his deep regret and shame for his behaviour, which worked in his favor during the court case. Nevertheless, he has all but been erased from Flemish television, with Timon being dubbed by another voice actor from ''WesternAnimation/TheLionGuard'' onwards (Verbeeck still voiced Timon in the series pilot) and all of the ''Wat nu weer?!'' episodes starring him getting scrapped from the rerun rotation.
189* Actor Creator/JonVoight, following his {{Star Derailing Role}}s as the villains in ''Film/BabyGeniuses 2'' and ''Film/{{Bratz}}'', has become more of a presence in the media for his far-right political views and the resulting family feud with his daughter and ideological opposite Creator/AngelinaJolie than his acting.
190* Creator/RobertWagner has had an acting career spanning 70 years, but him being considered a person of interest in the mysterious drowning death of his wife Creator/NatalieWood has cast a heavy pall over his personal and professional reputation.
191* Bilal Wahib was a rather successful Dutch actor, rapper, presenter and vlogger, who even won the "Shooting Star" award at a film festival in Berlin, until he was arrested on suspicion of acquiring child pornography online. The story goes that one night, Bilal and his friend Oussama Ahammoud dared a twelve-year-old boy to show his private parts during a livestream on Instagram for 17000 Euros. When the boy exposed himself during the livestream, Bilal and his friend turned the entire thing into one big joke (making their request sound like a play on words), before removing the (now embarrassed) boy from their livestream. Videos of the livestream subsequently went viral, causing a massive outcry of disgust throughout the Netherlands, as well as [=TopNotch=] (his record label) and [=BNNVARA=] (the broadcasting station he was working for) to drop him like hot garbage. Any attempts to salvage his career (such as an interview on talk show ''Beau'') were met with fierce resistance, as the general public deemed that he had not been punished enough (by a long shot), causing Bilal to cancel the interview shortly before the start of the show. At this moment in time, any chances of a career resurrection seem incredibly slim, as this controversy becomes the focal point as soon as his name is even mentioned.
192* Canadian swimmer and actress Creator/EstellaWarren got a big push to her acting career in the early 2000s. However, after her momentum stalled, she became more well-known for her tabloid antics and criminal behavior (including domestic violence allegations and an incident where she assaulted a cop and tried to escape from police custody after being arrested for a DUI hit-and-run).
193* As the head of Creator/MiramaxFilms and Creator/TheWeinsteinCompany, Harvey Weinstein oversaw the production of some of the most acclaimed films since the '90s like ''Film/PulpFiction'' and ''Film/ShakespeareInLove''. While some earlier controversies were surrounding him,[[note]]His cutting of films, his often petty and incompetent handling of releases, and his lobbying of Academy voters for his OscarBait films all come to mind[[/note]] these were blown out of the water when allegations of his history of sexually harassing women such as Creator/AshleyJudd and Creator/RoseMcGowan came to light in an October 2017 article in ''The New Yorker'' and ''The New York Times''. The article encouraged several women to come forward with similar allegations against him, including Creator/LeaSeydoux, Creator/CaraDelevingne, Creator/AngelinaJolie, and Creator/GwynethPaltrow.[[note]]The latter starred in Weinstein's BreakthroughHit ''Shakespeare in Love'', which she noted was very much TeethClenchedTeamwork on her part, while Jolie straight-up admitted that she went out of her way to never work with Weinstein ever again.[[/note]] Then a ''New Yorker'' article by Ronan Farrow (ironically, the son of Woody Allen, who has also been hit with sexual misconduct allegations) had many actresses, including Creator/AsiaArgento, accuse him of rape, alongside an audio recording of him admitting to groping women. Soon, many of Weinstein's friends and clients began siding with the victims and refused to associate with him any further; he was fired from his own company by a board of directors that included ''his own brother'', Bob Weinstein, who later described Harvey as "a sick man" and "a world-class liar" (Bob would later be accused of sex offenses himself, albeit much less severe than Harvey's); his wife announced that she was leaving him; TWC began scrubbing his name away from any further projects and was sold to Lantern Capital and renamed Lantern Entertainment. The fallout also [[DisasterDominoes led to a wave of accusations against other celebrities and powerful individuals]] - some of whom are also on this page - which became known as the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weinstein_effect Weinstein effect]] or the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_Too_movement "Me Too" movement]]. In 2020, he was finally found guilty on two counts of rape and sexual assault and was sentenced to 23 years in prison (and later 16 years), but was found not guilty on counts of predatory sexual assault, which would have led to a life sentence. Nevertheless, most were pleased with the outcome, with fellow Weinstein victim Creator/MiraSorvino admitting that she was at least grateful that justice was finally served.
194* Creator/JossWhedon's storied career as a "nerd icon" and reputation as an outspoken feminist creative became tarnished in this starting in 2017, first from [[https://www.themarysue.com/joss-whedon-and-the-terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-script/ a leaked script he wrote in the 2000s]] for an unmade ComicBook/WonderWoman movie that received backlash for coming off like it was infantilizing the character (among other problems), his ex-wife Kai Cole [[https://www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-feminist-hypocrite-infidelity-affairs-ex-wife-kai-cole-says/ accusing him of cheating on her repeatedly during their marriage]] and calling him a {{hypocrite}} using feminism as a shield for his abuse of power, and his part in the critical and [[BoxOfficeBomb financial failure]] of the [[Film/JusticeLeague2017 2017 theatrical cut]] of the ''Justice League'' movie (which itself has been mired in controversy due to [[TroubledProduction its many behind-the-scenes issues]]). The latter caused further trouble in 2020 when stars Creator/RayFisher and Creator/GalGadot accused Whedon of [[HostilityOnTheSet abusive and toxic behavior]] on the ''Justice League'' set, which in turn led to multiple actors from ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'' and ''Series/{{Angel}}'' (most notably Creator/CharismaCarpenter) and other writers he'd worked with (such as Creator/JoseMolina) to speak up about their own negative experiences of working with him. As a result, [[https://jezebel.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-joss-whedon-and-the-myth-of-the-h-1846288271 reevaluations]] [[https://variety.com/2022/tv/columns/joss-whedon-allegations-buffy-legacy-1235157632/ of]] [[https://www.vox.com/culture/22277010/joss-whedon-charisma-carpenter-buffy-toxic-workplace-abuse-accusation Whedon's work and legacy]] have sprung up, with several outlets expressing a general feeling of disappointment and betrayal at how shows like ''Buffy'' have [[https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/22/opinions/joss-whedon-vulture-interview-buffy-vampire-slayer-thomas/index.html become much more difficult to watch and enjoy with that knowledge in mind]]. Whedon himself added fuel to the fire in January 2022 when he conducted [[https://www.vulture.com/article/joss-whedon-allegations.html an interview]] with ''New York Magazine'' that drew backlash from former fans and colleagues alike due to his apparent inability to genuinely own up to and apologize for his actions.[[note]]The closest he really came to owning up to his actions, though, was admitting that he could sometimes be "confrontational".[[/note]]
195* Creator/JamesWoods' once-respected career as an actor in Hollywood has been damaged in recent years by his embrace of far-right politics and conspiracy theories, making him a pariah to most outside that realm. His name also was brought up about the [=#MeToo=] movement, with Creator/AmberTamblyn accusing Woods of hitting on underage girls (ironically, after he criticized the age gap of the couple in ''Film/CallMeByYourName''), and Creator/ElizabethPerkins accusing Woods of sexually assaulting her in the past.
196* Creator/SeanYoung is probably known less for her acting and more for her serious mental issues, which has led to frequent run-ins with the law, as well as her infamous publicity stunt to try and get herself cast as Catwoman in ''Film/BatmanReturns''.
197* Creator/BillyZane saw the majority of his career dry up after he chose to appear in ''Film/ValleyOfTheWolves'', a Turkish anti-American propaganda film during UsefulNotes/TheWarOnTerror, and loudly defended his decision to do so. He has had few notable film roles since (with one such role being a cameo in the universally panned ''Film/HolmesAndWatson'').
198[[/folder]]
199
200[[folder:Other Creators]]
201* Artists who support controversial political regimes and ideologies often face this:
202** Creator/BertoltBrecht, Creator/SergeiEisenstein, Creator/PaulRobeson, and several other artists who supported or sympathized with the Soviet Union, especially if that included its time under Stalin, saw their reputations decline, at least briefly, during the UsefulNotes/ColdWar. As for artists who actually worked under Stalin, they faced further backlash in their homeland during de-Stalinization and the Khrushchev thaw. The phrase "useful idiot", [[BeamMeUpScotty misattributed]] to [[UsefulNotes/VladimirLenin Lenin]], is often used by historians to tag any artist or intellectual who supported or sympathized with UsefulNotes/RedOctober and in some cases used, retroactively, to justify such instances as UsefulNotes/TheHollywoodBlacklist.
203** Supporting fascism and ''especially'' Nazism is, however, usually seen as far worse than supporting Soviet Union, and numerous individuals who were involved with the ideologies have seen their reputations be destroyed or overshadowed:
204*** Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the author of ''Literature/JourneyToTheEndOfTheNight'', one of the most acclaimed novels of the 20th century. He was also grotesquely antisemitic and supported Vichy France and never repented. This has made it difficult for people to praise him as an author.
205*** During the war, another collaborationist writer, newspaper editor Robert Brasillach, was actually shot by firing squad in the post-war trials.
206*** The same applies to Creator/EzraPound, an American poet who was a major figure in the modernist movement of literature, promoting the works of Creator/TSEliot, Creator/ErnestHemingway, and Creator/JamesJoyce, who ''also wrote and broadcast fascist propaganda'' for Mussolini during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII and was imprisoned for treason several years afterward.
207*** Fashion designer UsefulNotes/CocoChanel is a legend in the fashion world, but she is not without controversy throughout her career; the most infamous and well-known controversy is that, allegedly, she was a [[LesCollaborateurs collaborator]] with the Nazis during World War II, even dating one of them.
208*** Hugo Boss: famous for their luxury suits and perfumes for men, infamous for their eponymous founder's support of the Nazi Party. While the rumor that Boss designed the [[PuttingOnTheReich Nazi uniforms]] is false, the company did manufacture those uniforms, with the help of slave labor.
209*** Thea von Harbou was the second wife of pioneering German film director Creator/FritzLang, and worked on several screenplays, most famously Lang's ''Film/{{Metropolis}}''. All this was overshadowed when Hitler came to power. Lang, seeing where things were going, fled to the United States, where he developed a successful career in Hollywood before returning to Germany in the 1950s. Von Harbou, however, agreed to work for Nazi film productions, leading Lang to divorce her.
210*** British historian David Irving was once well-respected for his work on Nazi Germany until he published his infamous best-selling book ''Hitler's War'', which proposed a controversial theory that Adolf Hitler knew nothing of the Holocaust and later flat-out denied that the Nazis had systematically exterminated Jews in gas chambers during the Holocaust. These actions have unsurprisingly sparked colossal outrage amongst his colleagues and the general public, who wasted no time at all in labelling Irving as an anti-Semite, Holocaust denier and Nazi sympathiser. More than a few Western nations have even gone so far as to regard Irving as ''person non-grata'', thanks to his radical views and defeats in multiple defamation suits, which has all but destroyed his reputation as a military historian.
211** Music/RichardWagner is universally considered a genius composer, but his open anti-Semitism and the Nazi party's promotion of his music and writings have tarnished his legacy.
212** Creator/RudyardKipling's promotion of MightyWhitey and WhiteMansBurden made him, formerly one of the most popular and well-read authors of his day and regarded as ''anti-''racist, an embarrassment for many literary critics in the wake of decolonization.
213** Philosopher and author Creator/FriedrichNietzsche, much like Richard Wagner, is now best known for the promulgation of his work by the Nazis rather than its actual content. Saying you agree with Nietzsche's philosophy on ''anything'' will get you accusations of being a racist, fascist, and/or SocialDarwinist, and it is CommonKnowledge that the man himself was all these things and more.[[note]]Although Nietzsche himself was very much against the repugnant ideas that the Nazis championed, his sister was a Nazi fangirl who edited his work after he died to support Nazi viewpoints.[[/note]]
214* Australian philosopher and professor Peter Singer is widely regarded as a leader in the animal rights and utilitarian movements, but his numerous viewpoints, as a result of taking is utilitarianism to the logical extreme, that conflict with conventional morality have gotten him resoundingly criticized by many other groups, and he has been called "the most dangerous man in philosophy" and similar epithets by many publications. He is particularly infamous in the disabled community for his advocation that the severely disabled should have fewer rights than other people and that medical money spent on treating them would be better spent on fixing temporary ailments of otherwise healthy people; he has frequently been labeled a eugenicist due to these beliefs. He has also campaigned for nonhuman animals being granted the same rights as humans (apart from in cases where the rights would be impossible for the animal to exercise, like voting), which has gotten him assailed by activists for civil rights, women's rights, and others who advocate that the well-being of marginalized human groups should take priority, and has even insinuated that he is uncomfortable with the existence of things such as music and art, finding them wasteful when many people around the world still lack necessities.
215* German philosopher Martin Heidegger is better known for his membership in the Nazi Party and the debate over how much his Nazi affiliations affected his views than said views themselves.
216* Creator/JudyBlume is one of the most beloved young adult writers of the 20th century... and also one of the most frequently challenged and banned, due to her frank portrayal of puberty and everything that comes with it, with her first-person main characters freely discussing things like budding sexual feelings, menstruation, breast size, and masturbation.
217* Creator/VoxDay (Theodore Beale) may have made some interesting work, but he is ''by far'' more known for his almost cartoonish bigotry, particularly [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_Day#White_supremacy his support for white supremacy]] (to the point that [[https://boingboing.net/2018/09/04/alt-right-publisher-founds-com.html some]] [[https://www.wired.com/story/welcome-to-the-wikipedia-of-the-alt-right/ publications]] have described him as being part of the alt-right), and organizing the Rabid Puppies campaign, a partially successful attempt to sabotage the most popular Science Fiction/Fantasy award (the Hugo). Said attempted sabotage being, in theory, a protest against the award's perceived left-wing bias (citing ''If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love'' as an example), but ''very'' likely also a form of petty revenge against SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America) for having been expelled from the association due to his racist remarks against fellow fantasy writer Creator/NKJemisin. His strong support for Marion Zimmer Bradley's daughter when she revealed the extent of her parents' sexual abuse seems less to have been inspired by EveryoneHasStandards than by his hatred against gays and lesbians. Suffice it to say, he is considered one of the most despised writers in the SF/F community for a reason (unrelated to his writing).
218* Harold Camping's final years of life and as CEO of Family Radio (one of the largest Christian radio broadcasters in America) has become irreversibly tainted after he "predicted" that the Biblical Rapture would occur on May 21, 2011. A multi-million dollar America-wide advertising campaign launched by Family Radio sowed fear into the hearts of Camping's loyal followers, making many of them quit their jobs, take on debt and sell prized possessions online. However, this prophecy would also spark fierce opposition from an unlikely alliance of atheists and skeptical Christians decrying Camping's apocalyptic messaging as nothing more than fearmongering. Tellingly enough, after Camping's death in 2013, Family Radio went to great lengths to distance itself from Camping, as his antics had caused significant damage to the company's finances and public image.
219* Creator/HarlanEllison was widely acclaimed for his science fiction writing but was also infamous for his HairTriggerTemper, frequently suing and threatening to sue people, trademarking his own name, and a bizarre 2006 award show appearance where he sucked on a microphone like a lollipop and groped a woman's breast.
220* Creator/JohnOsborne is generally viewed as one of the most important British playwrights of TheFifties, with his 1956 play ''Theatre/LookBackInAnger'' revolutionizing British theatre. However, he is very controversial due to his sexist and misogynistic views and the fact he was frequently abusive towards his wives, mistresses and children. Backlash against him increased when he re-edited his autobiography ''A Better Class of Person'' (originally released in 1981) to write a whole new chapter where he ''celebrated'' his fourth wife's suicide in 1990.
221* Creator/TerryGoodkind has long been a divisive figure in the fantasy culture for his adoration of Creator/AynRand and [[FilibusterFreefall turning his books into treatises]] on her UsefulNotes/{{Objectivism}} philosophy without a shred of irony (most infamously, one book has the main protagonist slaughtering a bunch of peaceful and unarmed protesters), plus his insistence against all logic and reason that his work [[SciFiGhetto shouldn't be considered fantasy but "deep philosophical work."]] In 2018, he finally burned a lot of bridges for good by publicly insulting the cover for ''Shroud of Eternity'' and holding a contest for the best insult toward it, much to the confusion of the general public who couldn't at all see what was supposed to be so bad about it. He quickly apologized in the face of the massive backlash, but the cover artist Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme refused to forgive him and ended their long working relationship.
222* John Harvey Kellogg is well-known for founding Kellogg's with his brother Will Keith and his career as a doctor, particularly his contributions to the clean living movement. However, he is perhaps much better known for his staunch anti-masturbation activism[[note]]Kellogg's methods of rehabilitation and circumcision often involved mutilation without anesthetic. Also, Corn Flakes were initially invented as an anaphrodisiac.[[/note]] and his collaborations with the eugenics movement.
223* Creator/HPLovecraft is generally regarded as one of the most influential figures in the horror genre, but his legacy in modern times suffers greatly because of his racism and anti-Semitism (even though ''his own wife'' was Jewish), which by all accounts was extreme even by the standards of his day,[[note]]some of his personal letters actually suggest that he sympathized with Hitler[[/note]] and bled into some of his work. While the idea that his various monsters were allegories for non-Aryans is debatable, what's not is the fact that many real ethnic groups were frequently subject to demonization in his stories.[[note]]For example, in "Medusa's Coil", the fact that Marceline had some black ancestry is used as part of a horrifying twist ending.[[/note]]
224* Anne Perry had been a very popular mystery writer for years before eventually being exposed as none other than notorious New Zealand murderer Juliet Hulme, who in 1954, was convicted in [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker-Hulme_murder_case the murder of her friend's mother, Honorah Rieper]] at the age of fifteen.[[note]]She changed her name after serving a five-year sentence for Rieper's murder.[[/note]] This came after the film adaptation of the story, ''Film/HeavenlyCreatures'', reignited interest in the case and what became of the people involved. She managed to continue her writing career with some measure of success until her death in 2023, but the stigma has unavoidably stuck with her to this day. The documentary film ''Interiors'' revealed ([[https://thespinoff.co.nz/tv/04-02-2019/from-crime-reality-to-crime-fiction-the-strange-case-of-the-anne-perry-film as in this review]]) that she remained in a state of desperate pathological denial to the bitter end.
225* Creator/AnneRice, known for her gothic, religious, and erotic fiction, such as ''Literature/InterviewWithTheVampire'' and its sequels, was just as notorious for her [[DearNegativeReader dismissive responses to criticism]] (one of which spawned the [[MemeticMutation meme]] "You are interrogating the text from the wrong perspective") and for her [[FanworkBan hardline stance against fanfiction]] to the point of taking legal action against anyone who wrote fanfic based on her work. Later in life, however, her attitude towards fanfiction mellowed considerably.
226* Gareth Roberts, best known for his work on the modern series of ''Series/DoctorWho'' (and its expanded universe), killed his standing with the fandom due to his transphobic beliefs, ensuring that he will never work on the show again. His reputation has further declined due to his tweeting support for racist and offensive causes.
227* Sci-fi author Creator/KarenTraviss is notorious for her outspoken MugglesDoItBetter views when writing for settings that include both mundane and supernatural characters, most prominently ''Franchise/StarWars'', views that many fans find [[DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything uncomfortably similar to real-world bigotry]]. Like Rice, she's also well known for [[DearNegativeReader colorful screeds directed at critics]], including comparing them to ''the Taliban''.
228* Creator/JohnCWright is despised for being an accomplice to Vox Day's attempted sabotage of the Hugo Awards; his savage, homophobic disparagement of ''WesternAnimation/TheLegendOfKorra'' creators for ending the series by having the main character start a relationship with another woman, and [[GodwinsLaw comparing]] renowned author Creator/TerryPratchett to ''UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler'' because of how the former endorsed ''voluntary'' euthanasia.
229* Fantasy writer Creator/MarionZimmerBradley was considered an ''incredibly'' important figure in the genre, a mentor to dozens if not hundreds of aspiring authors, and something of a feminist icon among fans even though rumors about her husband Walter Breen's sexual molestation of minors during their marriage had popped up now and then since the 1960s. It generally hadn't affected her personal reputation, as many assumed Breen's actions had taken place without her knowledge and that she had divorced him when he had been arrested. Also, [[https://fanlore.org/wiki/Breendoggle many notable science fiction creators publicly supported Breen and refused to believe he was a molester]]. After Bradley died in 1999, evidence came forward that not only had she known about and tolerated Breen's abuse of children throughout their marriage, she had helped in covering it up, which tarnished her name but generally left her literary legacy intact. Finally, her reputation took a fatal blow in 2014 when her daughter stated that Bradley had not only been complicit in Breen's acts, actually procuring for him numerous times, she was a pedophile in her own right, having abused, along with other unknown victims, her own children.
230* Novelist Creator/OrsonScottCard is probably better known nowadays for his [[HeteronormativeCrusader virulent anti-gay beliefs]] (to the extent that it started to leak into his writing, putting a huge dent in fans' use of the "separating art from the artist" defense), ultimately leading to a boycott of the [[Film/EndersGame film version]] of ''Literature/EndersGame'' and relegating him to becoming the sci-fi/fantasy community's equivalent of Anita Bryant.
231* While Creator/LRonHubbard was an author of fantasy and science fiction, it's hard for most people to name a single work of fiction written by him. You might run into somebody who knows about ''Literature/BattlefieldEarth'', but chances are that's due to the infamy of [[Film/BattlefieldEarth its movie adaptation]]. No, Hubbard's undoubtedly most famous for his role as the founder of the Church of Scientology, which is probably one of the most controversial new religious movements in the world.
232* Gavin [=McInnes=] was once a pretty widely popular journalist and comedian who was best known for his public image as an eccentric {{hipster}}. His many humorous articles and essays helped turn Vice Media (which he co-founded) into a major force in the world of online journalism, and his comedic memoir ''How to Piss in Public'' sold decently well after being published by Scribner. Then, in 2016, he founded the Proud Boys--a highly controversial conservative/right-wing populist social organization that has been labeled alt-right, associated with numerous incidents of violence, reportedly has ties to neo-Nazi groups and is currently [[https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/proud-boys classified as a hate group]] by the Southern Poverty Law Center and is considered a terrorist group within Canada. Though [=McInnes=] has since cut ties with the Proud Boys, his role in founding the group has cast a long shadow over everything else in his career, and he is now best known for his dabbling in what many consider to be right-wing extremism.
233* Graham Linehan, once best known for creating the sitcoms ''Series/FatherTed'' and ''Series/TheITCrowd'', has had his reputation tainted by his virulent anti-transgender views, including [[GodwinsLaw comparing trans activists to Nazis]] and trying to have a £500,000 grant for the trans support charity Mermaids UK revoked. His anti-trans views resulted in the permanent suspension of his Twitter account and his wife divorcing him.
234* Billy Mitchell was once a respected video game player for his multiple records in the ''Donkey Kong'' arcade games and being credited as the first person to achieve a perfect score in ''Pac-Man''. Nowadays, however, his reputation is primarily defined by accusations of cheating after evidence emerged suggesting that his records were fabricated, as well as him being [[FrivolousLawsuit notoriously litigious]] against his critics.
235* Terry Richardson's body of work as a photographer and music video director is less well known among the general public than allegations that he has used his influence in the fashion industry to sexually assault and exploit models during photo shoots.
236* Stephen Glass is a paralegal and author who had a successful journalism career with ''The New Republic'', only for it to be revealed that most of his stories were partially or completely made up, for which he will probably be known for the rest of his life. The fact that the scandal got [[Film/ShatteredGlass a movie]] just sealed his fate.
237* Creator/BillOReilly, host of ''The O'Reilly Factor'', gained significant notoriety for the persistent sexual harassment allegations that were made against him. These allegations eventually got him fired from Fox News in 2017 (though contrary to popular belief, this wasn't because of the [=#MeToo=] movement; his firing happened in April 2017, months before the sexual abuse accusations against Harvey Weinstein in October of that year that gave birth to [=#MeToo=]).
238* Sean Hannity, another Fox News personality, has always been rather contentious even by the standards of pundits because of his hardline political views and allegations that he promotes conspiracy theories. But during UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump's 2016 presidential campaign, he developed a close relationship with him, one that ended up getting even closer after his subsequent election. This has led to some ''very'' pro-Trump coverage, which even other Republicans have criticized him for. But even Hannity's feuds with multiple anti-Trump conservatives were eclipsed by the April 2018 revelations that he shared a lawyer -- the infamous Michael Cohen -- with Trump. In a serious breach of journalistic ethics, Hannity had been defending Cohen and criticizing those who investigated him without disclosing their working relationship.
239* Former Fox News personality Megyn Kelly became infamous in the later years of her run on the network for making racist attacks against black people playing SantaClaus during the Holiday season, saying that they shouldn't be allowed to dress up as a "white" character. That itself became overshadowed by her criticisms of then-Presidential candidate UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump leading to Trump belittling her with sexist comments, saying that she had "blood coming out of her eyes, out of her 'wherever,'" which was widely seen as saying that she was on her period when she criticized him. Kelly subsequently started gaining sympathy, even amongst the left, enough for the earlier "Black Santa" attacks to be forgotten. She ultimately left Fox News for a more lucrative job at NBC News, where she got her own news program ''Megyn Kelly Today'' in the fall of 2017. A year later, she got into a controversy when she made comments defending {{blackface}} on her show, which played a part in ''Megyn Kelly Today'' getting canceled (low ratings were another factor). Shortly after NBC fired Kelly, her "Black Santa" rant resurfaced, which helped paint her as a {{hypocrite}}, that somehow to her black Santas were unacceptable, but blackface ''wasn't''.
240* It's impossible to talk about NBC News journalist Brian Williams without mentioning the multiple occasions he misrepresented his professional history. The most infamous of these tall tales were his false claim that a military helicopter he had been riding in while covering the 2003 invasion of Iraq was forced down by RPG fire. NBC suspended and later demoted him after this lie was exposed in 2015.
241* Walter Duranty is ''undoubtedly'' best known for writing multiple articles denying the Holodomor, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. Needless to say, his work is a major OldShame for ''The New York Times'' (which published his articles), and there have been multiple calls for his Pulitzer to be revoked.
242* Canadian journalist Jan Wong is best known for "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Wong_controversy Get under the desk]]", an article she wrote for ''The Globe and Mail'' that many found inflammatory. She claimed in the article that there was a link between three school shootings in Quebec and purported alienation brought on by Quebec's linguistic struggle, even going so far as to accuse Quebecois culture of being overly concerned with "racial purity". The problem is, this assertion was based solely on the fact that the shooters weren't French Québécois; their motivations had nothing to do with "''pure laine''". There was an enormous backlash against her article and her as a person, leading her to be dismissed from the ''Globe'', and her subsequent work has been haunted by the specter of "Get under the desk". Less known is her trip to [[RedChina China]] to join the UsefulNotes/CulturalRevolution, where she denounced a fellow student who sought her help to defect to the West. Her friend was sentenced to hard labor, while some years later, [[ScrewThisImOuttaHere Wong made a return to the West]].
243* Celebrity chef and TV personality Paula Deen had long been criticized for cooking unhealthy food and encouraging people to eat diets high in fat and sugar. But starting in 2013, these criticisms were eclipsed by accusations of racism. In June of that year, a woman named Lisa Jackson sued Deen for racial discrimination. Jackson also claimed that Deen had used derogatory language about African-Americans and mused about throwing a "Southern plantation" themed wedding with black male servers, only rejecting the idea because she thought it would be bad optics. The lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice, but Jackson's claims seriously hurt her image nevertheless. Not helping matters was a Halloween picture of her son Bobby dressed as [[Series/ILoveLucy Ricky Ricardo]] -- and wearing {{brownface}}.
244* Many, ''many'' artists accused of plagiarism (especially comedians) have become known first and foremost for those accusations. Creator/DenisLeary, Carlos Mencia, and Creator/DaneCook are commonly cited, at least in the world of stand-up comedy.
245* Genaud, SA de CV / New Art Dub (originally known as Grabaciones & Doblajes, SA until 2004, Grabaciones y Doblajes Internacionales, SA de CV until 2007, and colloquially known as Estrellita) is one of the most prolific dubbing studios in Mexico, was the first professional recording studio used by Creator/{{Disney}} for their Spanish dubs and continued to work with them until 1999. The studio was founded by Creator/EdmundoSantos, considered one of the pioneers of the industry and a prolific Disney collaborator in his own right. It has become far more famous for its attempts to hire non-union voice actors, the conflict with ANDA that resulted from it, and the mass recasts on the current projects that followed ''that''.
246* Whatever respect Matt Lauer may have had as an NBC News anchor has long been overshadowed by his possible role in getting Ann Curry fired as his co-anchor on the ''Today'' show, which NBC denies. But this is nothing compared to his history of sexually harassing his co-workers during his time at the network, which came to light once the #[=MeToo=] movement started taking off, leading to his eventual firing from NBC. Even more allegations came to light in 2019 in #[=MeToo=] co-architect Ronan Farrow's book ''Catch and Kill'' where he alleges that Lauer raped an NBC News employee in Sochi, where he was covering the 2014 Winter Olympics.
247* Creator/OrianaFallaci was an Italian journalist and author who, after being a partisan during World War II, became famous worldwide for her earnest interviews with many world leaders during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s (including one with UsefulNotes/HenryKissinger, in which Kissinger described himself as "the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse", which Kissinger would later regret as "the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press."). However, after retirement, she returned to the spotlight after writing a series of controversial articles and books critical of Islam that aroused condemnation as well as support. While criticism of conservative aspects of Islam was nothing new for her (to interview the Ayatollah Khomeini following the Iranian Revolution, she was required to wear a chador, which she wore only to remove it during the interview before attacking the obligation of women to wear it), following the 9/11 attacks her criticism was viewed as having become much more inflammatory, including claiming that "the sons of Allah breed like rats", that Europe was no longer Europe but "Eurabia", and when rumors began of the construction of an Islamic center in Siena, saying that she would "blow it up with the help of [her] friends," to the point Creator/ChristopherHitchens (not a friend of Islam himself) criticized her books as "a sort of primer in how not to write about Islam." As a result, it's hard to talk about her accomplished career as a journalist without bringing up her anti-Islam views.
248* Obscure fantasy author Robert Stanek is more famous for the [[http://conjugalfelicity.com/robert-stanek/ deceptive tactics he used to promote his books and his attempts to silence critics]] than the books themselves.
249* Gloria Tesch is the author of the obscure ''Literature/MaradoniaSaga''. However, she's more known for the notorious "Team Tesch", which used {{Sock Puppet}}s to promote her books and tried to silence critics. It doesn't help that the film adaptation (in which she played a main character) had a TroubledProduction, and its director Gerry Tesch (Gloria's father) tried to screw over his business partners.
250* Artist Edgar Degas was one of the founders of Impressionism. But among those who have heard of him, he is more well known for his outspoken anti-Semitism than his art; his involvement in the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair Dreyfus Affair]] is ''at least'' as well known as his ballet-themed paintings.
251* Although Markus "Notch" Persson is known for founding Creator/{{Mojang}} and creating ''VideoGame/{{Minecraft}}'', the best-selling video game of all time, he's become notorious for supporting alt-right conspiracy theories and making transphobic remarks on Twitter. This ultimately led to him being [[UnPerson un-personed]] by Mojang, Microsoft, and the wider ''Minecraft'' community. The fact that the latter's rejection of Persson (by jokingly attributing the creation of ''Minecraft'' to Music/HatsuneMiku) became a widespread meme applied to other [=IPs=] with controversial creators (perhaps the most famous example being claiming that Creator/DanielRadcliffe was the "real" author of ''Harry Potter'') only cemented the controversy's status as the defining element of his reputation.
252* Roger Ailes, late former chair and CEO of Fox News, Fox Television Stations, and 20th Television, is best known for the allegations of sexual harassment on his part that tarnished his reputation and forced him to resign from his position in July 2016.
253* In Australia and New Zealand, making negative statements about ANZAC Day, a national day of remembrance that broadly commemorates all Australians and New Zealanders who served and died in all wars and armed conflicts can lead to controversy.
254** In 2015 Scott [=McIntyre=], who was a sports reporter for the state-financed public broadcaster SBS tweeted about it, including calling the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki "the largest terrorist attack in history" and made generalized statements about the day being built around "poorly-read white nationalist gamblers and drinks". He was immediately sacked by the conservative government, so he had moved to Tokyo with his Japanese wife in 2015 and kept working as a sports reporter. He found himself in the spotlight again in 2019 when the breakdown of his marriage resulted in their children being kept away from [=McIntyre=], and during his attempts to find them, he entered an apartment building illegally (but non-violently) for two minutes. He was reported to the police and later found guilty and being jailed for trespass.
255** Sudanese-born media commentator Yassmin Abdel-Magied became known for her heated clash with Tasmanian senator Jacqui Lambie over interpretations of Sharia law and suggesting that ANZAC Day should honor Muslim asylum seekers held in Australian detention facilities. The latter act sparked outrage from conservative media, who deemed it to be disrespectful and anti-Australian, with some even demanding for Magied to get fired from her position at the ''other'' state-financed public broadcaster, the ABC, and "self-deport". As a result of death threats, Magied fled Australia and moved to UsefulNotes/{{London}} permanently.
256* Since the early 2000s, French stand-up comedian [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieudonne_M%27bala_M%27bala Dieudonné M'bala M'bala]] has been extremely controversial for his open anti-Semitism. This was ''especially'' true after he made a 2015 Facebook post seemingly identifying himself with Amedy Coulibaly, an ISIL-affiliated Islamic terrorist who murdered four Jews while holding a Kosher supermarket hostage.
257* Creator/YukioMishima was a Japanese author, playwright, and poet who dabbled in acting, directing, and modeling. His body of work was well-regarded at the time (and today, at least to an extent), and there was even talk of him being nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature before he turned forty. But Mishima had ultra-nationalist views, which caused him to attempt a coup to restore the power of the emperor. When this failed, he killed himself. Nowadays, he's at least as well known for this as he is for his literary and film output.
258* Competitive gamer Todd Rogers spent decades as the respected "Mr. Activision", due in large part to holding many record-breaking high scores, his best-known one being beating ''Dragster'' in 5.51 seconds, for which he won a Guinness World Record. However, starting in the 2010s, many of his records were viewed with increasing suspicion due to lack of independent evidence, especially after some of them (particularly the ''Dragster'' one) were found to be impossible to obtain in normal play. In January 2018, Twin Galaxies removed his scores from their leaderboards and banned him for life, and Guinness followed suit by stripping him of all his records; to this day, his name is only ever invoked in discussions about his cheating and how long he got away with it.
259* Charlie Rose was once respected as a talk show host and journalist with a career that spanned decades. Then in 2017, he was one of the many celebrities accused of sexual misconduct in the aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein allegations breaking, being said to have sexually harassed at least eight women. The day after the article documenting the allegations was released, he was fired by CBS, PBS, and Bloomberg. 27 more women came forward with accusations in May 2018, bringing his total number of accusers to 35.
260* Creator/JKRowling created a generational pop-culture phenomenon with the ''Franchise/HarryPotter'' franchise. Since 2019, her reputation has been soured by her support of transphobes and her criticisms of trans rights, which led to her being condemned by many of the film's actors. Rowling's subsequent statement that she considers all support for the ''Harry Potter'' franchise an endorsement of her beliefs led to more critical reappraisals of it in light of her views. In particular, her descriptions of goblins were reanalyzed as antisemitic, the house-elves' HappinessInSlavery was highlighted, and various characters' names were considered excessively stereotypical and offensive. This all culminated in multiple calls to boycott all of the ''Wizarding World'''s products released since her views went public, including the ''Film/FantasticBeasts'' film series and the ''VideoGame/HogwartsLegacy'' video game (which also highlighted the issues the franchise has with goblins appearing to be anti-Semitic caricatures).
261* UsefulNotes/{{Tarrare}} was an 18th century-era French sideshow performer who gained notoriety for his ExtremeOmnivore tendencies, enough for the French military to try and briefly employ him as a spy and courier of documents. However, most modern discussions and jokes about him today revolve almost entirely around, or at the very least mention, allegations that [[ImAHumanitarian he devoured a baby]].
262* Helen Thomas is now known less for her journalism career and more for saying things that many accused of being antisemitic, then defending herself by denying it was even possible for her to be antisemitic by pointing to her Lebanese ancestry to claim that she was a Semite[[note]]in the sense of having significant ancestry from among the Semitic peoples[[/note]] herself.
263* Entrepreneur Peter Thiel's role in co-founding [=PayPal=] has become overshadowed by his bankrolling of Wrestling/HulkHogan's successful lawsuit against Gawker Media-- which ended up bankrupting Gawker-- as an act of revenge against Gawker for outing him as a gay man. He's also achieved controversy for his considerable ties to very polarizing political figures, including UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump, and for founding Palantir Technologies, a tech firm that has been repeatedly accused of facilitating corporate and government surveillance.
264* British TV chef Jamie Oliver is controversial because of his MoralGuardian activism including his 2005 school dinners campaign and campaign for a sugar tax. He was also criticized by climate activists for partnering with fossil fuel company Shell in 2019.
265* Fans of fantasy author Creator/DavidEddings were blindsided by revelations in 2020 that both he and his wife/co-author Leigh had done hard time in TheSeventies for abusing their adopted children.
266* Richard Brittain (the ''Series/{{Countdown}}'' contestant, not the Scottish footballer) was once respected as the champion of the 2006 ''Countdown'' season. However, from the 2010s onwards, he has become better known for becoming obsessed with and stalking university student Ella Durant for over three years, reducing her from a sociable woman to an emotional wreck from the trauma. He's also well-known for travelling hundreds of miles to an ASDA store to physically assault another young woman named Paige Rolland by smashing a wine bottle over her head--having used Website/{{Facebook}} to find out where she worked--all because she had posted a negative review of his novel ''Literature/TheWorldRose''. Rolland had to be rushed to hospital, both of these incidents resulted in Brittain getting arrested, and he's now known as a stalker and assaulter first and a ''Countdown'' champion second.
267* Hilaria Baldwin was beforehand best known for being the wife of Creator/AlecBaldwin and a yoga influencer, but this changed at the end of 2020 when video footage surfaced of her speaking with a contrived Spanish accent, including trying to pronounce "cucumber." As a result, people started to dig out and discover various past instances of her [[{{Fauxreigner}} pretending to be Spanish]],[[note]]including her agency's website having listed her birthplace as Mallorca, rather than her actual birthplace Boston,[[/note]] which resulted in her losing sponsorship deals with other companies. These days, her reputation is mostly defined by accusations that she faked her heritage.
268* [[Creator/JenniferDianeReitz Jennifer Diane Reitz (Chatoyance)]] had a rather storied computer programming career in the mid-1990s working with companies such as Interplay as well as founding Happy Puppy, a gaming website that at one time was ''the'' most visited gaming website on the Internet. Nowadays, if you mention her name, the first thing that comes to mind is her ''[[FanFic/TheConversionBureauTheChatoverse Chatoverse]]'' TCB stories, their ''extreme'' misanthropy and her vitriolic response to [[CantTakeCriticism any criticism]] of her setting. Outside of her stories, she is also infamous for her radical transgender and feminist viewpoints.
269* Odd Nerdrum is the Norwegian painter whose philosophy spawned the Kitsch movement, but people who aren't into art probably remember him for ''The Murder of Andreas Baader'', which portrays the violent left-wing extremist as a martyr, and the infamous ''Self Portrait in Golden Cape'' where he painted himself showing off an erection.
270* While Paolo Roberto, a Swedish entrepreneur, restauranteur, showrunner and professional boxer began his career in controversy as he was known for getting into physical fights and had ties to the biggest robbery in Swedish history when he got into acting and boxing, reception gradually warmed up to him and many considered him to be a "redeemed delinquent" of sorts. But this good will waned over time as he began self-identifying as a "militant opposer to feminism", and came to a head in May 2020 when he was arrested for purchasing sex, and doubled down by describing it as "an act of self-harm".[[note]]In Sweden, the sale of sex is legal, but not the purchase. In addition, it soon became very clear that the woman in question was a victim of sex trafficking.[[/note]]
271* English artist Eric Gill was infamous for depicting sex in his works, but was still praised as one of the greatest craftsmen of the 20th century. However, nearly fifty years after his death in 1940, it was revealed that he was a sex offender who committed rape, incest, paedophilia and bestiality, with his two eldest daughters among his victims, causing his work to be highly contested. The fact that a statue of his depicting a child is still outside BBC Television Centre is still a sore spot for many people.
272* Photographer and film director David Hamilton was always controversial due to his work often portraying nude or scantily-clad young women, with his movies often portraying young women pursuing romantic and sexual relationships with older men, but for a long time, he retained an auteur license because of his talent with lighting and composition. This fell apart in 2016 when a former model, Flavie Flament, accused him of raping her as a teenager in the '80s, followed by three other models coming forward with their own accusations. Hamilton committed suicide soon after; and the accusations, combined with his previous infamy, have overshadowed his work ever since.
273* While fantasy author Creator/AnaMardoll was already a controversial figure for xer[[note]]Mardoll uses xie/xer neopronouns publicly but he/him pronouns with friends[[/note]] radical views on social justice, in 2022 xie attracted greater controversy following the revelation that xie worked for notorious weapons contractor Lockheed Martin for the past 15 years. The revelation sparked debate between those criticizing Mardoll as hypocritical in light of xer views and those defending xer on the grounds that the revelation came from Kiwi Farms, a notorious cyberstalking site. Mardoll left Twitter in the wake of the debate; since then, xie's been much better known among the general public for xer history with Lockheed Martin than for xer bibliography.
274* ''ComicStrip/{{Dilbert}}'' creator Scott Adams' support of UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump and sympathies with men's rights activists, promotions of [[UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic COVID-19]] hoax-cures, and other dalliances with far-rightism, made the strip unpopular among those who don't share his views; while readers might normally be willing to overlook a cartoonist's personal politics, the fact that said politics resulted in some very public disputes and scandals made them difficult to ignore. This worsened when Adams made comments disparaging black people during a livestream, causing his distributor to cut ties with him and several newspapers dropping ''Dilbert''.
275* Elon Musk's purchase of Website/{{Twitter}} in 2022, and subsequent mismanagement of the website, has eclipsed his other achievements as founder of [=SpaceX=] and owner of Tesla. Arguably, the most scandalous decision was the one in which he allowed users buy verified checkmarks without actual proof of identity, which opened the floodgates to trolls buying the checkmark and using it to impersonate various celebrities and companies.[[note]]Most notably, a prankster pretending to be pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly announced that insulin will be free, leading to the corporation losing ''$15 billion'' in market capital.[[/note]] Compounding this are Musk's other controversial decisions like reinstating accounts previously banned for hate speech and fraud, firing the entire moderation team, and abruptly rebranding the site to "X", all of which led to a mass exodus of advertisers and users. And even before acquiring ownership of Twitter, he was already controversial for being a ConspiracyTheorist and [[DisappearedDad a deadbeat father]] to many of his children.
276* Kenji Yamamoto is a Japanese composer who was once best known for his involvement in the creation of the soundtracks for various pieces of ''Franchise/DragonBall'' media, such as ''Anime/DragonBallZKai'' and the ''[[VideoGame/DragonBallZBudokai Budokai]]'' series of video games. These days, however, Yamamoto is better known for the accusations of plagiarism that were made against his work during the airing of ''Anime/DragonBallZKai'', his subsequent firing by the Creator/ToeiCompany and the replacement of his tracks in re-releases of ''Dragon Ball'' media as a result of the plagiarism accusations.
277[[/folder]]
278
279[[folder:Events]]
280* While November 22, 1963 is widely known for the assassination of UsefulNotes/JohnFKennedy, fans of the Detroit Lions also remember the date because William Clay Ford Sr., the son of Edsel Ford and member of the board of directors of the Ford Motor Company, purchased the Lions to become the majority owner. Had it not been for the tragedy that day in Dallas, it is safe to say that while not necessarily front-page news, it would have made at least some waves. Not only was Kennedy assassinated on that day, [[Literature/BraveNewWorld Aldous Huxley]] and Creator/CSLewis also died as well.
281* The 1968 Democratic National Convention is best known for counterculture and anti-war protest activity that degenerated into rioting. Many historians have suggested that the fallout from the events was severe enough to be one of the main reasons Nixon won that year.
282* It's safe to say that the May 1985 G7 summit in Bonn is known among the general public solely for US President UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl making a ceremonial visit at a military cemetery in Bitburg to lay a wreath. When it became known that 49 members of the Waffen SS were buried there, a massive backlash against the planned visit occurred among Americans, causing a strain in American-West German relations. As an attempt at damage control, during the wreath-laying ceremony, Reagan carefully and deliberately turned his back on the Nazi graves, but this wasn't enough to prevent the affair from damaging his reputation.
283* The 1997 UsefulNotes/MacysThanksgivingDayParade is mostly remembered for high winds causing multiple balloon-related accidents. The most infamous of these was a Cat in the Hat balloon knocking off the arm of a lamppost, resulting in injuries to four people, one of whom went into a month-long coma.
284* The 2007 Anime Friends convention, the biggest anime/manga event in Brazil, was overshadowed by three women claiming to be ''Manga/LoveHina'' cosplayers that were wearing nothing but [[ModestyTowel towels]] - and one of the cosplayers was a teenager. The photos were quickly shared through the Internet, especially the ones with them flashing their panties (the rumors about them asking for money to flash their panties did ''not'' help). As such, the event was criticized for allowing it to happen, with some even accusing the event of supporting the prostitution of minors. While the controversy was contained to the Internet, meaning the convention was able to move past the incident and continue with the 2008 edition, there were new rules in place forbidding this type of cosplay.
285* The 2013 Miss Russia pageant is mostly known for the fact that winner Elmira Abdrazakova was hit with a barrage of Tatarophobic abuse online, to the point where she closed her social media accounts.
286* The 2015 Miss Universe pageant was overshadowed by host Steve Harvey accidentally announcing the wrong name as the winner and later by a vehicular incident that injured dozens of pedestrians (and killed one) outside the venue.
287* The 2016 Miss Teen USA pageant was supposed to be seen as a huge step in distancing beauty contests from their allegedly sexist pasts, as it was the first such pageant since the organization cut ties with Donald Trump. Instead, it drew more attention to concerns of racism, as its finalists were all blonde, white women. Furthermore, the eventual winner had used the "n-word" in several past tweets.
288* The German ''ECHO'' music awards were hit in April 2018 with a wave of protest for its Best Hip-Hop/Urban album of that year. The winners were Farid Bang and Kollegah, whose album ''Jung, Brutal, Gutaussehend 3'' (''Young, Brutal, Good-Looking 3'') had songs in which they mocked Jews and concentration camps and were heavily criticized due to it being seen as anti-Semitic. This has led to several well-known previous winners of the ''ECHO'' award returning their awards in disgust and distancing themselves from it. As a result, the ''ECHO'' award has been discontinued.
289* The Evolution Fighting Game Tournament is the most prestigious fighting game tournament on the planet, where people come from around the world to compete, and it's seen as ''the'' event of the year for the MediaNotes/FightingGameCommunity. However, sometimes the tournaments attract attention for the wrong reasons:
290** At EVO 2018, the ''[[VideoGame/SuperSmashBrosForNintendo3DSAndWiiU Smash 4]]'' tournament ended up almost entirely remembered for its Grand Finals between two players both using Bayonetta, a HighTierScrappy on the very top of the tier list in that game. The crowd had been openly hostile to both players (both on social media and in-person) by booing throughout the entire tournament, but when they both got to the Grand Finals, the booing became intense. The players [[StylisticSuck intentionally played badly in response to all the abuse]], wasting time by barely putting in any offense, one intentionally giving a "Homie Stock" [[note]]A ''Smash''-exclusive practice of self-destructing after the opponent unintentionally self-destructs, often done as a sign of respect and fairness in a friendly match with nothing on the line. The players doing it at EVO was seen as a sign of how they were refusing to take the match seriously.[[/note]], and standing still ''for two minutes''. The tourney organizers were forced to intervene and told both the crowd and the players to knock it off. It became a low point of the entire tournament and EVO history and was a black mark on the Western ''Smash'' community.
291** The 2019 ''VideoGame/{{Tekken 7}}'' set is best known for a poorly-thought-out prank by the organizers, where Solid Snake suddenly appeared on the screen and said "This is Snake. That was some good ass ''Tekken''." to ''Tekken'' director Katsuhiro Harada in a video styled after a ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid'' Codec conversation. This would have been an alright joke... had ''Tekken 7'' not already featured several {{Guest Fighter}}s in the game already. The crowd immediately assumed that this was an announcement that Snake was joining the roster and cheered loudly but became incredibly disappointed when it turned out to be nothing more than a joke. Worse still, this was done without the approval of Snake's voice actor Creator/DavidHayter (who had been commissioned to record the lines through the site Cameo as Twitch alerts), Harada, or Creator/BandaiNamco, all of whom were pissed that their voice and/or likeness were used that way without their permission. The incident ended up drawing any attention away from any of the actual gameplay that happened during the tournament.
292** At EVO Japan 2020, [[GameBreaker Leroy]] of ''VideoGame/{{Tekken 7}}'' (in)fame, who had become increasingly [[HighTierScrappy controversial]] after his release, solidified his place in the fighting game hall of infamy of overpowered characters. The tournament would see legends of the game Arslan Ash, Knee, and every other famous player who refused to jump on the Leroy bandwagon eliminated in stunning upsets. By top 8, only one player not using Leroy was left, a staggering 7/8 places having been taken by Leroy Players. That one player (Mikio) would manage an impressive second place finish, but they too would fall to Leroy player Book. His win, which would otherwise have been celebrated as a long time coming for the Thai player, just went down as further demonstration of Leroy's ludicrous power. To the surprise of no one, Leroy would proceed to get hammered with [[{{Nerf}} Nerfs]] in the following patches, bringing him down to a much more balanced level.
293** EVO itself fell victim to this starting in July 2020. While that year's edition of EVO was cancelled and turned into an online event due to the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic, and had to have its entire lineup of games changed to games that used rollback net code, those were quickly forgotten about when it was alleged that EVO organizer and cofounder Joey "Mr. Wiz" Cuellar had engaged in acts of pedophilia back in the early days of EVO. After these allegations, companies whose games were supposed to be featured at the event such as Creator/{{Capcom}}, Creator/BandaiNamco, and Creator/NetherrealmStudios backed out of appearing and cut ties with EVO, with lead to the final cancellation of EVO 2020 and the dismissal of Joey Cuellar. As a result of this, the rights to EVO were sold less than a year later to a joint venture between the Endeavor and Creator/SonyInteractiveEntertainment, which ''then'' resulted in Creator/{{Nintendo}} pulling out of EVO and setting up their own competitive circuit for ''VideoGame/SuperSmashBros'', doing even further damage to EVO due to the large attendance that ''Smash'' had drawn in years prior now not having any reason to attend EVO. While EVO has been able to relaunch, it will never be the event it once was because of the allegations against Joey Cuellar, which affected EVO both directly and indirectly.
294* Pound 2019 is most frequently remembered for the [[ProducePelting crab thrown at]] [[UsefulNotes/FGCAces Juan "Hungrybox" Debiedma]] after he won the Melee Bracket with its biggest HighTierScrappy Jigglypuff.
295* The [[UsefulNotes/ElectronicEntertainmentExpo E3]] 2019 convention accidentally doxed over 2,000 journalists and gamers with their website leaving their personal information available with just a single link click. They didn't help themselves at all by calling it a "website flaw," as if it were only some arcane loopholes that let people access the page rather than a link openly displayed on the main page. A class-action lawsuit was quickly put together, and it was put in serious question whether E3 had been completely killed by the incident, as it seemed unlikely anyone would be willing to hand over their information again. They tried to regain trust, but a [[UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic COVID]]-related cancellation in 2020, a disastrous 2021 online-only event, and two lack-of-interest cancellations in a row prevented it.
296* George W. Bush's December 14, 2008, press conference in Iraq, where he explained how the withdrawal of all U.S. combat forces would proceed, was overshadowed by an angry Iraqi journalist named Muntadhar al-Zaidi who [[ShoeSlap threw his shoes at him]], which Bush hastily dodged while Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki attempted to catch one to protect him.
297* Rainfurrest was a MediaNotes/FurryFandom convention formerly held in Seattle, Washington. It was created in 2007 to give the Pacific Northwest a new furry con after the demise of Conifur Northwest. However, the 2015 incarnation quickly became known both inside and outside the fandom for extreme misconduct. Attendees - and some event staff - were caught abusing drugs and vandalizing the hotel, and other attendees were found to be wandering around the con and public spaces in the Hilton hotel wearing fetish gear (some were even spotted wearing ''used adult diapers''). Two staffers were charged with assault (one sexual, the other regular), and the whole con nearly ended prematurely when a guest tampered with a smoke detector to hotbox their room. In the end, the Hilton [=SeaTac=] sent the con organizers letters announcing that they would no longer host Rainfurrest, and other regional hotels filed suit. The organizers tried to move Rainfurrest to another hotel for the 2016 incarnation, but the reputation of the 2015 incidents caused the con to terminate for good and its staff to disperse. Nowadays, both inside and outside the fandom, the [[CondemnedByHistory legacy of Rainfurrest seems to be limited entirely to the misdeeds of its last installment]].
298* The [[Creator/BlizzardEntertainment BlizzCon]] 2018 convention is mostly remembered for the intense fan backlash to the revelation that the then-latest game in the ''VideoGame/{{Diablo}}'' franchise, ''VideoGame/DiabloImmortal'', was to be [[MobilePhoneGame mobile]]-[[NoPortForYou exclusive]] after teasing fans of a new ''Diablo'' game being in the works for several months, thereby leading fans to believe they were working on ''VideoGame/DiabloIV'' (which was later announced at [=BlizzCon=] 2019); their decision to announce it as TheClimax to a convention aimed at Blizzard's most dedicated audience, [[DidntThinkThisThrough which is all but exclusively made up of]] [[Platform/IBMPersonalComputer PC]] [[DidntThinkThisThrough gamers]] who had paid $200 each to attend the event in hopes of seeing a mainline ''Diablo'' game; and Blizzard designer Wyatt Cheng impulsively and insensitively asking "Do you guys not have phones?" in response to the crowd's booing when he confirmed there were no plans for a PC port, which revealed that he had been [[DidntSeeThatComing taken by surprise]] by [=BlizzCon=] attendees' negative reaction. Cheng's question rapidly became a [[MemeticMutation meme]] used to mock corporations failing to understand their audiences.
299* The big Carnival parades of Brazil end in a vote count to determine who was the best "samba school". It is very SeriousBusiness, and the 2012 one in Usefulnotes/SaoPaulo wound up overshadowed by a disgruntled supporter being so angered by perceived low grades that they [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79nfFNzpqWc jumped into the judges' area to rip the rating papers!]] This had the consequence of the ratings that [[FourPointScale hardly went lower than 9.0]] actually start with 9.0, rather than have the risk of someone giving a grade lower than that to anger the crowd.
300* The ''TabletopGame/YuGiOh'' First National Conference tournament--held by Creator/{{Konami}} on August 26th, 1999--was where a [[https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Premium_Pack_(Japanese) Premium Pack]] was released to attendees with the announcement that its cards would never be re-released[[note]]This was true at the time. However, several of its cards would eventually be re-released[[/note]], and among its cards was "[[https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Exodia_the_Forbidden_One Exodia the Forbidden One]]". However, representatives were not prepared for the number of people who would attend the tournament[[note]]Most attendees didn't care about the tournament; they just wanted Exodia[[/note]]; the Premium Pack was sold by a single vendor, and the tournament ended up being attended by approximately ''10,000'' more people than the entire building could contain. The result was a full-fledged riot when the Premium Pack was cancelled by the representatives, in which two people ended up hospitalized along with dozens of relatively minor injuries. As a result, the tournament is remembered only for the riot that ensured in the wake of a coveted ''Yu-Gi-Oh!'' card being temporarily pulled from sale[[note]]The Premium Pack would ultimately be converted into a mail order that required proof of tournament attendance to pick up[[/note]].
301[[/folder]]
302
303[[folder:Places]]
304* Few people who live outside of the St. Louis area know anything about the suburb of Ferguson outside of being the city where racial riots erupted after a black man was shot dead by a white police officer.
305* UsefulNotes/{{Columbine}} High School in Colorado, Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, and Robb Elementary School in Texas (and by extension, the towns of Newtown, Parkland, and Uvalde where the latter three are located[[note]]Littleton, Columbine's hometown, mostly avoids this, as that shooting is rarely ever referred to by that name[[/note]]) are all primarily known for being the sites of mass school shootings. In fact, Columbine's reputation has become so unshakeable that, 20 years after the shooting took place, there have been talks about tearing down the school.
306** Schools aren't the only building that get hit with this, prior to 2017 the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino was mainly known for its attached arena that hosts various combat sports events and concerts. Ever since the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting 2017 Las Vegas shooting]] it's known for being where the gunman was perched (in a rented room on the 32nd floor) when he opened fire on a crowd of concertgoers across the street below, killing 60 people and himself. The hotel has since reopened, with the two rooms that the shooter rented now permanently sealed off to the public.
307* As noted by the 2007 documentary ''Film/{{Zoo}}'' and satirized by ''Film/TheDeathOfDickLong'', the city of Enumclaw in King County, Washington is almost impossible to refer to without bringing up [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enumclaw_horse_sex_case the incident in 2005]] in which Boeing engineer Kenneth Pinyan died as a result of receptive anal sex with a horse.
308* The island of Little Saint James, a small private island in the US Virgin Islands, is best known for involvement in child sex trafficking case surrounding its former owner Jeffrey Epstein. Under his ownership it earned nicknames such as "Island of Sin", "Lolita Island", "Orgy Island", "Pedophile Island", etc and everyone who visited it, including celebrities and politicians, are suspected to have used his services.
309* [[UsefulNotes/{{Beijing}} Tiananmen Square]] is one of the most famous locations in China and has a rich history. But, for most people living in democracies, the first thing that comes to mind hearing that name is the 1989 protests that were violently stamped out by the Chinese military. The governing Communist Party of China, who are very aware of this, have thus gone great lengths to suppress all knowledge of the event within their borders.
310* The Watergate Hotel is at least as well-known for being the setting of Richard Nixon's infamous scandal that ended him as a public figure as being a hotel, to the point that "-gate" would go on to become [[ScandalGate a suffix used in the names of controversies]].
311* Despite being part of a transnational UNESCO World Heritage Site known as the "Great Spa Towns of Europe", the French resort town of Vichy is largely known for being the capital of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vichy_France Vichy France]], a pro-Axis puppet state. To this day, the word "Vichy" [[PersonAsVerb is a byword]] for collaboration with oppressive, expansionist regimes, including [[TropeNamers naming]] the trope VichyEarth.
312[[/folder]]
313
314[[folder:Others]]
315* The swastika. [[UsefulNotes/NonNaziSwastika Originally used in an almost exclusively positive manner]], it is widely associated with UsefulNotes/NaziGermany now. Even if you are yourself a Jew, Romani, etc. -- and in fact, trying to use the GrandfatherClause or NWordPrivileges on this point will likely only stir up greater resentment against you. The exception is if you are a Hindu, Buddhist or a Jain, both religions that used the symbol in its original context for centuries before Hitler co-opted it.
316* While we're on the subject of the swastika, several flags around the world fall into this category for similar reasons:
317** The [[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:North_Virginia_Third_Bunting.svg Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia]], better known as the "[[UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar Confederate battle flag]]" or just the "Confederate flag" (leading to it being sometimes confused as the flag of the Confederacy as a whole), remains a highly, ''highly'' divisive symbol in the U.S. because of its adoption as a symbol by white supremacists, and more recently its association with racist incidents like the 2015 Charleston church shooting (the gunman had posed in photos with the battle flag). Flags of Southern states which feature the battle flag as a canton (like Mississippi's, which changed their flag after the killing of George Floyd) or a saltire design clearly inspired by the battle flag (Florida's and Alabama's) are also an issue. Some have also called for [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Georgia_(U.S._state) Georgia's state flag]] (which had ''already'' been changed in 2001 to remove the battle flag) to be redesigned again, since it draws its design from the first flag used by the Confederacy, the "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_the_Confederate_States_of_America#First_flag:_the_%22Stars_and_Bars%22_(1861–1863) Stars and Bars]]". The controversy surrounding the flag has spread across the Atlantic, as some European far-right groups began using it to get around bans on displaying symbols associated with fascism. The flag has become so controversial that even UsefulNotes/{{NASCAR}} has banned it, first banning any employee of NASCAR or one of its teams from displaying it in 2015 while asking fans not to bring it to races, then completely banning it from any NASCAR event in 2020.
318** The Charleston shooter also embraced the former [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_South_Africa_(1928-1994) flag of South Africa]] (associated with UsefulNotes/TheApartheidEra) and the former [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Rhodesia flag of Rhodesia]], both of which were used by racist, repressive white minority governments and have been adopted by white supremacists in recent years. As of 2019, public display (outside historical or artistic context) of the former South African flag is legally considered hate speech in South Africa.
319** Then there is the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_Flag Rising Sun flag]], which people closely identify with UsefulNotes/ImperialJapan. The flag is actually still officially in use by Japan's navy, while a more stylized version is used by its ground forces. While the flag isn't particularly controversial in the West compared to the Nazi flag, that is decidedly ''not'' the case in Asia, ''especially'' in China and Korea, thanks to the horrific atrocities carried out by the Japanese under that banner during their colonization of the continent. This trope even extends to generic sunburst and radiating line patterns if they too closely resemble the flag's rays. In 2021, [[https://news.yahoo.com/school-mural-transformed-original-offended-120001711.html a mural]] in Los Angeles' Koreatown had to be revised because of this.
320** As with a lot of things related to UsefulNotes/TheTroubles, flags are a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Ireland_flags_issue very sore issue]] depending on which side of the divide you're on. The Union Jack is beloved by unionists/loyalists/Protestants but despised by nationalists/republicans/Catholics. The Irish tricolour is beloved by nationalists/republicans/Catholics but despised by unionists/loyalists/Protestants. (And that's not even getting into the flags used by paramilitaries.) It's considered such SeriousBusiness, even decades after The Troubles ended, that a decision in 2012 to fly the Union Jack over Belfast City Hall on public holidays led to serious rioting.
321* UsefulNotes/{{Skinheads}} were originally just a 1960s subculture of working-class Brits who wore jeans and workboots along with their short-cropped hair. They were also huge fans of reggae. Sadly, many of them gravitated to racist and neo-Nazi movements during the 1970s, to the point that skinheads in general are associated with Nazism and racism, even though there are also anti-racist, anarchist, far-left, and apolitical skinheads.
322* In December 2014, Music/DaveGrohl got his first solo ''Magazine/RollingStone'' magazine cover. Sadly, that moment has been completely overshadowed by the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus "A Rape on Campus"]] article in the magazine. That story, wherein a student claimed she was sexually assaulted multiple times and her school covered it up, sparked a wave of protests, but turned out to be so poorly researched (no attempt was ever made by the author to talk with any of the boys accused ''or'' the police to corroborate her allegations, and independent fact-checkers quickly discovered [[FalseRapeAccusation the student had lied about everything]]) that the magazine was forced to retract it and blackball the author. The associate dean of the University of Virginia, where the nonexistent rapes occurred, as well as the fraternity named in the article, sued ''Rolling Stone'' for defamation.
323* In 2014, a story about a man from Virginia claiming [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bir_Tawil an unclaimed empty desert territory between Egypt and Sudan]] went viral. He wanted to establish a "kingdom" so that his daughter could become a real-life princess, and it was a heartwarming story of a father's love of and loyalty to his daughter. Things, however, took a turn for the ugly when [[Film/SuperSizeMe Morgan Spurlock]] bought the movie rights to it, and ''Disney'' was to distribute it. This announcement immediately brought connections to the highly illustrious Franchise/DisneyPrincess franchise and drew plenty of criticism, as this was about a white girl becoming a princess in ''Africa'' -- a continent associated with anything but white people, and the colonialism aspect reminded people of another rather controversial entry in the franchise, ''WesternAnimation/{{Pocahontas}}''.
324* Malaysia Airlines is best known outside its home country for two disasters that happened to its planes in 2014: the disappearance of Flight 370 in the Indian Ocean and the shoot-down of Flight 17 over the Russia-Ukraine border. Before those, it was actually considered one of the world's ''safest'' airlines.
325* Alex Tizon was a respected journalist and author for much of his career, but his earlier work has largely been overshadowed by his final story, "My Family's Slave", in which he confesses that his parents kept a slave for 56 years. The piece was published by ''The Atlantic'' shortly after his death, and had an extremely polarizing reaction, earning praise for its honesty and showcasing Tizon's deep guilt in his adulthood over her treatment, but also criticism for revealing that Tizon never really did much to help her after he became a journalist and that he did not reveal her slave status to the obituary writer at the newspaper he worked at, resulting her story not being told until seven years after her death. Whatever one's reaction to the piece was, it's the only thing anyone remembers from Tizon's Pulitzer Prize-winning career.
326* Jade Goody, mentioned in the Western Animation section, was once a rather famous British women's gossip icon in the early 2000s, thanks to her role in the third season of ''Series/BigBrother''. However, things took an ugly turn in her re-appearance in the fifth season of the spinoff show ''Celebrity Big Brother'', where she and two other female contestants racially insulted Indian actress Shilpa Shetty (who would later go on to win the season) many times over her incorrect usage of cooking with stock cubes. The incident led to the highest number of complaints ever recorded to OFCOM and caused Goody to quickly be voted off the show. ''Celebrity Big Brother'' lost many of its sponsorships as a result and went on a one-year hiatus after the season ended. She eventually became the butt of many jokes afterward until her death from cervical cancer in 2009. Even though her reputation has slightly improved after her death, her name has still become synonymous with the event. [[Music/SClub7 Jo O'Meara]] and Danielle Lloyd, the other two contestants involved in the incident, also faced blowback, though not as severe as Goody's.
327* Despite a long career that spans four decades, ten books, and countless exhibitions, photographer Sally Mann's career has largely been overshadowed by the controversy that arose over her third book, ''Immediate Family'', which features a lot of nude (though not sexually explicit) photos of her children.
328* While UsefulNotes/ChristopherColumbus wasn't the first to discover America, his voyages ''did'' lead to a greater contact with the Old and New Worlds, (hence the term ''Columbian'' exchange) and kick-started the colonization of the Continent by European powers. However, it also led to the mistreatment and death of several indigenous peoples, which Columbus himself allegedly had a direct part in. As a result, a ''significant'' portion of the population in the Americas has opposed the celebration of Columbus Day,[[note]]For example, in the United States in particular the celebration is controversial for being named after Columbus, while in other countries it has names that distanced them from his persona, like "Day of the Race" or "Day of the Americas".[[/note]] with some communities having outright changed the name of the day to "Indigenous Peoples Day," "Respect for Cultural Diversity Day," "Italian Heritage Day," or other similar names in direct reference to said mistreatment.
329* Celebrity chef Mario Batali took a major hit to his popularity in December 2017 when he was faced with no less than twelve sexual harassment accusations in the fallout from the aforementioned Harvey Weinstein scandal. He lost his hosting gig on the cooking talk show ''The Chew'', reruns of his older show ''Molto Mario'' were pulled from Creator/FoodNetwork, and Target announced they would be no longer stocking his cookbooks after they received a petition with over 7,000 signatures.
330* Billy Bush, a relative of the Bush political family, was the longtime host of ''Access Hollywood'' who later took on hosting duties on NBC's ''Today'' show. But to most people, he will forever be known for being the man who Donald Trump was talking to when he made comments widely interpreted as being about how he could sexually assault women without being punished. Once the tape was leaked during Trump's presidential campaign, Bush was fired by NBC.
331* It is difficult to talk about the International Brotherhood of Teamsters without bringing up the many years they were connected with TheMafia, especially under the leadership of the notorious Jimmy Hoffa. This not only damaged the Teamsters, but to this day, there is a certain percentage of the American public (encouraged by anti-labor politicians) who believe that all labor unions are corrupt.
332** Also, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act was passed to combat mob influence in labor unions. Investigations by prosecutors in the 1980s revealed how entrenched the mob was in labor racketeering, and the crimes they committed such as [[StealingFromTheTill stealing from benefit plans]], giving "no-show" jobs to mafiosi so they could have a legit income, and forcing contractors to hire only mob-controlled workers. In some cases, they even gained entire control over a union's board. In New York City, most construction projects could not be performed without mob approval. In the freight industry, mobsters would steal valuable items after bribing union workers and fence the stolen merchandise on the black market.
333* Gawker Media was certainly never free of controversy, at least partially due to several ''very'' shady and sleazy things they did (coming up with a feature to track celebrities called ''Gawker Stalker Maps'', [[ForcedOutOfTheCloset outing people as gay without their permission]], etc.). But most people know the company for the circumstances of its demise: after they posted a sex tape of Wrestling/HulkHogan and ignored a court order to take it down, Hogan sued them into bankruptcy, receiving significant financial assistance in his suit from venture capitalist Peter Thiel, [[TheDogBitesBack one of the people Gawker]] had forced out of the closet. Not helping was former Gawker editor AJ Daulerio implying he would have been willing to post sex tapes involving prepubescent children during cross-examination.[[note]]He was probably being flippant, but it's still a ''very'' bad idea to say something like that on the stand.[[/note]]
334* The now-defunct company [=AmericaStar=] Books, formerly [=PublishAmerica=], was primarily well-known for accusations of being a [[VanityPublishing vanity press]], which were put to the test when a group of science fiction and fantasy authors, upon the company [[SciFiGhetto sniping]] at the genres they wrote in [[http://web.archive.org/web/20031217113119/http://www.authorsmarket.net/experts.htm two]] [[http://web.archive.org/web/20031212115034/http://www.authorsmarket.net/youreyes.htm articles]], decided to collaborate on a book, ''Literature/AtlantaNights'', with the goal to make the book [[StylisticSuck as bad as possible]], and see if [=PublishAmerica=] would actually sell it; ''Atlanta Nights'' was approved, with the authors happy[[note]]but also per the advice from their lawyer[[/note]] to confirm the hoax when it was announced. [=PublishAmerica=] immediately stated that they weren't going to publish the book until after further review, but the entire fiasco confirmed the suspicions of the company being a vanity press. They also faced criticism for not paying the people whose works [=AmericaStar=] published, and it even continued to sell their work despite their ownership having expired, which likely played a part in the company's eventual closing in 2018.
335* At least in the United States, the Australian real estate company LJ Hooker is known almost entirely for its ill-fated attempt into building shopping malls. Most notorious is Forest Fair Mall, an overly-large, sprawling upscale megamall that was doomed from the start. Promising an upscale shopping experience, LJ Hooker bought stakes in ''four'' upmarket department stores to force them into the mall -- a move seen as risky not only due to the blue-collar demographics and existing retail nearby but also due to all four stores being new to the market. The mall was DOA, combining with other failed retail venues across the States which drove LJ Hooker to bankruptcy in 1989, taking down three of the four department stores with it. Forest Fair Mall itself saw a few short-lived revival attempts, including a briefly successful run under the Mills Corporation (bought out by Simon Property Group, the largest mall company in the US, in 2007), but the initial controversy always hung over it. Its reputation, combined with new retail developments to the north, has left it as a nearly vacant white elephant for most of the 21st century. Meanwhile developer George Herscu, who oversaw the ill-fated US expansion and was fired for it, continued to be the target of other financial controversies in real estate back in Australia and was described by multiple sources as "[[https://www.smh.com.au/business/disgraced-developer-george-herscu-dies-20131219-2znub.html disgraced]]" at the time of his 2013 death.
336* Creator/{{TBN}} is an evangelical Christian network that holds the record of being the largest religious broadcaster in the world. But most people know it best for two major controversial elements: its advocacy of the "prosperity gospel", which claims that {{God}} will reward people with material blessings if they donate money to the network (which has been criticized for contradicting the anti-materialistic leanings in the New Testament and caused detractors to [[MaliciousMisnaming dub TBN]] "[[FunWithAcronyms The Blasphemy Network]]"); and the various conflicts (some of them legal in nature) between members of the [[BigScrewedUpFamily Crouch family]] that owns it.
337* Henry Ford was and remains an iconic engineer, industrialist, and philanthropist, founding the automaker that bears his name and being the chief developer of the assembly line technique of mass production, which converted the automobile from an expensive curiosity into an accessible conveyance that profoundly impacted the landscape of the 20th century. But his promotion of anti-Semitism (to the point of buying [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dearborn_Independent his own newspaper]] to publish his views)[[note]]Though if one source is to be believed, Ford was reportedly so horrified by the atrocities of the Nazi regime that he collapsed with a stroke after being shown newsreel footage of the aftermath of UsefulNotes/TheHolocaust. Even more ironic was that he was a Freemason, a secretive fraternal society often if not always alleged to have been plotting for a New World Order amongst other conspiracies, with which the Jewish elite are recurring subjects of such canards; further fueling the irony was the fact that the Nazis were also anti-Masonic.[[/note]] and his staunch opposition towards labor unions have left a dark stain on his legacy that's very hard to ignore.
338* Dr. Laura Schlessinger is probably best known less for her self-help advice and more for her condemnation of homosexuality (citing her religious beliefs as an excuse), a nude photo scandal, and her complaining to a black woman and asking why [[NWordPrivileges she was offended by the word "nigger" when "black people say it all the time."]]
339* It's hard to talk about Cecil Rhodes without discussing his racist and pro-imperialist views, as well as the infamous [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jameson_Raid Jameson Raid]] that resulted his forced resignation as prime minister and the debate over whether it's appropriate for universities to pay tribute to him (as he was the founder and namesake of the famous Rhodes Scholarship).
340* If you know the defunct Mexican restaurant chain Chi-Chi's for anything other than its licensed Mexican food products which are still sold in grocery stores, then that would most likely be the widespread Hepatitis A outbreak at several of their restaurants in late 2003. The outbreak, the largest in U.S. history, was traced back to a location at a mall in Pennsylvania. Already taxed by overexpansion and increased competition, Chi-Chi's could not recover from this debacle and quickly closed down all of its U.S. locations.
341* Fast food chain Chick-fil-A gained infamy in the 2010s for its ties to anti-LGBTQ legislation and organizations, particularly those that practiced conversion therapy, which has long been discredited and considered harmful. As a result, boycotts became common for a while, and mention of the restaurant often involved a discussion of the controversial politics as much or more than its food. While the chain announced in 2019 that it would no longer donate to anti-LGBTQ groups, owner Dan Cathy is reportedly still a donor, and the association of the brand with homophobia is still strong.
342* A particular style of shoe sold by C. & J. Clark, one of the largest shoe manufacturing firms in the UK, [[https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40916607 became this]] when an angry mother made a rant claiming that the "Dolly Babe" Mary Jane school shoes were shoddy, and that the shoes' name itself was "sexist" and "promoting gender stereotypes." SeriousBusiness ensued, and as a result, Clarks issued an apology, stating that it wasn't their intention to offend, pulling out the shoes in question from sale.[[note]]They did briefly [[https://www.charlesclinkard.co.uk/girls-c23/school-shoes-c71/cla-dolly-babe-jnr-p23607 re-release]] the style [[SameFaceDifferentName under the name]] [[https://www.mumzworld.com/en/clarks-movello-lo "Movello Lo"]] presumably to clear out existing inventory, though.[[/note]] They would later commit to designing and selling "gender-neutral" school shoes, which presumably also had a side-effect of being more acceptable in certain schools where dress codes are stringently observed.
343* The reputation of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria has been overshadowed by his death in a murder-suicide pact alongside his lover, Baroness Mary Vetsera, in what became known as the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayerling_incident Mayerling incident]], which started a chain of events that led to UsefulNotes/WorldWarI. Before that, he was known as a RenaissanceMan: a respected ornithologist[[note]]Having written several monographs that are still cited to this day.[[/note]] with an interest in minerals and rock formations.[[note]]His sizable mineral collection was bequeathed to the Natural History Museum and the Universität für Bodenkultur.[[/note]] He wrote anonymous political articles that were strongly liberal and remarkably prescient,[[note]]In direct opposition to his staunchly conservative father, Emperor Franz Joseph.[[/note]] published a travelogue, initiated and wrote for an encyclopedia of regional studies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and was awarded two honorary doctorates from the Universities of Budapest and Vienna. He was an artist as well.[[note]]Some of his work can be seen at the Imperial Furniture Collection in Vienna.[[/note]] In society and at court, he was considered an excellent conversationalist, charming enough to win the affections of UsefulNotes/QueenVictoria.[[note]]At her jubilee, she specifically asked for his presence, and he escorted her to her dinner, preceding all attendant kings.[[/note]]
344* Pizzeria maverick "Papa" John Schnatter courted controversy in 2018 when he terminated Papa John's sponsorship of the NFL due to the kneeling issue, which prompted some neo-Nazis to proclaim him as their hero and urging other white supremacists to buy Papa John's pizza. His complaints about how the Affordable Care Act would supposedly bankrupt his company received very little sympathy, especially after a picture of his [[BigFancyHouse enormous mansion]] went viral, with comparisons between his wealth and his minimum-wage employees being made. Then an audio recording of Schnatter making racist comments emerged, which served as the final straw for Papa John's other board members, who subsequently ousted him from the company. Ironically, the comments were intended to ''prevent'' controversy, as the quote was him actually talking about how other corporations get away with saying such words.
345* Marcial Maciel was a Mexican Catholic priest who founded the Legion of Christ, and throughout most of his career, he was respected within the church as a prolific fundraiser and recruiter of new seminarians. Later in his life, however, Maciel was accused of sexually abusing many boys and young men in his care for a long time, accusations that the legion later acknowledged as factual after his death.[[note]]After his death, it came to light that he had also maintained sexual relationships with multiple women, one of whom was a minor at the time, and to have fathered many children with them.[[/note]] This ascended him to infamy in Latin America and abroad, with his name becoming a byword for PedophilePriest in his native Mexico in particular. For example, when in ''Film/{{Deadpool|2016}}'' the title character calls somebody "Jared" as a reference to Jared Fogle, the former Subway spokesman and convicted child molester; in the Latin American Spanish dub (done in Mexico), since Fogle is little known in Latin America, the Merc with a Mouth (dubbed by [[Creator/JoseAntonioMacias Pepe Toño Macías]]) [[{{Woolseyism}} calls him "Father Maciel" instead]].
346* Brazilian-American preacher Josué Yrion would probably just be an unknown outside of U.S. and Latin American evangelical and fundamentalist sects, if it weren't for a series of sermons he did and released on video in the late 1990s accusing video games, Disney films (and the company as a whole), and {{Franchise/Pokemon}} (among others) [[EveryoneIsSatanInHell of being "satanic"]] using false and/or manipulated "evidence" (most infamously using ''Franchise/YuGiOh'' cards claiming they were ''Pokémon'' ones and making up demonic and sexual meanings for them), as well as making overly outlandish and bizarre claims like videogames causing fatal brain tumors after playing them for eight years, which went viral beginning in the late 2000s among the Spanish-speaking world and later became a MemeticMutation thanks to two short parodies in which Yrion's voice is edited to sound like he's singing about the evils of video games (or "Nintendos", as he called them) and Pokémon (or "Pokimons", as he pronounces it). One of those sermons featured a libelous statement against Brazilian children's singer and actress Xuxa, claiming she had sold her soul to Satan and was involved in Satanic rituals (a claim that was repeated by several Latin American evangelical churches and tabloids). Around 2006, before the sermons went viral, Xuxa filed a defamation lawsuit against the publications and churches (including Yrion), which she won afterwards. Seemigly, one of the conditions for Yrion was for him to halt the distribution of the videogames/Disney/Pokémon sermons and never mention them again, as he has kept silent even after being propelled to "fame" by them. As such, he will forever be seen as a laughingstock á la Jack Thompson and a fraud among those outside of fringe sects.
347* The thin blue line has become a controversial symbol in recent years. The line originally stood for police solidarity, representing police officers separating good from evil. However, the line took off in the mainstream after various cases of police brutality against African Americans in the early/mid-2010s led to the flag being co-opted by critics of the then-fledgling Black Lives Matter movement. Backlash against it really took off after the Unite the Right rally in 2017, where thin blue line flags were seen flying alongside Confederate battle flags by right-wing extremists. Ever since then, the blue line flags have been seen in some circles as representing opposition to police accountability or even as emblems of far-right politics and/or white supremacy.
348* Ayds was a brand of appetite-suppressant candy that saw strong sales in the 1970s and 1980s, but nowadays is only known for the controversy surrounding its name, pronounced the same as "AIDS." It didn't help that weight loss is an effect of both the disease and the candy. As AIDS rose to prominence in the late 1980s, the company's sales plummeted, and they tried to distance themselves from the epidemic by changing their name to "Aydslim" in Britain and "Diet Ayds" in the States, before ultimately being discontinued, with its only legacy being its [[HarsherInHindsight retrospectively awkward]] advertising campaign.
349* The bootleg videotape distribution company Video Bancorp would have faded into complete obscurity after their 1990 closing had they not gotten into controversy in 1993 when a mother discovered thirty minutes of pornographic content was left at the end of a ''WesternAnimation/{{Popeye}}'' tape she bought for her daughter. The few sources that discuss Video Bancorp always mention that incident.
350* Boeing's reputation has taken a hit in recent years as their entire 737-MAX series jets had to be grounded for months worldwide due to two crashes killing 346 people. The problems have continued to accumulate for the company, as their 777 series has seen several jets be grounded and the 787 series has been having additional problems as well.
351* Robert Barker co-printed (with John Norton) the [[Literature/TheBible King James Bible]] of 1611, one of the most important and influential books in the history of the English language. Barker's reputation was completely tarnished in 1631 when he co-printed (with Martin Lucas) the infamous "Wicked Bible", named after a [[StealthPun crucial]] typographical error in the Ten Commandments that omitted the word "not" from "Thou shalt not commit adultery", turning it into "Thou shalt commit adultery". There was no way such an error found in the Ten Commandments would go unnoticed, and 17th century England saw this unfortunate blunder as a ''very'' serious crime; almost all copies of the edition were recalled and burned by order of [[UsefulNotes/CharlesI King Charles I]] (it is believed that ''fewer than twelve'' copies exist today, and as you can imagine [[KeepCirculatingTheTapes they sell for outrageous prices]]), and both Barker and Lucas were fined £300 (equivalent to approximately £71,490 in 2021) and [[RoleEndingMisdemeanor had their printing licenses revoked]]. Four years later, Barker was imprisoned for debt, where he remained until his death in 1643. Even centuries later, while the King James Bible itself is highly regarded as a pivotal moment in English history, it's still very difficult to talk about its co-printer without mentioning that he also co-printed the "Wicked Bible".
352* Kingfisher Airlines used to be the second largest India based Airline Group. However, it is now overshadowed by the actions of its chairman and founder Vijaya Mallya, who after accumulating a large amount of debt from various banks across India, fled the country. This caused the company to shut down in 2012, while extradition efforts are still in progress.
353* GSC Vindicat atque Polit, or Vindicat, the oldest student association of the Netherlands, is notable for two things: its list of famous (former) members, even including several Dutch royals, and the many scandals it got involved in over the past decades. The first scandal (back in 1997) involved a prospective member, who drank himself to death on Dutch gin during his "introductory drink". A second scandal (just under two decades later) involved another prospective member, who contracted severe head trauma after a senior member stood on them during a hazing. This was quickly followed by several politicians (and former members) distancing themselves from the student association. Around the same time, it also came to light that a group of Vindicat members had made a "banga"-list of their fellow female students, rating both their looks and sexual performance, which cost the association their place on the national heritage list. When another case of (physical) abuse within the student association came to light little over a year later (in 2018), both the University of Groningen and the Hanze University Groningen decided to (temporarily) cut their ties with the student association, forfeiting their annual payment of 33000 Euros to Vindicat. While their allowance from the universities in Groningen has since been reinstated, wild stories of hazing practices within Vindicat still run rampant and one can't mention the name without discussing their past transgressions.
354* The foam pillow manufacturer [=MyPillow=] has now become known for its founder/owner Mike Lindell using the company as a platform to promote right-wing conspiracy theories. One notable claim he propagated was insisting that his friend Creator/DonaldTrump was re-elected as President in 2020 and that year's election was rigged in UsefulNotes/JoeBiden's favor. Lindell also claimed that the riot at the U.S. Capitol committed by believers of this conspiracy theory during a pro-Trump protest he co-sponsored was actually committed by far-left anarchists disguised as Trump supporters. His support for far-right conspiracy groups such as the [=QAnon=] movement (followers of which participated in the riot) hasn't helped, either. Consequentially, [=MyPillow=] was dropped from some stores and Lindell was subsequently blocked from Twitter, followed by the company when he used the corporate Twitter account to ban-evade. Lindell would make a direct-to-video movie titled ''Absolute Proof'' to try to back these claims further. It would win Worst Picture at the 2020 UsefulNotes/{{Golden Raspberry Award}}s.
355** Even before Mike Lindell's turn towards politics, he was a controversial figure due to having designed the pillow during insomnia caused by his decade-long crack cocaine addiction, which was so bad that his own dealer staged an intervention. Despite framing it as an inspirational story about being liberated from his addiction by God, his account came off as romanticising the crack lifestyle due to his claims that God commanded him to start [=MyPillow=] in a vision he had after a two week sleepless crack binge, giving him the entire product design, including the logo, and that he would often talk about [[DrugsAreGood how much fun crack supposedly is]] in interviews. This led to public concern that he was not a "sleep expert", but a guy with cocaine and insomnia-induced psychosis selling an untested product. This was borne out when the pillow company faced restrictions from industry watchdogs for promoting false health claims, using misleading pricing and selling poor quality products that consumers disliked. Lindell argued that this response was due to the government trying to censor him for his political beliefs.
356* The vuvuzela is a kind of horn that is deeply integrated in UsefulNotes/{{South Africa}}n culture, but it is ''extremely'' infamous internationally for the loud, monotonous drone it produces when blown, to the point that it can cause permanent hearing loss to unprotected ears. Vuvuzelas received intense backlash at the 2010 [[UsefulNotes/TheWorldCup World Cup]] that was hosted in South Africa that year, and there was even a case where a teenage boy's local neighbour became so frustrated with him blowing his vuvuzela during that year's World Cup [[OffingTheAnnoyance that he decided to kill him]] by gunshot.
357* Advertising agency Fallon [=McElligott=] was a respected, award-winning company until its childish response to a critique of one of its ads. A woman wrote to complain about an ad for ''Series/Dynasty1981'' that said, "Bitch, Bitch, Bitch", calling it sexist. In response, an agency executive sent her a photo of an African boy kissing cow's butt, saying, "As the enclosed photo clearly illustrates, the Dinka tribe of East Africa has a rather barbaric ritual that has apparently been going on for centuries. I pass it along to you believing that you will be able to deal with these people in the same firm, yet even-handed manner in which you dealt with us." Another executive, Tom [=McElligott=], called her a "brave missionary to the Dinkas." The resulting PR storm led to the agency losing a client, and this whole incident has remained an embarrassing footnote in the company's history.
358* Chances are that if someone's heard of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarsdale_diet Scarsdale diet,]] it's because its co-author Herman Tarnower was shot dead by his jilted lover Jean Harris in 1980.
359* Fredric Wertham tends to be remembered less for his contribution to the US Civil Rights Movement, and more for being the author of the infamous 1954 book ''Seduction of the Innocent'', which produced a moral panic about comic books and led to the creation of UsefulNotes/TheComicsCode.
360* Richard Stallman is a well-known figure in the open source movement. These days, his comments supporting pedophilia is what people will remember the most.
361* Cause Animale Nord was a relatively unknown animal rights group based in France, and it gained attention in 2015 for the wrong reasons - namely for forcibly taking a puppy from a homeless man and putting it up for adoption. A video of the incident circulated online, leading to massive backlash. The dog was eventually reunited with its owner and the activists were arrested. When googling "Cause Animal Nord", the first results are news articles about this incident, and the group itself has been rather quiet on social media ever since the incident.
362* Ornithologist Alan Feduccia is a genuinely celebrated individual for his extensive and comprehensive research on modern birds (including having a number of bird species named after him), but he is far more well-known for spearheading the [=BANDit=] (Birds-Are-Not-Dinosaurs) movement, which opposes the otherwise overwhelming consensus that birds are a subgroup of theropod dinosaurs. As a result, the fact he was ever once a widely respected researcher is overshadowed by his virulent opposition against an otherwise widely accepted theory (to the point where many creationists cite his works and other palaeontologists label him pseudo- or anti-scientific).[[note]]Indeed, the idea is so undeniable that certain feathered non-avian dinosaurs such as oviraptorosaurs and dromaeosaurs [[MovingTheGoalposts are now considered]] by Feduccia as being weird birds and not dinosaurs.[[/note]] Notably, the section on his Website/{{Wikipedia}} [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Feduccia article]] about his opposition to dinosaur-bird relation and its criticism is far larger than the rest of the page.
363* PETA is already a divisive animal rights organization, but they will forever be known for a few things: That they put down more animals than regular shelters and [[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/17/peta-sorry-for-taking-girls-dog-putting-it-down have stolen and murdered pets from young children in the past,]] their numerous low-quality games that take aim at other, more popular gaming franchises for supposedly encouraging animal abuse (often [[InsaneTrollLogic on the flimsiest of justifications]]), and for condemning Creator/SteveIrwin years after he died and [[UsefulNotes/VictimBlaming implying his death was his own fault]] because he was "bothering the sting ray". They proceeded to double down a short time later in another tweet condemning Irwin.
364[[/folder]]

Top