Real Life / Persona Non Grata

Persona Non Grata in Real Life.

Artists
Sometimes creators themselves get banned from certain venues, or even entire countries, whether for expressing certain political views, or just causing general mayhem and destruction.

In the late 80s and early 90s, various members of X Japan (and occasionally the entire band) were banned from various restaurants, hotels, bars, and drinking establishments around Tokyo and elsewhere in Japan, due to the band's tendencies to start fights. Some bars even had "No Yoshiki" or "No Blondes" (since Yoshiki and other VK rockers that tended to cause trouble often had blonde hair) signs, and the band still holds the record for most damage done to a Japanese hotel. Not just the room — the entire hotel.
At one time, it was almost a point of pride for many punk rock, heavy metal, and hard rock bands to get themselves banned from venues and hotels, typically after trashing their rooms or starting riots at the venues, but also for violating local obscenity laws. Several have been banned from performing in entire states or countries, usually on obscenity grounds.
- GWAR was at one time banned from the state of North Carolina, for certain... elements of their costuming.
- Bad Brains was at one time banned at nearly every nightclub and performance venue in Washington D.C.
- The Who at one time held the record for this, thanks to the antics of the late Keith Moon.
- The World/Inferno Friendship Society is banned from the Cha-Cha's club in Coney Island, New York, after what happened at that one show in 2007.^note Prior to 2003 the band was also banned from a few venues that they'd set on fire.
- After the events surrounding the Sex Pistols' participation in Queen Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee in 1977, the band found it near-impossible to find bookings in England, as venues were afraid the shows would be shut down by the police or attacked by patriotic vigilantes angered at the apparent insult to Her Majesty. In the end, the Pistols kept touring, under the code name of "S.P.O.T.S" (or "Sex Pistols On Tour Secretly").
- Similarly, The Germs were finding it increasingly hard to get bookings in Los Angeles during the early portion of their existence due to their increasingly anarchic gigs ^note that often turned into full-on riots. Understandably, venues were reticent to host them. To get around this, much like the Sex Pistols example above, they booked secret gigs under the name "GI", for "Germs Incognito".
Guns N' Roses was commonly believed to have been banned from St. Louis after the 1991 Riverport Riot. It turns out, though, that it's the band who didn't want to come back; the riot started when frontman Axl Rose spotted a bootlegger, which pressed his Berserk Button and caused him to storm off the stage. While many venues in the city were reluctant to have them back and Rose was charged with starting the riot (and later acquitted), there was never a formal ban. The self-imposed exile ended in 2017.
Hour of Penance is almost assuredly banned from Alicante, Spain after an incident where they were scheduled to play a club in the city near the tail-end of a European tour, only to have their performance cancelled when then-drummer Mauro Mercurio drunkenly caused thousands of dollars' worth of damage to a backstage area in the club. The band was nearly arrested, Francesco Pauli voluntarily quit the band, and Mauro was unceremoniously ejected as a result.
During a 1985 show in Switzerland, the Post-Punk band Swans were actually arrested onstage and asked to leave the country for being too loud.
Japanese noise band Hanatarash was banned from most venues for years because their performances involved over-the-top destruction and risky maneuvers that could have killed its members or audience.
Ozzy Osbourne was banned from the city of San Antonio, Texas for a decade, for urinating on a cenotaph outside The Alamo. While wearing a dress.^note When he finally returned to San Antonio years later to film an episode of a TV show, it was revealed that the ban might have been an urban legend. It was never officially announced and it is unclear what might have happened if he chose to return a decade earlier.
The Insane Clown Posse has earned its share of blackballs, not because of the band itself or its inflammatory lyrics, but rather the extreme rowdiness of their "Juggalo" fan following, which the FBI once went as far as to declare them as a gang. The 2014 "Gathering of the Juggalos" needed three tries to find a venue that was willing to deal with the complaints of their outraged neighbors. Shows involving ICP or other acts with similarly large Juggalo followings are notoriously hated by venues in the live music world; while they do draw well, they have a reputation for unruly, unhygienic crowds who are prone to vandalism, fighting, attempting to sneak in banned items, and displays of public lewdness, and the Faygo showers that are a major part of ICP's live shows create unholy messes that are a nightmare to clean up.
Skinless was banned from the Palladium in Worcester, Massachusetts in 2002 after Sherwood Webber stagedived onto some police and paramedics who were tending to an injured fan. The cops let it slide — until Webber began insulting the police onstage. This resulted in the venue cutting their power and the police forcibly removing them from the building. The ban was lifted after Jason Keyser took Webber's place on vocals, but with Webber back post-reunion, it is likely that they are banned once again.
Unearth ran into some problems on their early run of tours due to founding bassist Chris Rybicki and his record with the authorities in Canada, which made entry for him and the band as a whole into the country difficult. This culminated in an incident in 2001 where the band set out for what vocalist Trevor Phipps later characterized as a "last shot" to get across the border with Rybicki, only to discover halfway there that he had stowed away a fifth of vodka prior to departure. Upon proving reluctant to simply dispose of the fifth despite pleas from the other members, Rybicki instead decided to hide it by downing the entire fifth on his own and then hide himself in the back of the tour van. Unfortunately, the band was stopped at the border and an inebriated Rybicki was discovered by the guards, at which point Unearth was turned away and Rybicki apparently slapped with a lifetime ban from Canada. This eventually forced Rybicki to leave the band so that they could gain entry to the country (and its numerous metalcore-friendly venues) with a new bassist (John Maggard).
Borg Ward in Milwaukee made headlines on various metal sites by banning the entire genre of metalcore from performing there, after their fans continuously caused significant structural damage during mosh pits.
Michael Savage is banned from entering the United Kingdom for inciting hatred against Muslims.
Charlie Chaplin was banned from the United States during the Red Scare and the McCarthy era, a situation that he parodied in A King in New York. He was allowed back in with open arms in the early 1970s, attending the 1971 Academy Awards where he was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award.
Comedian Andrew "Dice" Clay is the only person to be banned from MTV. He was, apparently, unbanned at some point before attending the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards.
Richard Gere is banned from China, probably because he's openly against China's administration of Tibet.
Adam Sandler was banned from the campus of a Nebraska state college after he was caught getting high with some students after a comedy performance.
The Cannes Film Festival declared director Lars von Trier persona non grata after he made some inflammatory comments about how he "was a Nazi" and "understood Hitler." Trier considered it a compliment to be the first person banned from Cannes.
After John Oliver made fun of the crown prince of Thailand on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, he got put on their military watchlist. Thailand is well known for its lèse majesté law, which prohibits anyone from making fun of the royal family. Oliver's response to this was to mock the royal families of the Netherlands, Denmark, and Kuwait, which all have similar laws on insulting royalty.
In the late 1990s, Philippine government officials declared actress Claire Danes persona non grata for her comment that Manila is a "ghastly" place due to its pollution and high poverty rate, based on her observations while shooting the film Brokedown Palace.
In the world of Pinball, Kevin Kulek of Skit-B Pinball attempted to sell Predator-themed pinball machines without permission from Fox. When buyers and other pinball fans discovered this and called him out, Kulek was completely unapologetic about it. He played naive about everything. Combined with his reputation as a Mean Boss by employees — all of which who walked out due to disagreements prior to the revelation, leaving Kulek the only person remaining in his company — the result was pinball manufacturers agreeing to never hire Kulek, along with pinball shows and conventions refusing to bring Kulek as a guest. Given that there's a lawsuit pending comprised of those who lost money from the Predator project, his life in pinball is most likely over.
Offset of Migos was banished from four rural Georgia counties after a college show, in which the rap trio and their entourage brought illegal drugs and firearms on the campus.
Russia did not have an entry in the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest because the singer they chose to enter, Yulia Samoylova, is barred from entering the host country, Ukraine, due to traveling to Crimea via Russia, who had annexed that region.
During filming of The X-Files, David Duchovny was permanently banned from a strip club in Vancouver... for insulting the city's weather.
Snoop Dogg has been banned from entering the UK, Australia, and Sweden on various occasions, often involving marijuana, and is currently banned from entering Norway.
Noted Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao was banned from entering The Grove at Farmers Market in Los Angeles due to a controversial statement he made in regards to same-sex marriage, which was met with outrage both from Filipino and foreign LGBTQ+ communities. It didn't help that he had just converted to evangelical Christianity at the time, leading to him being branded as a fundamentalist as a result of the ordeal.
For at least a decade, Channel 4's compliance guidelines for independent producers contained the note that "the Channel 4 Board has undertaken to the ITC^note that Shaun Ryder will not appear live on Channel 4", becoming the only person referred to by name in the document. The reason for this was Ryder's demonstrated inability to not turn the air blue when on live television, specifically TFI Friday. In 2021, he was then let back on (pre-recorded) to deliver a standup set for charity... only to deliver 121 separate swear words in the space of ten minutes.
Brazilian dubbing has many cases where a dubber has troubles with a studio or a distributor and ends up blackballed from future projects. But Sidney Lilla ended up an outstanding case due to the sheer amount of lawsuits towards channels, production companies, dubbing studios, etc. (one legal website found his name over 500 times in the São Paulo courts) regarding works with his voice, one time even resulting in a channel broadcasting a title card acknowledge he voiced a minor character in a movie they aired many times. Along with general exclusion and replacement (for instance, season 6 of Parks and Recreation had by episode 6 replaced Lilla as Ron Swanson), there are cases of partial redubs with the sole purpose of removing Lilla's voice.
An amusing minor example: Pat Boone has said that, after he released his In a Metal Mood album (where he covered various Heavy Metal songs in his usual easy-listening style), his church kicked him out for several months.
Jean-Jacques Annaud was banned from entering China after featuring the Dalai Lama in Seven Years in Tibet. That seems to have been lifted, as he's directed a French-Chinese coproduction film in 2015, Wolf Totem.
Roger Waters got booted in 2022 from the city of Kraków in Poland along with having two April 2023 concerts cancelled by authorities after he shamelessly victim-blamed Ukraine for "provoking" the 2022 Russian invasion. Waters intended to have his concerts held in other Polish cities anyway, but no local promoting agency wanted to have anything to do with someone so blatantly pro-Russian (especially in the wake of many Russian war crimes being committed in this invasion and Russian diplomats lying on a daily basis about it).
Louis Malle was banned from India in 1970 for his negative portrayals of the country in two controversial documentaries.
Tony Moran, who played the unmasked Michael Myers in Halloween (1978), made several insults to his coworkers that resurfaced online in April 2021. These included mocking John Carpenter's relationship with Debra Hill and claiming Jamie Lee Curtis slept around with the crew. He also mocked fellow Michael Myers actors Tyler Mane and James Jude Courtney and made homophobic slurs towards them. As a result, he was banned from the 2023 Halloween: 45 Years of Terror convention.

Conventions
Conventions are often hit with such bans, as some conventions tend to go overboard. In general, any convention or expo without a permanent location runs the risk of getting banned from certain venues, and all it takes is one or two idiots associated with them to do something stupid. Sometimes, the convention will go to great lengths to tell their guests to stop; other times, they wear getting banned as a badge of honor (or at least sufficient quirkiness).

Rustycon 1995, a science-fiction convention in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, was already notorious for its wild partying when it was put in a very fancy Hyatt hotel. The hotel staff was clueless about what to expect, and they wound up putting business guests on the same floor as the party wing. Among the highlights were: an intoxicated person crashing through a plate-glass window, sabotage to the fire alarm, broken elevators, several chandeliers being ripped down, and damage to the lobby artwork that reached five figures. It took almost twenty years for Bellevue to host another sci-fi convention.
Tekkoshocon was banned from several hotels in Pittsburgh after one particularly drunk and riotous pair painted their room floor to ceiling, smashed the toilet, and rode a dresser down the stairs like a bobsled. The convention itself also blacklisted the individuals involved.
Anime Weekend Atlanta was banned from one hotel after some guests dressed as Klingons got drunk and disorderly, to the point of taking several doors of their hinges. This resulted in one of AWA's three iron-clad rules: "No fucking Klingons!"
The Seattle furry convention Rainfurrest was banned from its usual Hilton hotel after its 2015 event for large amounts of vandalism to the building, costing large amounts of money (costing more than the hotel's yearly maintenance/repair costs). The attendees deliberately flooded rooms, which caused damage to nearby offices, and also wore fetish gear around the general public despite being told not to. Rampant public intoxication was another serious issue (including multiple overdoses on various drugs), while individual incidents included tampering with a smoke alarm so an attendee could hotbox their room, shoving towels in the pump of a hot tub until the motor broke, and tossing used adult diapers around the parking lot. The convention couldn't find a new venue for 2016, since the staff of the Hilton told every other hotel in the Seattle area about what happened, and has effectively been cancelled indefinitely. The "Rainfurrest incident" made significant headway in the Furry Fandom, leading them to be stricter about curbing bad convention behavior.
The Sheraton hotel chain will not host a Shriners' convention, owing to the extreme rowdiness and damage that tends to follow them. Ray Stevens' song "Shriner's Convention" is based on such an event Stevens attended, and it involves molestation, extreme intoxication, and a motorcycle going off a high diving board. The real ones aren't nearly that sedate.
The Bullingdon Club is a secret society in Britain that's made up mostly of Oxford Upper Class Twits, and it's been banned from nearly every bar and restaurant in Britain. They get around these bans by their habit of booking function rooms through a shell corporation and writing cheques for the cost of repairing the venue as they stagger away from the wreckage. The Club is also notable for including nearly every notable male Tory Oxonian since the late 19th century, including David Cameron and Boris Johnson, as well as Kings Edward VII and Edward VIII.^note
Cosplayers who apply body paint to anything and everything they touch (often because they did not properly seal their makeup, as many guides on the subject by the cosplay community now typically include), or excessively mess up hotel bathrooms and towels trying to clean it all off (well, without using makeup wipes), often receive flak from venues and hotels, especially Homestuck cosplayers (one of the largest consumers of grey body paint), and often resulted in rumors that some cons or hotels were intending to ban body paint (or particularly Homestuck in general) in cosplay.
- Anime North in Toronto outright banned the use of body paint after one particular year made headlines around the convention community for numerous instances involving Homestuck cosplayers. The numerous hot tubs and bathtubs in private rooms as well as the pool area itself was stained with grey paint from cosplayers who jumped in; there were multiple bed sheets that had to be destroyed because cosplayers were sleeping in their body paint; and there was also a sighting of one particular HS troll carrying around an outright unsanitary "Spit bucket".
- Some conventions have the "peanut butter and jelly" rule: nothing allowed in the masquerade that will make a mess of the stage or other contestant's costumes. This is traced back to Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew! illustrator Scott Shaw entering the 1972 WorldCon convention as his indy comic book character "The Turd", by covering himself with chunky peanut butter. The body-temperature peanut butter began releasing peanut oil, permanently staining at least two other costumes and the hotel wallpaper ... and then there was the plumbing issues when he tried washing it off. There are unsubstantiated stories that the con found itself banned from that hotel afterwards. ^note
In general, people who either engage in egregious misbehavior or have a long history of idiotic, destructive, predatory, or generally unacceptable behavior that they have repeatedly been spoken to about to no avail can expect to receive bans from any well-run con (sometimes revocable if they can present a good case to the board and come back on a probationary basis, almost always irrevocable in the event of extreme or heinous misconduct, or after multiple failed attempts to clean up their act). Failing to abate or attempt to abate bad behavior is bad for business on multiple levels - failing to ban patrons who damage or steal property, leave gigantic messes, walk around intoxicated in public, or get into violent altercations with others will piss off hotels (who do talk, and if word gets out that you don't control your patrons, you may find yourself banned from an entire geographical area), while failing to ban known creeps or predators invites bad PR through fandom circles and can scare off vendors and guests. Cons that fail to take a hardline stance on bad behavior usually find themselves experiencing a slippery slope that leads to some sort of major incident, and occurrences like Rainfurrest 2015 (mentioned above) are almost always rooted in overly permissive policies that allow persistent bad actors to continue to attend.
- Following his highly publicized Role-Ending Misdemeanor following the #MeToo movement, Vic Mignogna has been blacklisted from numerous conventions both before and after his lawsuit against fellow Funimation actors resulted in his humiliating 0-17 count loss being added to the state of Texas's judiciary records to be cited as precedent in future cases. Among the Midwest convention circuit alone, Anime Detour, Kitsune Kon, Anime Milwaukee, Anime Central, No Brand Con, and Anime Iowa won't invite him as a guest on principle, nor is he allowed on the premises.
- Popular Internet personality KSI was banned from all Eurogamer (today Gamer Network, with Eurogamer being their flagship brand) events for life after the 2012 Eurogamer Expo (now known as EGX) when he posted a YouTube video of him interviewing several female fans where he asked them questions that the show's organisers deemed inappropriate. Microsoft, who he had a promotional partnership with at the time, also severed ties with him. Unlike most examples though, this incident never became a Role-Ending Misdemeanor for him and ultimately became a minor setback to his then-rising career, considering that he would co-found the Sidemen the following year, bringing him even more fame years down the line.

Sports

John Green, the man who started the "Malice at the Palace" (a 2004 brawl between the Indiana Pacers and Detroit Pistons at the Pistons' home arena, The Palace of Auburn Hills) got a season ticket revocation and a lifetime ban from the arena. No word on whether the ban extends to the Pistons' new home at Little Caesars Arena.
Donald Sterling, the former owner of the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers, was thrust in the center of a scandal in April of 2014 when audio was leaked of him asking his girlfriend not to "bring black people to Clippers games", amongst other things. Having already been accused of racism in his capacity as a real estate mogul, once the NBA authenticated his voice, they decided to ban him from setting foot on NBA property for life, and removed any and all authority he held over the team. (That said, they had to force him to sell the team, and he made out like a bandit.)
Major League Baseball maintains a list of "permanently ineligible" people who are not allowed to have business associations with MLB or any of its affiliates (teams, minor leagues, Baseball Hall of Fame, current players via acting as their agents, etc.). It's commonly known as a "lifetime ban", but that's not strictly accurate, since the Commissioner can theoretically reinstate a person at his discretion. Many stints on the list only last a few years, and occasionally they are reinstated posthumously for Hall of Fame consideration.
- "Shoeless" Joe Jackson is one of the most famous players on the list, for his involvement in the 1919 "Black Sox Scandal" when the Chicago White Sox threw the World Series. Jackson died in 1951, but he still cannot be enshrined in the Hall of Fame because of the ban, despite his talent. Some people believe he was Mis-blamed for his role in the scandal (one of whom is the protagonist of Field of Dreams).
  - In 2020 MLB changed their policy on banned players. "Permanently ineligible" players are now removed from the ineligible list upon death since the point of the ban is to keep the banned player out of MLB, which obviously isn't an issue if the player is no longer alive. The HOF hasn't yet commented on the matter.
- Pete Rose is baseball's all-time hits leader, but he has been banned for betting on baseball games while he was a player-manager for the Cincinnati Reds. He even bet on games he was involved in, although he maintains he never bet against the Reds (and the 1989 Dowd Report seems to back him up on that), but the rule makes no distinction on those lines.^note
British newspaper The Sun is, for all intents and purposes, banned from the city of Liverpool after the paper published a blatantly false story accusing Liverpool FC fans of starting the 1989 Hillsborough disaster and attacking victims and urinating on responding police officers (when it was really a fatal crush caused by abysmal crowd control). Liverpudlians responded by collecting all copies of The Sun they could find for bonfires. When an inquest in 2017 officially cleared the victims of wrongdoing, the club itself banned Sun journalists from club premises. Liverpool's bitter crosstown rivals Everton FC followed through with their own ban (although the Sun hasn't been kind to that club either). To this day, it is pretty much impossible to buy a copy of The Sun in Merseyside.
Four Tottenham Hotspur fans were banned from all football grounds in England and Wales for three years in 2009 for chanting extremely offensive chants towards former Spurs player Sol Campbell, who famously left the North London club to join hated rivals Arsenal in 2001.
The Northern Ireland-based Ice Hockey team the Belfast Giants managed to do this to their owner. A month after buying a majority share, it was discovered that he was a registered sex offender in Florida charged with lewd and lascivious battery. The entire team cancelled their contracts with the club, and the trust who managed their home arena banned the team until the owner sold his share.
Stanford swimmer Brock Turner was banned for life by USA Swimming, which ended his aspirations of swimming for the US Olympic team. This arose out of a considerably controversial case where he raped a drugged woman and got a lenient six-month sentence in prison, which was further reduced because the judge feared damage to his future swimming career. The public called for the judge's sacking for essentially showing favoritism to a white male frat-bro with a rich dad; without the backlash, it's unknown how USA Swimming would have reacted, and indeed, the judge in question (Aaron Persky) was recalled from the bench in 2018.
Following a doping scandal, Marion Jones was literally Banned in China—as in, she was barred from setting foot anywhere in an Olympic facility in 2008. The IOC even declared she wouldn't even be allowed access as a spectator.
Four Chicago Blackhawks fans received lifetime bans from the United Center for chanting "basketball" at Washington Capitals player Devante Smith-Pelly (the implication being that Smith-Pelly, one of the few black players in the NHL, was playing the "wrong" sport for someone of his skin color). Smith-Pelly would prove himself a worthy hockey player by scoring seven goals in the 2018 playoffs, including a crucial game-tying goal in the game that would clinch the Caps The Stanley Cup for the first time in their history.
As portrayed in I, Tonya, in the wake of the attack on Nancy Kerrigan by people related to her (which she may or may not have known of), Tonya Harding was stripped of her titles and banned from competitive figure skating for life.
Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic was banned from Australia for 3 years after he falsified his COVID-19 vaccination status on his visa application prior to the 2021 Australian Open. However, the ban was lifted in late 2022, and he won the 2023 AO.
The legalization of sportsbooks and mobile sports betting in many U.S. states led to the NFL revising their gambling policies, which of course led to a few not particularly bright players violating those policies. As of this writing 7 players are under indefinite suspension, with 5 of them getting released shortly after they were suspended. The NFL has since revised their gambling policy again to hand out even harsher penalties to future violators.

Other

Fred Phelps, the late leader of Westboro Baptist Church, was banned from several places, most notably the UK. Ironically enough, he changed his ways and was excommunicated from his own church.
For several years in the late 1980s, a US Coast Guard cutter which shall remain nameless was banned from the port of Juneau, Alaska, until the crew (due to the usual billet changes and rotations) was almost entirely replaced. Upon its eventual return, Leslie Fish's filk song made the rounds of the enlisted decks.
This is quite frequently the fate of anybody caught counting cards at a casino blackjack table. Las Vegas casinos employ private investigators who maintain a list of people who have been caught trying to cheat (or even suspected of doing so) and routinely ban them from their premises, even if methods like card counting aren't illegal — banning people from the premise for any reason other than discrimination based on the protected classes of race, gender, etc. is also legal, making Rain Man a case of Truth in Hollywood. Notably, every known member of the famous MIT Blackjack Team is banned for life from most (if not all) casinos in the US, including every casino on the Las Vegas Strip; Vegas casinos have gone farther and banned everyone who appears in an MIT yearbook. More amusingly, World Memory Champion Dominic O'Brien was banned from every casino in the UK just for his ability to count cards. (By contrast, casinos in Atlantic City can't ban card counters due to a 1979 state Supreme Court decision, so they have to use other means to thwart the practice such as using multiple decks and employing automatic shufflers.)
- The American Physical Society, a professional association of physicists, was allegedly prohibited from holding its annual meeting in Las Vegas after a 1986 conference at the MGM Grand led to a financial loss for the hotel - not because anyone was counting cards, but simply because very few of the physicists gambled.
Terry Jones, American fundamentalist pastor who holds Koran burnings, was banned in the UK for possible incitement of violence.^note
Kurt Waldheim was secretary general of the United Nations and then president of Austria. He was also maybe a former Nazi intelligence officer. The controversy got so bad that by the time he was president of Austria, he was not allowed to enter the United States and several European countries. Nobody ever found conclusive proof (and at least one author claimed he was framed by Mossad), so Waldheim was never prosecuted.
During World War II, the Allies tried to quarter ANZAC troops in Cairo. The Egyptian government refused, saying that while New Zealanders were welcome, the city was still recovering from the victory celebration the Australian troops gave in the last world war.
Ancient Athens had a procedure known as ostracism, in which people would hold a vote on whoever was seen as the worst threat to society. The selected citizen would then be banished from Athens for a period of ten years. Notably, the penalty did not include confiscation of property or any other loss of status; very often, the ostracized citizen was actually very well-respected, but had gotten into some kind of fight with another well-respected major figure, threatening the stability of the city, and thus one or the other had to go to keep the peace.
Theodore Roosevelt pissed off the nation of Colombia due to his actions concerning the construction of the Panama Canal. When asked why he had left it off his speaking tour of South America, he mentioned that he was "not a persona grata" in that country.
The government of Azerbaijan has compiled a blacklist of people, mainly foreign politicians, ambassadors, and even famous entertainers, who are no longer allowed entry into the country because they visited Nagorno-Karabakh, a separatist, de facto country that seceded from Azerbaijan with the fall of the Soviet Union with plans of joining Armenia, but that Azerbaijan claims and is still internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan.
Charles de Gaulle, French war hero and president of the post-war Republic, was basically made persona non grata in Canada after shouting "Vive le Québec libre" ("Long live free Quebec!") in a speech to Canadians at the 1967 World's Fair during the country's 100th anniversary. While he wasn't officially banned, the controversy that resulted made him cut his visit short, and he never returned to Canada. (He only lived three years afterwards and he was already 77 years old.) Also interesting in that not only was his speech vehemently criticized in Canada (for obvious reasons) and America (who naturally backed up their northern neighbour and closest ally), but also in France, where it was seen as a serious breach of protocol. (Probably quite a few French agreed that Canada's then-Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau had a point when he rhetorically asked what De Gaulle would've thought had a Canadian Prime Minister visited Rennes and said "Brittany to the Bretons!")
Daryush Valizadeh, aka Roosh "The Douche" Vash, pick-up artist and founder of the far-right Return Of Kings blog, has been banned from the UK for publishing an - allegedly satirical - article advocating the decriminalization of sexual assault, inspired by A Modest Proposal.
Though The Mafia usually kills troublemakers in gruesome ways, an offender may be "given a pass" in some cases, meaning they were spared, especially if they earned good or were old-timers. But then, the offender is permanently banned from associating or doing business with any made member under pain of death. In other words, they are considered a pariah by the other mafiosi.
After Senator John McCain (R-AZ) passed away in 2018, it was announced that then-President Donald Trump would be banned from attending his funeral as Trump attacked McCain's military service during the 2016 election, specifically mocking his time as a POW by saying "I like people who weren't captured." But it didn't stop Trump from insulting McCain in the months afterward, which at one point was met with silent disapproval from veterans during a speech he gave at a tank factory. McCain's former 2008 running mate Sarah Palin was also excluded from the funeral, along with former 2008 campaign advisors Steve Schmidt and Nicholle Wallace.^note
When a spy given No Official Cover is caught, he or she can expect very serious consequences including execution or very long prison sentences. However, a spy who has an official diplomatic cover, cannot be prosecuted due to diplomatic immunity. They are therefore declared PNG, deported and banned from that country for life.
Following numerous defamation cases from families of mass shooting victims and complaints from concerned groups, radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was permanently banished from mainstream social media outlets and websites such as Facebook, Apple, YouTube, Spotify, Periscope, Roku and Twitter, largely for promoting hate speech and inciting violence against people of other faiths and ethnicities. PayPal followed suit, and the official InfoWars mobile apps were removed from the Apple App Store; the Android client remained on the Google Play Store for a time until it was finally taken down by Google on March 2020 due to misinformation circulated by Jones relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Thirteen Canadians, including eight members of Parliament, were barred from Russia in 2014 for their condemnation of that country's invasion of Crimea. Several of them took it as "a badge of honour", including three MPs of Ukrainian descent and one who had been expelled from the Soviet Union in 1979.
Alec Baldwin was banned from the Phillipines and given an Implied Death Threat after making a joke on TV about a Filipino mail-order bride. The practice of mail-order brides is banned there, so it makes sense.
After the release of Seven Years in Tibet, Brad Pitt, David Thewlis and director Jean-Jacques Annaud were banned from entering China. The film itself was also banned due to its positive depiction of the Dalai Lama, as well as showing China's annexation of Tibet. Annaud was eventually allowed back in to judge the 2012 Shanghai Film Festival. Pitt's ban was also lifted sometime after, as he has since visited the country with his then wife, Angelina Jolie in 2014 and 2016.
This was occasionally known to happen on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, as Johnny Carson had a tendency to hold grudges and take perceived slights very personally:
- Joan Rivers, who was the permanent guest host of Tonight, was banned after accepting her own late-night laugher on the nascent FOX network in 1986 without first consulting Carson. After Carson's death in 2005, Rivers revealed that they never spoke again. Her ban was honored by Carson's successor Jay Leno, who also never featured her as a guest on his iteration of Tonight (she also didn't appear on Conan's Tonight, albeit he only hosted for less than a year - and she had been a guest on his Late Night) before Jimmy Fallon lifted the ban and featured her as a guest on his show in 2014, less than a year before her death.
- After executive producer Fred De Cordova made a rather inappropriate "wrap it up" gesture at Carson (off-stage) while the host was running long on his remarks about the death of his son in a 1991 monologue, Carson banned De Cordova from the set for the rest of the show's run. (This is less serious than it sounds as Carson had already announced his retirement and the show ended less than a year later.)
On November 5, 2020, Steve Bannon was permanently banned from Twitter after he used the website to suggest that if Donald Trump is reelected in the 2020 Presidential election, Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray should be executed and have their heads displayed on pikes on the White House lawn.
Following the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol, mainstream social media platforms have suspended Trump from posting after he made incendiary and seditious statements condoning the attacks carried out by his supporters and calling the supporters to "fight like hell" for Republicans to "take back our country". Twitter initially locked his account for twelve hours immediately after the incident, and later banned him indefinitely from using their services citing "repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy". Several other platforms whom Trump has a presence on, including Snapchat, Shopify, YouTube and Facebook and its platforms, including Instagram, followed suit, with Mark Zuckerberg stating, "The shocking events of the last 24 hours clearly demonstrate that Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor." Some companies, including the PGA and Deutsche Bank, also severed all business ties with him after the riot. However, on November 19th, 2022, Trump was allowed back on Twitter after Elon Musk bought the company.
In a 2019 interview with Anderson Cooper, Stephen Colbert admitted that he was unlikely to have then-President Trump on The Late Show again, because he (Stephen) felt he would struggle to give the Presidency the respect it deserves when Trump did not show such respect to the office. And while Stephen was never known to make this an official banishment, it nonetheless became more certain the following year when Trump refused to accept defeat in the 2020 election and accused the opposition of cheating; Stephen was so disgusted as to go full Scottish Trope, refusing to refer to Trump by name on the show after that point.
During the 94th Academy Awards in March 2022, Will Smith slapped Chris Rock after the latter made a joke at the expense of Smith's wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. "The Slap" was widely publicized (and a veritable Fountain of Memes), but Rock declined to press charges (even though it was technically assault under California law). However, for the disruption, the Academy banned Smith from attending the Oscars for the next 10 years. They would likely have expelled him from the Academy membership had he not already resigned.
Kazuhiko "Smokey" Nagata of the Japanese car tuning shop Top Secret was invited by British automotive "lad mag" Max Power to bring his Nissan RB26-powered Toyota Supra to a car show in the UK. Seeking to leave a mark in the industry, Smokey performed an insane speed record stunt at an A1 highway, hitting a then-record breaking 197 miles per hour (317 kph). The local police were none too pleased about it, and Nagata was arrested for his antics (not helping matters was his lack of English skills). He was banned from entering the UK for a good decade soon after, but his stunt only served to made him a legend in the car tuning scene.
To date, three people have gotten permanent bans from Games Done Quick, two runners and one attendee:
- gamepro11 was banned from GDQ after his Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back run at SGDQ 2015, where (supposedly due to nerves) he spent the entire time making unfunny jokes about suicide and murder while playing extremely poorly. The run was also erased from all official archives of the event.
- During AGDQ 2017, the audience made a running gag out of yelling "WAH!" a la Waluigi. During the Super Metroid 100% race, an audience member stood up, took hold of a microphone, and demanded that the people making the noise commit suicide by throwing themselves in front of the hotel shuttle. He was promptly ejected from the building, and by all accounts is permanently barred from attending.
- The runner Mekarazium was permanently banned from ever appearing at GDQ events again after taking advantage of his performing remotely to attempt to pass off a pre-recorded, spliced run of the Bladewolf DLC for Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance as a live playthrough during AGDQ 2022.

Persona Non Grata / Real Life

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