1.
One old controversy that I feel like nobody knows involves Katy Perry’s 25th birthday party, which just seemed like a mess all around. First of all, Perry hired people with dwarfism to play Oompa Loompas. Taylor Swift was in attendance, and the two posed with them. Then later, after everyone covered each other in paint, Taylor posed with a guy who had a giant swastika painted on his shirt (Taylor’s team later said she’d taken photos with 100 people that night, didn’t know the man, and hadn’t noticed his shirt).
2.
I feel like I have literally never heard anyone else talk about the time George Takei jerked off a man on Howard Stern’s radio show. Stern has had Takei on his show a number of times over the years, and in 2008, there was an episode titled “George Takei’s Gay Bachelor Party.” In the episode, Jonah Falcon, who claims to have the longest penis in the world, appeared. Takei proceeded to give him a handjob onscreen, because that’s totally normal, I guess.
3.
There’s probably too much drama surrounding Azealia Banks for anything to really stand out, but at least for me, I always think about the story of how she was “trapped” at Elon Musk and Grimes’s house. According to Banks, after Grimes invited her over to work on music, Banks was left alone in Musk and Grimes’s house “for days.” She later claimed Grimes had been “begging” her to come for “weeks and weeks,” and had told her that Musk thought she was attractive, leading Banks to conclude she may have been invited for sexual reasons. She also compared her time there to the film Get Out.
4.
Oh, and another thing about Grimes and Musk — the existence of their secret second child was discovered by a Vanity Fair journalist interviewing Grimes, who noticed a baby repeatedly crying upstairs. Asking Grimes if she’d had another child, Grimes replied, “I’m not at liberty to speak on these things.” However, when the journalist asked Grimes if she really thought they wouldn’t be able to hear the baby, Grimes laughed and replied, “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
5.
Jameela Jamil is no stranger to controversy, and one truly wild one is about her medical history as it relates to running from bees. Yes, you read that right. It all started when journalist Tracie Egan Morrissey pointed out inconsistencies in Jamil’s stories about past health issues. In one story, Jamil said she had a spinal cord injury after running into traffic to avoid bees at age 17. She has also said she was hit by a car while fleeing bees in 2016, in a separate incident. And then in 2015, Jamil claims she and Mark Ronson were swarmed by 500 killer bees (Ronson later said it was only “one or two” bees). Her Wikipedia even used to have an entire section on “bees.”
After Morrissey suggested the first two incidents were the same, Jamil defended herself on Twitter and reaffirmed that the two incidents were separate. Piers Morgan then stepped in and accused Jamil of having Munchausen syndrome. Jamil further clarified her comments on her health, and all seemed to check out except the discrepancy between her and Ronson’s stories (though Ronson did tweet “Spoke to my friend Jameela. We’re good. also bees suck.”). Still, I can’t believe there was ever such a controversy surrounding Jamil and bees.
6.
You might know about the Dominic West/Lily James cheating scandal, where West was photographed cheating on his wife with James, but I still think this should’ve been a way bigger story considering how West and his wife Catherine FitzGerald handled it. Instead of avoiding paparazzi, they weirdly walked outside to meet them, posing and kissing for them.
In a pretty unprecedented movie for celebs, the couple then passed paparazzi a note that said, “Our marriage is strong and we’re very much still together. Thank you.” This was a pretty big shift from their previous paparazzi strategy, which involved West hiding in some bushes to escape photographers in one of the funniest pap photos I’ve ever seen.
7.
Twitter user @biz_socks claimed in 2022 that Dakota Johnson had once locked him and his mother in a Blue Bottle Coffee “because the barista told her she couldn’t make the coffee herself.” He then posted a photo of her at the doors, writing, “She closed the door on all of us who were still inside, pulled a rope out of her bag, tied the doors shut, and walked away. We had to have a passerby untie the rope so we could get out.”
A staff member later seemed to corroborate the story, claiming, “One time she came into my coffee shop at milk studios at like 11am, walked behind the counter and started pretending that she was making drinks while her people tied the front doors shut from the outside and started filming her … Customers were trapped inside.” It appears the incident may have had something to do with her January 2017 Vogue cover story, which was filmed nearby and featured Johnson in the same outfit. The first Twitter user also said she had people with her with a lint roller and camera, and another employee reportedly reached out to the user to tell him that Dakota’s crew “wanted her to do something where she would be making coffee or something, and the barista said no because it wasn’t approved by Blue Bottle corporate and [they] didn’t want to all get in trouble for having her behind the bar.”
8.
Paula Abdul has made multiple remarks about being in a plane crash in the ’90s, suffering injuries that led to her retreating from the spotlight for some time. There’s just one problem: There is no record of the crash ever happening. Abdul’s description doesn’t match any crashes at the time, though it is possible it was not reported and the wreckage was not found. Still, this would mean Abdul and the other passengers just left the burned-out plane in a field and never reported it.
9.
One of my favorite Hollywood urban legends is the Iong-standing rumor that Richard Gere once ended up in the ER after sticking a gerbil up his butt. It’s haunted Gere for four decades now, and yet no one can figure out how it started (there’s obviously no proof of it ever happening). Apparently, though, according to Gere’s longtime rival Sylvester Stallone, Gere believes Stallone started it. Stallone denies this, but honestly, I could see it.
10.
Another somewhat ~vintage~ memorable Hollywood moment has to do with actor, model, and romance cover star Fabio…and a goose. Back in 1999, Fabio was helping promote a new roller coaster at Busch Gardens. By the time the ride was finished, his face was covered in blood — and according to Fabio, it was goose blood.
“So the roller coaster goes down at 80 miles an hour…over a pond and back up, and then upside down,” Fabio said in describing what occurred. “So what happened is, over the pond there was a bunch of geese there. I’m talking about hundreds. And one got sucked in. I saw this very up close. The geese hit the video camera.” Fabio said the video camera shattered and metal cut the bridge of his nose. When the roller coaster turned upside town, the blood got all over his face, which was evident when the ride was over. People thought it was a hoax at the time, as the next day, when headlines came out, was April Fool’s day. One of the strangest parts? The footage from the camera was never found. “My manager at that time, he said, ‘Oh, let’s see the video footage.’ Well the camera is never to be found. The tape disappeared.”
11.
Older male stars dating women who have barely entered their 20s is nothing new, but Bradley Cooper still made waves when he began dating then-21-year-old Suki Waterhouse while he was in his late 30s, especially considering he’d recently slammed reports he was dating then-22-year-old Jenifer Lawrence by saying, “I could literally be her father.” But the bizarre, scandalous part that earned this example a spot on this list? The paparazzi photos of Suki and Cooper reading Lolita while cuddling in a park, which you have to admit are a little on the nose.
12.
I feel like Miguel’s 2013 stage dive has been forgotten, so let me remind you what happened — after skyrocketing to fame in the early 2010s, Miguel performed at the Billboard Music Awards in 2013. During his set, he attempted to stage dive and landed on two fans. It’s still one of the wildest award show moments to me, and ended with a lawsuit from one of the women, who claimed she was injured (the other woman also alleged an injury but did not sue).
13.
Kanye has partaken in a lot of bizarre behavior over the last few years, but one relatively harmless example always sticks out to me as particularly bizarre: when he posted a video of him peeing on his Grammy award. The post came amid Ye criticizing the music industry and its exploitation of artists, but still…I feel like this point could’ve been made via alternate means.
14.
Another celeb consistently in the media for their sometimes erratic behavior is Lindsay Lohan. In one of the most bizarre stories involving Logan, she posted an Instagram Live video in 2018 of her approaching two children and adults that she said were Syrian refugees. In the video, Lohan offered for one of the kids to stay at a hotel, then criticized the children’s mother for not allowing her to take the children, along with accusing her of child trafficking and telling them “You’re ruining Arabic culture. … Don’t fuck with Pakistan.” She then attempted to grab one of the boys, and it looks as though the mother hits her, leading to Lohan crying.
15.
And finally, I can’t finish this post without mentioning two more well-known controversies that have since faded from public memory…but live rent-free in my mind. First up: the salad dressing incident. Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis’s former nanny claimed that Sudeikis found out Wilde was having an affair with Harry Styles after seeing messages between them on Wilde’s Apple Watch. She also said Sudeikis once threw himself under Wilde’s car to prevent her from bringing her “special salad dressing” to Styles.
16.
Second, we must discuss the Hilaria Baldwin Spanish controversy. In late 2020, Twitter user @lenibriscoe accused Baldwin of faking her Spanish heritage and accent (fans also dug up a video where Baldwin doesn’t know the English word for “cucumber”). Evidence seemed to suggest Baldwin was actually from Massachusetts. Hilaria later admitted she was born in Boston but grew up traveling between the US and Spain, speaking both English and Spanish, explaining her mixing up the languages and accents.
Well, that’s all I have for you today, folks. What wild celebrity stories live rent-free in your mind? Let us know in the comments!