History is full of figures with popular stature or political influence who were plagued with scandals. Most of their offenses end up getting hushed up or forgotten, but sex scandals always seem to linger. The following are 7 (alleged) sex offenders and how they managed to get away with it.

1. Pope Sixtus III

Pope Sixtus III spent most of his reign repairing the damage done to Rome after the Visigoths sacked the city in 410. In his spare time, he reputedly enjoyed sleeping with nuns, a habit which caught up with him in 440 AD when he was charged with the seduction of a nun. Sixtus’ defense was based entirely on the Biblical Story of Mary Magdalene; he dramatically ended his testimony by quoting the Bible: “Let him who is without fault among you throw the first stone.” He was acquitted, not because he knew how to quote the Bible, but because no one witnessed him raping the nun in question. Sixtus died a few months later.

2. Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer was an English author best known for The Canterbury Tales. Some of his most famous stories involve rape – at that time, “rape” meant the same as “abduction” does today – so it is ironic that in 1380, Chaucer himself was charged with the rape of a baker’s daughter, Cecily Chaumpaigne. The charges shocked his supporters who rallied to support the writer and smeared Chaumpaigne. In an effort to make the story disappear, Chaucer paid Chaumpaigne an exorbitant sum of money (10 pounds!) to sign a contract agreeing to drop the charges. This contract came to light in 1873 and is the only evidence about Chaucer’s “raptus”.

3. Ernest Augustus I of Hanover

Ernest Augustus I of Hanover was an unpopular king whose entire reign was marked with sex scandals. It started when rumors of him carrying on a gay love affair with his valet ended with the valet’s death. A few months later, a man appeared claiming that he was the result of an incestuous affair between Ernest and his sister. But it was Ernest’s attempted rape of the Lord Chancellor’s wife which caused the biggest uproar. The victim died a few months after the fact and Ernest was never charged, leading historians to forever debate over the authenticity of the charges.

4. Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston

Henry John Temple, better known as Lord Palmerston, was a controversial British Prime Minister who advocated crushing foreign governments to increase the British Empire’s power. His supporters lovingly called him “Lord Pam” while his detractors called him “Lord Cupid”. The latter was a reference to Palmerston unabashedly attempts to seduce young women wherever he went. He famously forced himself onto one of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting during a visit to Windsor Castle and had to be ejected by Lord Melbourne. Palmerston managed to beat charges, saying that he had simply forgotten that it wasn’t his room.

5. Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle

Roscoe Arbuckle was the highest paid silent-film actor of the ’20s. His career dramatically imploded when he was charged with the rape and manslaughter of a young starlet, Virginia Rappe. Reality quickly became warped as tabloids spread conflicting eyewitness testimonies that claimed the quiet actor had done everything from smothered Rappe to death with his weight to violating her with a champagne bottle. Although acquitted after three trials, Arbuckle was blackballed from Hollywood, broke, and treated like a pariah by the public. His final years were spend spiraling into alcoholism and attempting to muster a comeback as a director.

6. Errol Flynn

Errol Flynn was a Hollywood actor who filled a successful career with swashbuckling roles. He used his means to support his much publicized hedonistic private life; the phrase “In like Flynn” is refers to his supposed exploits. Flynn’s reputation caught up with him in 1942, when he was accused of statutory rape by two 17-year-old girls. Unlike Arbuckle, Hollywood rallied to Flynn’s defense and even created a legal fund for him called the “American Boys’ Club for the Defense of Errol Flynn” (A.B.C.D.E.F.). A large portion of Flynn’s defense was that he was Errol Flynn and what woman could resist him? In spite of mountains of evidence, he was miraculously acquitted and the scandal only bolstered Flynn’s reputation as a ladies man.

7. Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry is one of the original pioneers of rock and roll. Like any good rock star, his entire career was built on scandal. He spent 5 years in jail early in his career for pimping a 14-year-old. He resurrected his career after being released, but ended up in jail again on tax evasion charges. After being released again, Berry started touring heavily but quickly found himself embroiled in the largest controversy of his career. 59 women came forward to claim that Berry had filmed them with hidden cameras in two of his restaurants. Berry managed to bury the accusations, at a cost of almost $1.2 million .

Bonus: Michael Jackson

The most successful entertainer in history, Michael Jackson’s eccentric career earned him approximately half a billion dollars and 24-hour tabloid attention. In the late-’80s, “The King of Pop” built Neverland Ranch into a sprawling property that included a menagerie and amusement park… and invited young fans to spend time with him. Tabloid speculation went absolutely insane in 1993, when the father of one of Jackson’s fans accused him of sexually abusing his son. While claiming innocence, Jackson paid off the family in an effort to avoid an O.J. Simpson-esque trial. That trial came 10 years later, after the controversial Living with Michael Jackson. The boy Jackson was seen holding hands with in the documentary accused the singer of abuse. Eventually acquitted, Jackson became a bigger recluse and could never manage to shake off the allegations. It was one of the most hotly debated topics when his death brought the Internet to its knees.

Weeee, finally back in the swing of things! Keep the motivating e-mails coming.

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Most of the stories we grew up hearing about Africans, Polynesians, and other “savages” eating colonists were exaggerated blood libels used to justify enslaving them. The following are 10 incidents of cannibalism. They delve into the cultures that practiced it, tell the stories of a few murdering cannibals, and also of some extreme situations where people were driven to eat their fellow man in order to survive.

1. Aghori

The Aghori are Hindu sadhus who believe immortality is attainable by spending 12 years bringing oneself closer to everything that is unclean in society. Most sadhus are content to roam around India smoking hash, but Aghoris smear themselves with cremation ash, drink wine and urine from human skulls, and practice cannibalism. They collect corpses that have been ceremonially disposed of by family members in the Ganges and consume them after praying. Aghoris believe that the proper combination of prayer and cannibalism gives them powers such as levitation and the ability to control weather.

2. Anyoto

Also known as the Human Leopard Society, the Anyoto was an 18th century West African secret society that practiced cannibalism. Each member had to murder a loved one to join, and had to provide a fresh victim every four years thereafter. They believed that a victim’s body fat allowed wishes to be granted. Members dressed in leopard skins and attacked travelers with weapons resembling a leopard’s claws and teeth. The flesh of victims was cut from the body, distributed to members, and consumed in a ceremony. Edgar Rice Burroughs based Tarzan’s Leopard Men on the Anyoto.

3. watuSimba

Today, watuSimba (were-lion) stories are used to scare misbehaving children. But in the ’40s, the watuSimba were young women who had been enslaved by East African witch doctors. They were forcefully addicted to drugs to make them compliant, forced to live in tight cages, and had their foot tendons reshaped to give them the gait of a stalking lion. The witch doctors would then send them out as assassins. The watuSimba wore the skin of a lion and were outfitted with prosthetic claws while hunting. Most shockingly, they were primarily fed the meat of their victims. They killed approximately 300 people over the course of four years and continued to kill even after the witch doctors were captured and hanged.

4. Fritz Haarmann

Fritz Haarmann’s victims were young refugees that he picked up at train stations in a post-World War I Germany. Similar to the watuSimba, Haarmann killed by gnawing through the throats of his victims until they were decapitated. He then sold their flesh as horse meat, ate what he couldn’t sell, and disposed of the bones in the Leine. In 1924, Haarmann was caught and charged with 27 murders after some local boys discovered human skulls while fishing. He was Germany’s first experience with a serial killer and it was just their luck that he would also be history’s most prolific cannibalistic murderer. Some investigators believe he killed many more people, with estimates reaching as high as 600 people in one year alone.

5. Albert Fish

Albert Fish was a pedophile who described the flesh of children as the “sweetest.” He claimed the idea came from a deck hand who described a trip to Hong Kong during a famine when children were being sold as meat. Fish was caught when he sent a letter to the mother of his final victim, a 10-year-old girl, six years after she vanished. In the letter he gave graphic details about using her body to make a stew, complete with bacon strips, carrots and onions. Fish spent the next nine days locked in his room, eating his stew and compulsively masturbating. Fish was a religious maniac who punished himself by inserting needles into his groin. These needles caused Sing Sing’s electric chair to short circuit during the first attempt to execute him.

6. The Siege of Suiyang

Fish wasn’t entirely off the mark when he claimed that the Chinese had resorted to cannibalism during a famine. He was, however, wrong about the time and place. In 757 AD, the Tang army was fending off a siege by the Yan army in the city of Suiyang. The Tang were vastly outnumbered and placed their hopes on outlasting the Yan. A local governor forced Suiyang to share supplies with surrounding fortresses, causing supplies to run out after a few months. Unwilling to give themselves up to the Yan, the people of Suiyang eventually resorted to cannibalism. A total of 20,000-30,000 people were eaten. In reference to this, The Old Book of Tang eerily states: “People always remained loyal.”

7. The Siege of Ma’arrat al-Numan

In 1098, the city of Ma’arrat al-Numan, in what is modern-day Syria, was besieged by a group of defeated crusaders who had run out of supplies. They massacred a large portion of the Muslim population after they surrendered, but quickly discovered that the city was not as rich as they had hoped. By winter, supplies were dwindling again and the crusaders resorted to cannibalizing the remaining Muslim population. One of the crusader commanders wrote to Pope Urban II: “A terrible famine racked the army in Ma’arra, and placed it in the cruel necessity of feeding itself upon the bodies of the Saracens.”

8. Richard I of England

The Siege of Ma’arrat al-Numan was not the last time crusaders resorted to cannibalization. Richard I of England, better known as Richard the Lionheart, was one of the main architects behind the Third Crusade, a move to reclaim the Holy Lands. But Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt and Syria, earned the crusaders’ respect by being too shrewd, organized, and powerful to defeat. The best Richard could do was to negotiate a peace treaty that gave Christians the right to visit Jerusalem’s holy places, and he remained very bitter about the defeat. In spite, he invited some of Saladin’s ambassadors to attend a banquet and reputedly dined on the curried head of a Muslim warrior in their presence.

9. Idi Amin

Idi Amin was Uganda’s military dictator from 1971 to 1979. (He is also a frequent subject on this site.) Over those eight years he managed to wipe out a fairly large portion of Uganda’s population for fairly tenuous reasons. Basically, if he hated you, you died. When he first rose to power he had the military leadership rounded up and decapitated. He then sat on a pile of their heads and chastised them while taking bites from their flesh. Amin was a member of the Kakwa tribe. They believed that if you ate a section of a man you killed then his spirit could not return to haunt you. Amin ate a lot of his enemies before switching to oranges.

10. Joshua Blahyi

In the ’90s, Joshua Blahyi was one of many Liberian warlords who killed thousands of people. What separated Blahyi from the rest was that went by the nickname “General Buck Naked” and believed his nakedness protected him from bullets. His group routinely performed human sacrifices that involved cannibalism before battle. A quote from Blahyi said:

So, before leading my troops into battle, we would get drunk and drugged up, sacrifice a local teenager, drink their blood, then strip down to our shoes and go into battle wearing colourful wigs and carrying dainty purses we’d looted from civilians. We’d slaughter anyone we saw, chop their heads off and use them as soccer balls. We were nude, fearless, drunk and homicidal. We killed hundreds of people – so many I lost count.

Blahyi now works as a minister, talk about an amazing career transition. There is a documentary about him in the works.

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Mental retardation is generally understood to be the lack of normal intellectual development. It was one of the most misunderstood conditions before the advent of modern medicine and there were literally hundreds of pseudo-scientific terms used to describe it. Not surprisingly, the practice of inbreeding helped stack royal courts with hundreds of mentally retarded heirs. Occasionally, one would manage to make it to the throne. These are the stories of 6 of them.

1. Philip III Arrhidaeus

A persisting rumor claims Alexander the Great’s mother Olympias caused Philip III Arrhidaeus’ mental condition with a botched poisoning while clearing out roadblocks to Alexander’s ascension. It is more likely that Arrhidaeus was born mentally retarded and was shielded from the Macedonian army’s politics while Alexander was alive. Afterwards however, he was thrust into a powersharing agreement with the infant Alexander IV and became a pawn for a series of power-hungry assholes. First came Perdiccas, a paranoid regent, who kept Arrhidaeus close to himself and almost caused a troop revolt by killing Arrhidaeus’ half-sister Cynane after she sent her daughter Eurydice to marry Arrhidaeus. The less batshit Antipater was made regent after Perdiccas’ officers had enough of him and killed him. This left Arrhidaeus in the hands of Eurydice, who used him to lobby for more power. She attempted to lead a rebellion against Olympias after Antipater’s death but found that Macedonians were unwilling to fight Alexander the Great’s mother. Arrhidaeus, unaware of what was happening, ended up in a narrow dungeon cell with Eurydice and was executed there.

2. Fyodor I of Russia

Fyodor I of Russia, the not-so-terrible son of Ivan the Terrible, was born with a “minor” case of Down syndrome. Fyodor was an extremely pious man whose idea of a good time was hanging out with monks, listening to Bible stories, and ringing church bells. By contrast, Ivan the Terrible’s idea of a good time involved creating succession issues by beating up his pregnant daughter-in-law, causing her to miscarry, and then murdering the heir-apparent. The “Oh, shit!” moment that followed left 3 possible options: Fyodor; a 3 year old boy; and Boris Godunov, an ambitious veteran of the royal court. Godunov was clearly the most suitable, but the church picked Fyodor anyway thinking that a pious retard would be easier to control. Fyodor managed to become a moderately popular tsar by not being a mass murdering psycho, and also by loosening trade restrictions, favoring the lower classes, and reforming the judiciary. Most of the public didn’t realize that these reforms came from Godunov, who had managed to claw his way into becoming the sole regent, and instead credited Fyodor’s belief that God spoke to him in his dreams. Unfortunately, Fyodor’s failure to sire any male children allowed Godunov to claim the throne after his death and signaled the start of the Time of Troubles.

3. Mustafa I

The Ottomans were good at avoiding succession wars by allowing each new sultan to kill all other potential heirs when he claimed the throne. In fact, the Ottomans got so good at wiping out anyone with a claim to the throne that for a while, the continuity of the dynasty was threatened. Eventually, a more “humane” solution was developed which allowed the heirs to live, but still provided the sultan with security: penning all the heirs in a palatial prison called the “Kafes” – literally, “the Cage”. Even then, it was fairly common for an unpopular heir to be found strangled to death in spite of the heavy security. Mustafa I was born “mentally weak” and was driven completely insane by the constant threat of strangulation. He spent most of his life in the tiny windowless apartments looking for guidance in the Quran, but was forced to become Sultan after his brother, Ahmed I, died of typhus. He was quickly deposed after refusing to learn ixaratte, the royal court’s complicated sign language system, and running around the palace screaming for his dead brother to take away his throne. The Jannisaries made short work of his successor and asked Mustafa to rule again. He responded: “I am reading the Quran, and I do not want to be the Sultan,” but no one listened and Mustafa was forced to reign until the Grand Mufti decreed that Murad IV should be allowed to take his place.

4. Ibrahim I

Allowing Murad IV to rule was a mistake. His bloody reign allowed his power hungry mother, Kösem Sultan, to become the most powerful woman in Ottoman history. She ruled from behind a silk curtain while Murad ran around brutalizing anyone he came across. When Kösem realized she would lose power when Murad died, she began lobbying for the mentally retarded Ibrahim I to become the next Sultan. Murad responded by ordering Ibrahim put to death, but Kösem managed to convince the royal court that Ibrahim suffered from “weakness of the nerves” and posed no threat. Much like Mustafa, Ibrahim had spent most of his life in the Kafes. Unlike the hapless Mustafa, Ibrahim was a sex crazed sociopath who immediately began kidnapping and raping married women. He became enthralled with obese women and paid immense bounties to anyone who could bring him a larger woman than he already had in his harem. Ibrahim eventually became obsessed with a cow’s genitals, had them cast in gold, and ordered his agents to find a woman with a similar vagina. They found Sechir Para (“Sweet Lump of Sugar”), a 300 pound Armenian woman who he dressed only in furs. Ibrahim was finally deposed after he raped the Grand Mufti’s daughter. He was found strangled to death in the Kafes a few months later.

5. Charles II of Spain

Charles II of Spain’s birth was widely celebrated because it helped avoid a succession war. That celebration was short lived, as people began worrying after getting a good look at him. Charles, the result of generations of Hapsburg inbreeding, resembled a Dane Cook joke: countless ailments, severely retarded, and constantly on the edge of an emotional breakdown. His head was freakishly misshapen, his jaw made it impossible for him to eat, and his tongue was so large he could barely speak. He was literally carried around like a baby for the first 10 years of his life because the royal court feared he would die if overworked. Even after he learned how to walk on his own, his legs could barely support him beyond a few steps. By the time he was 35, Charles had given up on cleaning himself, could not walk, and suffered multiple epileptic seizures a day. He spent the final years of his life desperately attempting to have a child. Even though his doctors tried everything from balancing dead pigeons on his head to draping him with the warm entrails of mammals, he could not manage to sire an heir. His death sparked the bloody War of the Spanish Succession, which some argue was the first world war.

6. Ferdinand I of Austria

Ferdinand I of Austria’s “feeble-mindedness” was well known to the general public. In the end, that knowledge probably saved his life. In person, it was practically impossible to understand him (though he did manage to keep a readable dairy). Reportedly, one of his few coherent sentences came after being told that apricot dumplings were out of season: “I am the Emperor, and I want dumplings!” Bedridden by up to 20 epileptic fits a day, Ferdinand relied on a cadre of counselors to guide his decisions. The most controversial was Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, who had brought peace between kings at the Congress of Vienna but ignored the general public’s demands for democratic reform. Ferdinand was forced to dismiss Metternich when revolutionaries started picking up supporters. Before fleeing to London, Metternich informed Ferdinand that the angry mob outside his palace was revolting and demanding that Ferdinand abdicate. A puzzled Ferdinand asked: “But are they allowed to do that?” Considered harmless by the revolutionaries, Ferdinand made it out unscathed and spent the rest of his days in Prague Castle.

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One possible reason for the jump in savings: The dearth of women is making China’s marriage market extremely competitive, and families with boys are accumulating wealth to make their sons more attractive matches.

In a paper recently posted to the National Bureau of Economic Research’s website, economists Shan-Jin Wei, at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business, and Xiaobo Zhangk, at the International Food Policy offer evidence why this might be so. They find that in areas where the male-to-female sex for young Chinese is high, savings rates are higher, too.  And they find that households with sons save more in high male-to-sex ratio regions.

Link. Via.

(PS: Hello again.)

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Following on the original perverted authors article, these are 5 more famous authors that were perverts.  This will be the last test format/style for the history trivia articles, let me know if you love/hate it.

5 ) T.E. Lawrence

Better known as Lawrence of Arabia, the Welsh archaeologist and British intelligence officer became famous because of his memoirs. Lawrence was celibate most of his life – claiming to have been raped and tortured by a Turk – and a pederast (which I’ve discussed here), but his most interesting perversion was the fact that he was a masochist. Lawrence used to hire a man, along with a witness, to beat him with birches under the claim that an uncle demanded it because Lawrence had stolen money. After the beatings he would ask them to write an account of the flogging which he would read later for kicks. In a sense, he was creating masochist porn for himself through himself. According to some of his biographers this wasn’t the first time either. There are doubts over if he ever had been raped and tortured or if it was just him writing out his masochistic fantasies and hiding them in plain sight.

4 ) Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

Speaking of masochism, the term originated from the last name of the 19th century Austrian romance novelist. Born into nobility, he discovered that he enjoyed being humiliated by strong women that wore furs through his aunt, Countess Zenobia. As the story goes, one day she asked him to help take off her furs and as he was undressing her he found himself kissing her feet. She responded by kicking the young boy away with a sinister laugh. He enjoyed this so much that he spent the rest of his life trying to replicate it. Not surprisingly, he had a collection of things that he wanted his lovers to hurt him with: chains, whips, and razors. Sacher-Masoch couldn’t get aroused without fur and owned numerous cats that he kept with him as he wrote. (This makes friends of mine that own cats only slightly creepier.)

3 ) Hans Christian Andersen

The Danish fairy tale writer is best known for “The Little Mermaid”, “The Ugly Duckling”, and “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Most of the fairy tales he wrote were based on events in his own life: “The Ugly Duckling” was based on growing up as a lanky child with a big nose and “The Little Mermaid” was based on a personal crisis after a man that he considered his soul mate got married to a woman. He was a lifelong celibate that used to visit brothels to have conversations with prostitutes. Afterwards, he would return to his hotel room to furiously masturbate and chronicle it by drawing a cross in his dairy. As a result, he kept meticulous tabs about how many times he masturbated in his life – and apparently he masturbated a lot.

2 ) James Joyce

The Irish author of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake is considered to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Finnegans Wake was influenced by his daughter, Lucia, who was a schizophrenic. Both were locked up in the same room while he wrote it, spurring on questions over if they had an incestuous relationship. There is very little evidence to support these allegations, but there is plenty of evidence to support the fact that Joyce loved farts on his face. He wrote a series of dirty love letters to his wife in 1909 and one gushes about her “fat dirty farts.” He complimented her over the various types she possessed – “big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush” – and even believed he could pick out her farts in a “roomful of farting women.”

1 ) Oscar Wilde

The Irish author of The Picture of Dorian Grey Gay Gray was also one of the biggest celebrities of the 19th century. London’s most famous Dandy, he made Perez Hilton seem like Rambo by wearing peacock feathers, carrying sunflowers everywhere he went, and wearing blue china. Today he is a gay martyr, but I’ve never understood why anyone would want Wilde to be the face for any movement since he was a pederast. He befriended Uranian poets, the 19th century’s version of NAMBLA, and developed a voracious appetite for young prostitutes, servants, and newsboys, showing off that “the danger was half the excitement.” Then he pissed off Lord Queensberry by introducing his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, to the Uranian lifestyle. Queensberry was a swarthy man that loved fighting (hell, the boxing rules are named after the guy), and he launched a personal crusade against Wilde, famously leaving him a calling card that called him a sodomite. Wilde responded by suing him for libel. This backfired and resulted in Wilde being tried for gross indecency and being sent to jail at a hard labor camp.

Bonus: Eric Gill

Since he isn’t an author I didn’t use him, but not using him would be a sin. Gill was a sculptor and designer of Gill Sans – Philips, Saab, and Wikimedia all use this typeface – that seemed to have lived a somewhat boring, extremely Catholic, life. But in the ’80s a Gill biographer shocked his fans by stating that Gill had been sexually abusing his daughters, had sex with his sisters, and had even raped the family dog.

Credit where credit is due: Hubso for Gill and MadHooks for Sacher-Masoch/Andersen.

Like it?  Subscribe via RSS (or e-mail, if you prefer).  Ideas for a third part?  Leave a comment, I’ll credit you.  I’m considering doing one over historic figures.

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