15 Celeb Scandals That Should've Been WAY Bigger

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3 days ago

I honestly can't believe more people don't talk about the Katy Perry vs. nuns debacle. Essentially, Perry bought a former convent in 2015 — only the nuns of Most Holy and Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary had already sold it to restaurateur Dana Hollister, who had moved in. The archdiocese, who sold the property to Perry, claimed the nuns hadn't had the right to sell the property, and a messy legal battle began. In one post-judgement hearing (after the judge ruled against the nuns), one of the nuns, 89-year-old Catherine Rose Holzman, collapsed and died.
The nuns preferred Dana as an owner because she would keep the convent open to the public, converting it into a hotel. Also, they would not get any money from the sale to Perry, despite the fact that they had originally purchased the convent in the first place. Holzman also said, "Katy Perry represents everything we don't believe in. It would be a sin to sell to her."
Hours before her death, Holzman spoke to the press, saying she and the other nuns had asked the Vatican for help. Holzman pleaded with Perry "to please stop" pursuing the purchase, saying, "It's not doing anyone any good except hurting a lot of people." The last surviving nun, Sister Mary Callinan, told the New York Post in 2019 that Perry has 'blood on her hands." It's unclear if the sale even ever actually went through, and it doesn't look like Perry has ever lived there.
It doesn't appear Perry has addressed the case publicly.
Speaking of Perry — I feel like most people aren't aware of her sexual misconduct allegations, beyond the viral uncomfortable video of her kissing an American Idol contestant. She's additionally been accused of touching and kissing a Russian TV host without consent and exposing model Josh Kloss's genitals to others at a party. Oh, and remember the time she squeezed 18-year-old Shawn Mendes's butt?
Katy issued a response stating, 'I don't want to say 'guilty until proven innocent,' but there's no checks and balances: A headline just flies, right? And there's no investigation of what it is. I don't want to add to the noise. I want to add to the truth, basically.' However, she did not explicitly deny the allegations, saying, 'I don't comment on all the things that are said about me because if I chase that dragon, it would be about true and false-ing my whole life. It's distracting from the real movement.'
I also feel like Jenny McCarthy didn't get quite enough flack for forcibly grabbing and kissing Justin Bieber onstage at the 2012 American Music Awards. Justin, who was 18 at the time, even said directly after the incident that he felt "violated." McCarthy later said, 'I couldn't help it, he was just so delicious, so little, and just, ahhhk, I wanted to tear his head off and eat it," and that she "kind of molested him." She added, 'I want some Bieber fever — and I want a Bieber rash. It'd be like cougar rape.'
It doesn't appear Bieber or McCarthy ever addressed this incident beyond McCarthy's above comments directly afterwards.
I feel like the controversy people talk about surrounding Nicki Minaj is usually related to her vaccine-related tweets, but the one they should be talking about is far worse. Back in 2021, Minaj and her husband Kenneth Petty were sued for intimidating a woman (Jennifer Hough) who had previously accused Petty of raping her at gunpoint. In fact, Petty had been convicted of attempted rape back in 1994 and served four and a half years in prison. In the lawsuit, Hough alleged Minaj had "directly and indirectly intimidated, harassed, and threatened [Jennifer Hough] to recant her legitimate claim that Defendant Petty raped her.'
Hough later dropped the lawsuit against Minaj, who called it "an entirely frivolous case which plaintiff's counsel has brought against me in an effort to use my name to generate publicity for himself." The civil case against Petty is ongoing, but Minaj has been dropped as a co-defendant, though she is still "prominently mentioned" in the lawsuit.
Shia LaBeouf garnered critical acclaim for his film Honey Boy, which was meant to be based on his childhood. Notably, in the film, the main character's father is abusive. Except LaBeouf later admitted that the depiction of his father as abusive was "fucking nonsense" and that he'd "vilified [him] on a grand scale." He continued, 'My dad was so loving to me my whole life. Fractured, sure. Crooked, sure. Wonky, for sure. But never was not loving, never was not there. He was always there…and I'd done a world press tour about how f***ed he was as a man. ... My dad never hit me, never."
Kevin Hart admitted to domestic violence in his memoir I Can't Make This Up: Life Lessons, even saying he once spent the night in jail after an argument with his then-partner Torrei turned physical. He described thinking, 'When it got violent where we're fighting — Am I really fighting? Am I holding my hands up as if she's a man right now? Oh my God. This is…I'm out. I've really got my hands up to not defend, but counter. Like, I'm waiting for you to throw a punch. Cuz I'm about to counter the s*** out of you.'
Jamie Dornan once stalked a woman in order to prepare to play serial killer Paul Spector in The Fall. 'This is a really bad reveal: I, like, followed a woman off the train one day to see what it felt like to pursue someone like that. I really kept my distance," he revealed to the LA Times. "She got off a few stops earlier than I was planning so I said right, I have to commit to this. I followed her around a couple of street corners and then was like: What are you doing?"
"It felt kind of exciting, in a really sort of dirty way. I'm sort of not proud of myself," Dornan continued. "But I do honestly think I learned something from it, because I've obviously never done any of that. It was intriguing and interesting to enter that process of 'what are you following her for?' and 'what are you trying to find out?''
He even wondered aloud, "Can we get arrested for this?" before telling the story.
Joe Jonas reportedly asked out Gigi Hadid when she was only 13 years old. "He asked me to a baseball game, and I said no," Hadid revealed. "I was so nervous; I literally didn't even know what it meant to hang out with a boy." If Hadid's timeline is right, Jonas would've been 19 at the time, but since Hadid says this happened at the Grammys, it was more likely when Hadid was 14 and Jonas was 20 (as this was the first time Hadid attended the Grammys). After Hadid told Jonas "maybe next time," she says Joe "wrote his number on a piece of paper and gave it to my mom." The two later dated in 2015, when Hadid was 20 and Jonas was 26.
Am I the only one who didn't know that Robert De Niro, along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., once offered $100,000 to anyone who could prove that vaccines are safe? This came after participating in a panel that flouted debunked vaccine claims, including that they cause autism. (De Niro's son has autism.) Oh, and De Niro wanted to put an anti-vax film in the Tribeca Film Festival, calling it "very personal" to him, though he later pulled it.
For the record, De Niro has said he's not anti-vaccine, and that he simply wants "safe vaccines."
We also obviously know about the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp defamation trial, but one part that consistently gets overlooked is Paul Bettany's part. Bettany, a friend of Depp's, exchanged numerous texts with Depp about Heard, some of which concerned burning and drowning her. 'I'm not sure we should burn Amber," Bettany wrote after Depp suggested it. "She is delightful company and pleasing on the eye. We could of course do the English course of action and perform a drowning test. Thoughts? You have a swimming pool."
Depp reportedly wrote back, 'Let's drown her before we burn her!!! I will fuck her burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she's dead.' Bettany reportedly replied, 'My thoughts entirely. Let's be certain before we pronounce her a witch.'
Depp later said he was ashamed of these messages, said they were an example of 'irreverent and abstract humour' based on a Monty Python sketch, and claimed "none of that was ever intended to be real." Bettany later called it an "unpleasant feeling" to have his private messages read aloud in court and said he hadn't spoken out about it at the time because he didn't want to "just pour fuel on the fire."
Speaking of Depp — unsealed court documents from the same defamation trial suggest that Depp was investigated by the LAPD and the Department of Family Services for allowing his then-15-year-old daughter, Lily-Rose, to live with her 23-year-old boyfriend next door to him in his condo. No charges were filed, and Depp has never publicly responded to these allegations, though the witness in the documents testified that they felt Depp had made false statements in order for the charges not to be filed.
These statements were made in response to questions asking about Depp's supposed "penchant for not telling the truth" and were part of a larger case, so there were no other mentions I could see relating to possible statutory rape charges. Depp was not cross-examined on this specific claim. Heard did not seem to address these claims either, beyond alleging that Depp had once let an older musician whom Lily-Rose had a crush on stay over at his house when Lily-Rose was 14. Lily-Rose has not commented on these specific claims.
"I asked him afterwards, I said, 'It must have gone pretty well,' and he said, 'Yeah,'" the witness, who appears to be his former agent Tracey Jacobs*, described. "I said, 'Well you couldn't have told them the truth.' And he just smiled."
None of the claims reference specific names, but according to People magazine, Lily-Rose dated model Ash Stymest when she was 16 and he was 24, so this may have been the "boyfriend" the witness refers to, as the age gap lines up.*The court documents name her as one of the witnesses, then the ensuing transcripts refer to the specific witness speaking as an experienced talent agent who stopped working with Depp in 2016 after a 30-year working relationship.
While Halle Berry has never publicly named her attacker, she has claimed that one of her exes, a well-known star, once "hit her so hard, her left eardrum was punctured" causing her to flee so quickly "there were skid marks." Singer Christopher Williams, who dated Halle, later alleged that the attacker was Wesley Snipes. Ex-boyfriend David Justice later claimed the same in a series of now-deleted tweets that were supported by Berry's ex-husband Eric Benét.
Snipes and Berry did not respond to requests to comment from E! when it reported on the incident in 2004.
Sean Penn was also accused of attacking Madonna when they were married. He allegedly tied her to a chair for nine hours, until she was able to escape and run to the police station. Originally, Penn was charged with battery and inflicting 'corporal injury and traumatic conditions,' but Madonna later pulled the complaints, though she did file for divorce.
R&B singer Michel'le has publicly accused Dr. Dre (with whom she shares a child) of beating her so badly that she had to get plastic surgery on her nose to repair the damage. In the Season 1 reunion special of R&B Divas: Los Angeles, when host Wendy Williams pointed out that she had to be referring to Dr. Dre, Michel'le replied, "He knows it. That was very public," and said he often gave her black eyes right before she'd shoot music videos. According to Michel'le, they also started a relationship when she was only 17.
Dr. Dre later publicly apologized for his past behavior toward women (which Michel'le didn't feel was genuine because it was public and not personally to her), and acknowledged that some allegations against him were true, though he then denied having abused Michel'le.
And finally, we'll end on the scandal surrounding the never-released Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio movie Don's Plum. Basically, Maguire and DiCaprio starred in a movie that was essentially about a group of awful people talking in a diner. The movie was never released in the US, and in fact is not allowed to be released in the US after a legal battle where Maguire and DiCaprio claimed they had never been informed the film was a feature with a commercial release. (Director R. D. Robb and producer Dale Wheatley later settled with Maguire and DiCaprio.) Years later, Wheatley made the film available via request on his site freedonsplum, writing "Leonardo DiCaprio has done everything in his power to bury this film and me along with it."
Wheatley also alleged frightening behavior from Maguire, who he says screamed at him for 12 hours about releasing the film. Oh, and he's also tweeted that "Leo is Tobey's little bitch," and that "there's something strange about their relationship — I do believe Tobey has something on Leo." One man's opinion, sure, but I still think this whole saga is pretty wild, and there's a lot we don't know.
If you want to learn more, the New York Post even ended up making a documentary about it, but the most in-depth description IMO is this Reddit write-up by gestatingsquid, which is based on Wheatley's comments and interviews (which are also linked in the post). Obviously, we can't confirm Wheatley's comments or gestatingsquid's conclusions, especially since neither Maguire nor DiCaprio have spoken publicly about the film. Our only comments from the two come from the case itself, which this Vanity Fair piece reviewed, and are mostly in reference to the claims in the lawsuit about whether or not the film was a short. Maguire did not reply to requests for comment from Vanity Fair, and DiCaprio declined to comment.
What's a celebrity scandal or allegation that you feel never blew up? Let us know in the comments.