There are many celebrities that you know are scumbags—no one is going to give Chris Brown or Roman Polanski a humanitarian award anytime soon. But other people have somehow managed to keep their names clean despite allegations, whispers, or actual convictions of awful or questionable behavior. Here are some of them.
1. Mark Wahlberg
Marky Mark would really like you to forget that he has multiple hate crimes in his past. When he was 15, the actor was the subject of a civil suit alleging that he threw rocks and yelled racial epithets at black children. At 16, he was convicted for a hate crime for beating a Vietnamese man with a stick and punching a different Vietnamese man in the face on the same day. Throughout the assault and during his arrest, he called both men racial slurs. He was convicted of assault and served 45 days in prison.
He's now requesting a pardon for his crimes, which is the stupidest f*cking sh*t in the world.
2. Halle Berry
When actress Halle Berry was convicted for a hit-and-run in 2000, prosecutors alleged that she had already been fingered in two additional hit-and-run accidents elsewhere in the country (her lawyers disputed this). It's a matter of public record, however, that Berry fled from the scene of this last accident, in which she received a gash to the forehead and the other driver suffered a broken wrist and other injuries. Berry said, as a part of her defense, that she lost all memory of the incident because of her head injury. Hopefully she remembers to hire a driver these days.
3. Jay Z
Everyone knows that Jay Z used to be a drug dealer—it's a part of the rapper's whole rags-to-riches mythology—but do you remember that in 1999, after he already became famous, Jay Z was convicted for stabbing a record executive in the gut with a five-inch blade because Hova believed the man had leaked his album?
Wrote Jay Z in his book Decoded:
One night I went to Q-Tip's solo album release party and at some point in the night, I ran into the guy everyone's been telling me is behind the bootleg. So I approached him. When I told him what I suspected, to my surprise, he got real loud with me right there in the middle of the club. It was strange. We separated and I went over to the bar. I was sitting there like, "No the fuck this n*gga did not....." I was talking to people, but I was really talking to myself out loud, just in a state of shock. Before I even realized what I was doing, I headed back over to him, but this time I was blacking out with anger. The next thing I knew, all hell had broken loose in the club. That night the guy went straight to the police and I was indicted...
There was no reason to put my life on the line, and the lives of everyone who depends on me, because of a momentary loss of control..... I vowed to never allow myself to be in a situation like that again.
And hey, that was more than 15 years ago. At least he isn't asking for a pardon. Mark Wahlberg.
4. Chuck Berry
It would be really easy to fill this list with all musicians from the mid-century, because the old days? They were awful. However, rock 'n' roll pioneer Chuck Berry is particularly noteworthy because he was sued by nearly 60 women for supposedly filming them while they used the bathroom at the restaurant he owned. Yup. The settlement cost Berry about $1.2 million.
5. Aaron Eckhart
It's not a crime, but it's pretty sh*tty: actor Aaron Eckhart joined a support group for parents who lost children when he was researching his role in Rabbit Hole. He never told any of the parents that he was an actor, and in fact lied to them and told them his child had died. "The gathering is very quiet," he told Howard Stern. "There's 10 people, couples. [Their children had passed away] very recently, it's fresh. You're sitting in sort of a circle. Then one person goes, then two, three, then it gets to me. And by that point you're just so flushed that you just start going and giving the details of the story." He just identified so much with his character, you see.
6. Laura Bush
Whatever your politics, Laura Bush has always seemed like a very nice lady. But when she was 17, Laura Bush ran a stop sign while she was chatting with her friend in her father's car, hitting the car of another teen at her high school and killing him. She wasn't charged in the death, though the incident apparently affected her for years. Still, it should be noted that First Lady Laura Bush has killed a hell of a lot less people than literally any president in U.S. history.
7. Matthew Broderick
Bush isn't the only famous person to have a deadly history behind the wheel of a car. Matthew Broderick was on vacation in 1987 with his girlfriend at the time, Ferris Bueller's Day Off costar Jennifer Grey, when his car veered into the wrong lane and collided with an oncoming vehicle, killing two women. Broderick, who suffered a head injury in the crash, told authorities he had no memory of the entire day. He was convicted of careless driving and fined less than $200 for the accident, which the family of the deceased called "a travesty of justice."
8. Tim Allen
Before he was the voice of Buzz Lightyear and the star of Home Improvement, Tim Allen was arrested in 1978 for carrying nearly one and a half pounds of cocaine in an airport. That is a huge amount of cocaine. For instance, for example, the sort of quantity of cocaine that a drug dealer would carry. Allen pleaded guilty to drug trafficking charges and provided the names of other drug dealers in order to avoid a life sentence. And because of that bargain, we have The Santa Clause.
9. Dr. Dre
Last year's N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton left out one inconvenient fact about its protagonists: specifically, that rapper Dr. Dre assaulted the female hip hop journalist Dee Barnes in 1991 after she interviewed Ice Cube, who had left N.W.A. a few years prior on bad terms. N.W.A.'s MC Ren, Easy E, and Dre himself all defended the assault, claiming she had it coming. "It ain’t no big thing —I just threw her through a door," Dr. Dre said. He was convicted of misdemeanor battery for the attack, a conviction which, again, was not mentioned in the N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton.
10. Zach Braff
Remember the TV show Punk'd in which Ashton Kutcher played pranks on celebrities? Of course you do. It was by far the best thing that Ashton Kutcher has ever done. When Garden State's Zach Braff was on Punk'd, the prank involved a 12-year-old actor using fake spray paint to tag his expensive car. Braff chased down the kid and punched him in the stomach (which he admits quite gleefully!). This part was edited out of the TV version, as you can imagine.
11. Ace of Base
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqu132vTl5YOne of the band members was a Nazi. Really. Try not hearing "I Saw The Sign" in a different light.