Infamous Scandals

by Anne Williams

  When victims of his alleged crimes were called in for questioning, it emerged that six girls and women aged between 11 and 23, had admitted to having sexual relations with Glitter. He was taken into custody and remained there until the end of the investigation on 26 December 2005. Throughout the proceedings, Glitter claimed that he was innocent, and was bitter about what he saw as inhumane treatment at the hands of the authorities.

  Obscene acts

  Eventually, the charge of raping under-age girls was dropped, which was just as well for Glitter because if he had been found guilty he would have faced death by firing squad. Instead, he was charged with committing obscene acts against the two young girls, and after a summary trial, was convicted on 3 March 2006. He received a prison sentence of three years, which he continues to serve today.

  Glitter has consistently denied any wrongdoing, and has blamed the tabloid press for his downfall, citing them as ‘the worst enemy in the world’. In an interview with the BBC, he continued to maintain that he was innocent, blaming the press for the fact that he could not, as he put it, put his life back on track. However, in the interview he failed to address such issues as why he had been in possession of child pornography, or why he had tried to escape from Vietnam if he was innocent.

  In June 2006, Glitter appealed against his sentence, but the appeal was rejected. Afterwards, Glitter commented angrily, ‘There is no justice here in Vietnam’. The same year, the National Football League asked teams to stop singing the ‘hey’ song at their matches. It remains to be seen what Glitter will make of his life when he is released in August 2008, as an entertainer whose reputation has been completely ruined by a series of shocking sex scandals over the last decade.

  R. Kelly

  R. Kelly was one of the United State’s most popular black entertainers until 2002, when it was revealed that a videotape of him apparently having sex with a 14-year-old girl was circulating among the public. Not surprisingly, the scandal has seriously damaged his reputation as an entertainer, changing his image from that of oversexed crooner to that of cold, manipulative paedophile. However, he still succeeds in making million-selling records, showing that the damage to his reputation has not seriously dented his income to date.

  Sexual lyrics

  Robert Sylvester Kelly was born in the south of Chicago on 8 January 1969. From a young age, it was clear that he had great talent as a singer, and at high school, his teacher encouraged him to pursue a career in music. He began by singing in the street and on trains in the city of Chicago, winning over audiences with his beautiful voice. Encouraged by his success in entertaining audiences, he joined a group called Public Announcement, and by the early 1990s he was beginning to make records with them. Their first hit was an album called Born Into the 90s, and he followed this up with a solo album, 12 Play. His songs were light, smooth and full of sexual lyrics, and soon made him one of the most successful artists in rythm & blues.

  In 1994, R. Kelly produced the debut album of a 15-year-old singer, Aaliyah. Later, it turned out that Kelly and she had married, after Aaliyah feigned to be 18 years old. Because of the controversy that followed, the wedding was annulled and the pair separated, on non-speaking terms. The incident was to be recalled later, when R. Kelly’s dealings with under-age girls once again created a public scandal.

  Paedophile sex video

  Although this episode provoked a scandal, Kelly continued to be a popular act and also made his name as a producer and songwriter, working with Michael Jackson and other famous artists. He made another album, and wrote a hit song for the Michael Jordan film Space Jam, ‘I Believe I can Fly’, following this up with ‘Gotham City’ for the 1997 movie Batman and Robin. In 1998, his career hit the heights with a new album on which he sang a duet with Celine Dion, and which eschewed the explicitly sexual lyrics of his former records.

  In the new millennium Kelly teamed up with Jay-Z and went back to his old style of sexualised lyrics, with great success. However, it was during the advertising campaign for the album Best of Both Worlds, featuring Kelly and Jay-Z, that a huge scandal broke. In February 2002, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that it had been sent a videotape of R. Kelly having sex with a girl who appeared to be under 16 years of age. In the video Kelly performs various sexual acts, including urinating on the girl. The girl was thought to be the daughter of an associate, and the niece of an artist called Sparkle that Kelly had championed at one time. Both Kelly and the girl – along with her parents – denied that they were the individuals in the video. However, after the Aaliyah episode, few believed Kelly, and he was indicted in Chicago on 21 charges of having sex with a minor.

  Viewing of the tape later showed that there was no actual sexual intercourse involved and the charges were reduced to soliciting a minor for child pornography, videotaping the act and producing child pornography.

  In 2003 he was charged in Polk County, Florida, on 12 counts of possession of child pornography when it was found that he had a digital camera showing him having sex with an under-age girl. The charges were later dropped. Several more girls and young women sued him for circulating pictures of them having sex with him without their consent, and one woman accused him of having got her pregnant when she was only 16, and then forcing her to have an abortion. He settled most of these cases out of court, claiming that this was to protect his career.

  Assault and false imprisonment

  By 2005, Kelly’s reputation had hit rock bottom as his girlfriend Andrea – originally his backup dancer and the mother of his children – sought a restraining order on him, claiming that he had attacked her. However, she later dropped the charges. She went on to marry him, only to sue for divorce shortly afterwards. The following year, his close friend, mentor and former employee, Henry ‘Love’ Vaughn sued him for assault, false imprisonment and a breach of contract concerning songwriting royalties. According to Vaughn, Kelly had taken him to the basement of his house and had punched him hard in the face and on the body. However, there was some dispute as to what had really happened, as a police investigation did not find any evidence to support Vaughn’s claims.

  Next, trouble broke out between Kelly and Jay-Z. Kelly behaved erratically during a tour and Jay-Z eventually threw him off the tour. Kelly responded by announcing that a friend of Jay-Z’s, Tyran Smith, had attacked him and members of his entourage with mace or pepper spray. The two artists fell out in no uncertain terms, and each of them launched a massive lawsuit against each other, which involved millions of dollars.

  After the paedophile scandal, Kelly’s career took a nosedive as a result of the negative publicity that followed. Several radio stations refused to play his records, and some record shops even refused to sell them. Sales on his album immediately dropped.

  In 2002 he was charged on the counts of child pornography and released on bail to the tune of $750,000. Currently, he is banned from associating with Michael Jackson and has to seek permission from the courts each time he wants to go on tour. However, he has refused to let the scandal overshadow him, and has continued to release successful albums, despite the public humilation following the revelations of his sexual proclivities, his manipulative behaviour towards women and his circulation of images of him having sex with under-age girls.

  Anna Nicole Smith

  Anna Nicole Smith, a Playboy model, became famous when she married oil billionare J. Howard Marshall, who was 63 years older than herself. After his death, she fought his son for a share of her deceased husband’s estate. She was also the subject of many sex scandals after the birth of her daughter, when several of her former lovers claimed paternity for the child. Other scandals erupted and her various legal battles over money, paternity and custody of her children, as well as her increasingly exhibitionist behaviour in public, ensured that she was constantly featured in the tabloid press throughout her dramatic career as an all-American sex symbol.

  Breast implants

  Smith was born Vickie Lynn Hogan in Houston, Texas, the only child o
f Donald and Virgie Hogan. During her childhood, her father left the family home, and Anna Nicole was raised by her mother and aunt. When her mother remarried, Smith took her new stepfather’s name before adopting her stage name. As a teenager, she went to live with another aunt and dropped out of high school, working in a restaurant instead. There she met her first husband, cook Billy Wayne Smith, and the couple married when she was 17 and he only 16. They had one child, Daniel Wayne Smith, before separating two years later.

  As a young mother with a child to support, Vickie found work as a stripper, and also took dance and singing lessons in the hopes of furthering her career in show business. Her break came when she auditioned for Playboy magazine and was picked out by Hugh Hefner to work as one of his star models, becoming Playmate of the Year for 1993.

  Anna Nicole Smith, as she now became known, attracted attention because of her large breasts, harking back to the glamour of 1950s’ sex symbols like Jayne Mansfield. Unlike them, however, her breasts were surgically enhanced by implants, and her popularity set a trend, decried by many, for women to enlarge their breasts in this way. In a series of advertisements for jeans and underwear, Smith played on her 1950s’ image, which created a good deal of controversy in the media. This got out of hand when, in 1994 New York magazine issued a picture of her wearing Western cowboy clothing, under the headline ‘White Trash’. Smith took objection to this and sued the magazine, claiming that they had not told her they were going to use this headline.

  Gold digger?

  By now, Smith was a well-known sex symbol and had embarked on a film career, but in 1991 she met an elderly oil billionaire, J. Howard Marshall, at a strip club in Houston, and began a two-year affair with him. During this time, he reportedly wooed her with expensive gifts and then proposed marriage. The wedding took place in 1993, when Smith was 26 years old and Marshall was 89 and in poor health. This union provoked outrage from the media, but in response Smith told the press that she loved her husband and that ‘age did not matter to her’.

  Just over a year into the marriage, during which time Smith did not live with her husband, Marshall died, leaving an enormous estate behind him, valued at millions. Only a few weeks later, instead of mourning him, Smith and Marshall’s son became locked in a battle for the estate, in which Smith claimed half the proceeds. The legal proceedings were extremely long, drawn out and complicated, and to this day the battle continues.

  Paternity claims

  While the negotiations for the money were continuing, Smith’s career began to decline. She began to put on weight and to make an embarrassing display of herself on screen, sometimes shedding her clothes to attract attention and slurring her speech, as though under the influence of drugs. Her reality TV series, The Anna Nicole Show, initially attracted good ratings, but critics panned it and eventually it only retained a cult following among college students.

  In 2006 Smith announced that she was pregnant, and her attorney Howard K. Stern claimed that he was the child’s father. On 2 September 2006 Smith’s daughter Dannielynn Hope Marshall Stern was born. There followed a series of counter-claims by Smith’s former lovers, including photographer and journalist Larry Birkhead, Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, former bodyguard Alexander Denk and Hollywood bad boy Mark Hatten, who all claimed paternity.

  Drugs overdose

  Scandals about Smith continued to entertain readers of the tabloid press, although by now her story was becoming a tragic one. On 10 September 2006, while visiting his mother and new baby half-sister in hospital, Smith’s son Daniel died suddenly. It was later found that he was suffering from an overdose of various drugs, including methadone. That same month, Smith and Stern threw a party and got married, although no formal marriage certificate was ever registered. Some were shocked at the hastiness of the celebrations, given that Smith’s son had only recently died.

  After the ceremony, Smith and Stern decided to stay in their holiday home in the Bahamas to avoid Birkhead suing for custody of the child in the United States. Another scandal erupted when, after gaining the right to stay in the country, Smith was photographed lying in bed embracing Immigration Minister Shane Gibson. As a result of the ensuing row, Gibson was forced to resign his position.

  Dead on arrival

  The final scandal came when Anna Nicole Smith herself was found dead in a hotel room in Florida. A bodyguard found her unconscious and although she was rushed to hospital, she was pronounced dead on arrival on 8 February 2007. After seven weeks of investigation, news came that Smith had died of a combination of prescribed drugs, among them chloral hydrate, a sleeping medicine that Smith consumed in large quantities. She had also taken several kinds of benzodiazepines, including lorezapam and diazepam, as well as injecting vitamins and growth hormone into her buttocks.

  After her death her estate was valued at over a million, although some of her property was heavily mortgaged. Today, legal disputes over her claim of Marshall’s estate continue, in the name of her daughter, and the paternity status of the child is still being contested. Even her place of burial continues to be a source of conflict among her family and friends. Smith was eventually buried in the Bahamas next to her son Daniel, despite his grandmother’s persistent attempts to have them both brought to Texas for burial. Various scandals persist to this day, and look set to continue, even after the death of Anna Nicole herself.

  Pete Doherty

  Pete Doherty is used to living life on the edge – drugs, alcohol, fights, prison and sex with a supermodel – have all been part of his daily routine. And yet, despite all the scandal that has haunted his life, Doherty has still managed to produce some of the most exciting punk-style music to come out of Britain in the past few years. His picture is very rarely out of the tabloids with news both good and bad, but despite the damning reports Doherty still manages to survive, maybe the reason is because he refuses to lie taking the criticism like a man.

  Doherty was born on 3 December 1979 in Hexham, Northumberland, the second of three children. His father was a major in the army and a strict disciplinarian and Doherty spent much of his childhood travelling around due to his father’s assignments. Doherty did not respond well to the constant moving and at the age of 17 went to live with his grandmother in North London. Settling into a regular routine, Doherty started to excel as a student and achieved top grades – 11 A grades at GSCE level and 4 A grades at A Level, earning himself a place at Oxford University to study English. However, in his first year Doherty dropped out and moved into a London flat with his friend Carl Barat, because he shared his love of music. Together they wrote songs and by 1996 had started to play as an acoustic duo in pubs around London. Other musicians, who were impressed by their talent, joined them and by 2001 the punk band known as the Libertines was formed. Doherty and Barat were joined by a drummer, Gary Powell and a bassist John Hassall.

  In 2002 the band were spotted by a talent scout and signed up to the Rough Trade label. Their first single, ‘What A Waster’, caused quite a stir in the music press and their second single a year later, ‘Up The Bracket’, received a similarly enthusiastic reception.

  However, along with the fame, came the self-destructive lifestyle, embracing the behaviour of one of his heroes, Sid Vicious from the band the Sex Pistols. Doherty’s behaviour started to cause problems with the other band members and the situation became volatile. When Doherty failed to turn up for a scheduled European tour, it was the cherry on top of the cake and he was expelled from The Libertines.

  With his unquenchable appetite for living in the fast lane, Doherty’s problems with drug addiction continued to get worse and his behaviour became more erratic. In 2003, while the rest of the Libertines were on tour, Doherty was arrested for breaking into Barat’s flat. During his brief spell in prison, Doherty managed to pull himself together and patched things up witt Barat, and when he was released the Libertines said they were prepared to give him another chance. Not surprisingly, their reunion was short-lived, when Dohe
rty’s behaviour threatened the future of the band. Again he was expelled, being told that he needed to do something about his drug addiction before they would be prepared to take him back.

  Friends and family pleaded with Doherty to go into rehab, but on two occasions he walked out before completing his treatment. Then his manager, Alan McGee, paid for him to go on a strict rehabilitation programme in a Thai monastery, but again the troubled star fled and drifted with no real purpose to his life.

  babyshambles

  With the Libertines seemingly unaffected by the loss of their front man, Doherty decided to form a new band called Babyshambles, which many believed at the time was due to his need to fund his drug addiction, rather than his obsession with music. However, his new musical career didn’t manage to keep him out of trouble and in the summer of 2004 Doherty was arrested again and charged with possessing a flick knife that the police found in his car.