16 Bizarre Celeb Controversies And Moments That I Feel Deserve More Attention
It’s time to finally talk about Beegate, the Taylor Swift swastika photo, and Paula Abdul’s questionable plane crash.
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.