1. Kevin Hart admitted to domestic violence in his memoir, I Can't Make This Up: Life Lessons. He met his first wife, Torrei Hart, in 2001, and they had two children together before splitting in 2010. The relationship was fraught, and Hart revealed that things got so violent that the police had to get involved; Hart even ended up in jail for one night in one instance.
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." Surprisingly, this revelation didn't seem to make any waves, and I've seen shockingly few people bring it up in relation to Hart.
2. Jackie Chan, too, admitted to violence — and a bunch of other bad behavior — in his memoir. In the book Never Grow Up, he detailed his irresponsible spending and drunk driving after reaching international stardom. "I drunk drove all the time. In the morning, I'd crash my Porsche, then in the evening, I'd total a Mercedes-Benz. All day long, I went around in a haze," he wrote. He also spoke of gambling and paying women for sex before becoming famous. But the worst admission is that he once threw his then-two-year-old son Jaycee across the room: "I picked him up with one hand and flung him across the room, and he crashed into the sofa."
"With the amount of force I used, if he'd hit the back or armrests, it could have been quite serious," he revealed. That was the last time he ever hit his son, he says, due to the immediate regret that washed over him.
3. Speaking of driving under the influence, Anthony Hopkins revealed that he once was so drunk while driving that he completely blacked out, ending up in a hotel room with no memory of getting there. "I was drunk and driving my car here in California in a blackout, no clue where I was going, when I realized that I could have killed somebody — or myself, which I didn’t care about — and I realized that I was an alcoholic," Hopkins said. He decided, right after that 1975 experience, to stop drinking and has now been sober for decades.
4. Cardi B once admitted in an Instagram Live that she used to drug and rob men "to ... survive." She said, "I had to go strip. I had to go 'Oh yeah, you wanna fuck me? Yeah yeah yeah, let's go back to this hotel.' And I drugged n****s up and I robbed them. That's what I used to do. Nothing was mothafuckin' handed to me." In response to backlash, Cardi tweeted, "I never claim to be an angel I always been a street bitch. Ya be glorifying this street rappers that talk and do that grimmey street shit but they can't stand a street bitch."
When the video resurfaced and caused renewed backlash, Cardi took to Instagram to write, "Whether or not they were poor choices at the time, I did what I had to do to survive. I never claimed to be perfect or come from a perfect world," also saying, "I never glorified the things I brought up in that live [video], I never even put those things in my music because I'm not proud of it and feel a responsibility not to glorify it. ... I made the choices that I did at the time because I had very limited options." She also claimed the men she had drugged were "conscious, willing, and aware" and involved with her at the time.
5. 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?'"
6. Snoop Dogg revealed in a 2013 Rolling Stone interview that he pimped out women in the 2000s...after he was famous. "I did a Playboy tour, and I had a bus follow me with ten bitches on it. I could fire a bitch, fuck a bitch, get a new ho: It was my program. City to city, titty to titty, hotel room to hotel room, athlete to athlete, entertainer to entertainer," he said. "If I'm in a city where the Denver Broncos or the Nuggets play, I get a couple of they players to come hang out, pick and choose, and whichever one you like comes with a number. A lot of athletes bought pussy from me."
However, Snoop wasn't a full pimp because he didn't take a cut of the profits. "I'd act like I'd take the money from the bitch, but I'd let her have it," he says. "It was never about the money; it was about the fascination of being a pimp. ... As a kid I dreamed of being a pimp, I dreamed of having cars and clothes and bitches to match. I said, 'Fuck it – I'm finna do it.'"
7. Ice-T was also a pimp. It's something he had mentioned in his music, the VH1 series Behind the Music, and in his first book, The Ice Opinion: Who Gives an F (one section was literally called "A pimp's guide to sex, rap, and God"), but he didn't go into detail. When flat-out asked about it in an NPR interview promoting his second memoir, Ice-T said he "tried [his] hand" at pimping when he was younger. He went into more detail in an interview with Esquire. "I was in Hawaii and the sister of my buddy's girlfriend was a prostitute. She had a pimp out there that we hung out with."
"He had parties and stuff. He's the first one who told me I could make it in the game," he said. "He told me, 'You don't seem fascinated with these women. Some guys are really giddy around chicks, but you just mind your business." I wasn't trippin'. So later in life I came back and hung out with him for a while and we'd drive chicks around and do all kinds of stuff." Unlike Snoop, he did make a profit (and said in real life, pimps take 100% of the money women make through sex work) though he said, "I never made enough to pay my rent" and that he really only "attempted" to be an actual pimp. He made it clear he doesn't agree with "the pimp lifestyle" now, though he also justified it: "If there was never a pimp there'd still be a whole lotta ho'ing going on."
"Every woman is a prostitute," he also said, specifically talking about women going out with men they don't like, so he'll pay/buy her something. (However, he also said that "working at a job you hate is a form of prostitution" and said priests are basically pimps, so there was a larger metaphor there.) He also painted pimps as simply opportunists: "The difference in a pimp and a normal guy is that a normal guy says, 'Oh this is terrible, you shouldn't do it.' And a pimp says, 'Well, since you decided you gonna do it, let's maximize this.'" He did acknowledge the dark side of trafficking and abduction, though he said "real pimps" don't do that.
8. Ice-T made another big reveal in 2012: that he used to rob banks. While his history of law-breaking was no secret, it was new info when he revealed that after he got out of the army, he and some friends would rob banks and jewelry stores armed with a sledgehammer. While he wasn't caught, friends were; he was reluctant to give details because, "It's a very difficult thing, because I got people still in the penitentiary. They're saying they didn't do it, here I am on TV."
9. Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino of Jersey Shore fame struggled with drug use, even before the show began. He went to great lengths to keep this a secret from producers, sneaking drugs onto the set of the show through his shoes and inside other pills and supplements. As far as crimes go, he even admitted to smuggling drugs through TSA at the height of his addiction. However, he was able to turn it around and has been sober since 2015.
10. Will Smith admitted in his memoir Will that he once considered murdering his father. This came decades after witnessing his father punch his mother in his youth, "so hard that she collapsed." He continued, "I saw her spit blood," stating that the moment — and his failure to stand up for her — defined who he is. As an adult caring for his father, who had cancer, he thought again of this moment. "One night, as I delicately wheeled him from his bedroom toward the bathroom, a darkness arose within me. The path between the two rooms goes past the top of the stairs. As a child I'd always told myself that I would one day avenge my mother. That when I was big enough, when I was strong enough, when I was no longer a coward, I would slay him."
He realized, at the top of the staircase, "I could shove him down, and easily get away with it." However, "as the decades of pain, anger, and resentment coursed then receded, I shook my head and proceeded to wheel Daddio to the bathroom." Smith's father ultimately died of cancer in 2016.
11. While promoting his film Cold Pursuit, Liam Neeson discussed how he related to the revenge story by recounting the time he found out a man had raped his friend. Because the friend stated that the man was Black, Neeson said he "went up and down areas with a cosh [a bludgeon], hoping I’d be approached by somebody — I'm ashamed to say that." He continued, "I did it for maybe a week, hoping some 'Black bastard' (Neeson used air quotes) would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could … kill him."
"There were some nights I went out deliberately into Black areas in the city looking to be set upon so that I could unleash physical violence," he also said on Good Morning America. He called his actions "terrible" but claimed he was not racist, saying he would've done the same thing but in other neighborhoods if the man who had attacked his friend had been white. "If she had said an Irish or a Scot or a Brit or a Lithuanian, I know I would have had the same effect. I was trying to show honor, to stand up for my dear friend, in this terrible medieval fashion." He later apologized for his comments, saying he'd "missed the point."
12. Charlamagne Tha God once suggested that he raped his wife, saying, "Me and my wife dated for a whole year, she would not give me no pussy. Me and my wife hung out one Saturday night and she got sloppy drunk and passed out in my momma's house and I got that pussy. She was f–king me back, and all that, but she was really drunk. I asked her yesterday, 'Did I rape you the first time we ever had sex?' And she goes, 'I mean in hindsight, yeah.'"
His wife Jessica Gadsden also spoke in the interview, "You shouldn't have used the word rape first of all because the conversation we were having is about rape culture. The conversation we were having was you felt like it was OK for you to have sex with me while I was intoxicated. That’s a rape culture thing. That's not rape. So when you asked me that question, I was hesitant to answer you because you used the word rape. But I mean, that's not what went down. Like we both know what happened. I was not passed out. I was very coherent, like enough for me to lift up my hips so you could take my panties off," she said. "And the next morning, we had sex. That’s what I'm saying, your memory’s for shit. You don't remember anything." Charlamagne also apologized for his word choice of "rape."
13. He also spoke about another time in which he got a girl drunk and gave her Spanish Fly (a sexual stimulant), then had sex with her, and admitted to having hit his girlfriend when he was 16. When these clips resurfaced, he addressed the backlash on his podcast, saying he had "failed to have productive mature conversations around issues that demand respect."
"Back in 2015, I attempted to have a dialogue about rape culture with an emphasis on the role men play...I can honestly say that I communicated that all wrong. For the record, in 1997 I was having consensual sex with a young lady," he said, referring to the Spanish Fly story. "I want to stress that I didn't take advantage of anyone, and I want to apologize to anyone who was triggered by that story." As for him admitting to domestic violence, he said, "There's no legitimate reason for me to do what I did, but I did it. I immediately regretted it. I also made a mistake by generalizing that all men have put their hands on a woman at some point. I'm not gonna speak for everyone else, I'm only going to speak for myself."
14. John Lennon also admitted to domestic violence. In the Beatles song "Getting Better," Lennon wrote, "I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved," and he later expanded on the lyric in an interview with Playboy in 1980. "I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically — any woman," he said. "I was a hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women," he said. "That is why I am always on about peace, you see. It is the most violent people who go for love and peace. Everything's the opposite. But I sincerely believe in love and peace."
15. Eric Clapton also admitted to abusing his ex-wife Pattie Boyd. "There were times when I took sex with my wife by force and thought that was my entitlement. I had absolutely no concern for other people," he told the Sunday Times, admitting to intense alcoholism and beating Boyd, as well as general violent behavior. "Everyone used to walk around me on eggshells. They didn't know if I was going to be angry or whatever. When I'd come back from the pub I could come back happy, or I could come back and smash the place up." Clapton and Boyd later divorced, and Clapton has been sober since 1987.
16. Numerous '70s/'80s rock stars have sung about hooking up with minors in their songs, perhaps most notably "Jailbait" by Ted Nugent (many of these rock stars, including Nugent, also became involved with minors). But for more explicit admissions, we have to talk about Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, who literally wrote about having sex with a minor at age 26 in his memoir. "She was 16, she knew how to nasty, and there wasn't a hair on it," Tyler wrote. He also wrote, "Her parents fell in love with me, signed a paper over for me to have custody, so I wouldn't get arrested if I took her out of state. I took her on tour."
It's likely that Tyler is referring to Julia Holcomb, who sued him in 2022 for sexual assault, sexual battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress back in the '70s. Holcomb also says she became pregnant, and Tyler made her have an abortion. Tyler denied these claims and said their relationship was consensual, and claimed immunity because he was her legal guardian then, calling for the suit to be dismissed.
17. Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers also wrote about having sex with a 14-year-old in his autobiography Scar Tissue. The girl — who reportedly inspired the song "Catholic School Girls Rule" — came backstage at his concert and the two had sex. According to Keidis, she then continued on with the band to Baton Rouge. After their show, the girl revealed that she was 14 and her father was the chief of police in her town, adding that "the entire state of Louisiana" was looking for her because she'd been reported missing.
Keidis said he wasn't scared "because, in my somewhat deluded mind, I knew that if she told the chief of police she was in love with me, he wasn't going to have me taken out to a field and shot, but I did want to get her the hell back home right away. So we had sex one more time." He was in his mid-20s at the time.
18. John Stamos once told a story about getting his friend laid by tricking a woman into thinking she was having sex with him in the mid-'80s. "I was in a band. I was playing somewhere in Finland, and there was a girl hanging around who was really drunk and interested in me. I wasn't into her, but my friend was. So the girl came back to my hotel, and I turned the lights down, and we started making out. I said, 'Hold on a second, I've gotta go brush my teeth.' It was dark, I left the room, and I sent in my friend who looked like me. And she thought she was having sex with me, but she was really having sex with my friend."
19. In an anthology about bad sex, Alison Brie once wrote about convincing a male gay friend to have sex with her. "And what if he were to discover he was actually straight? I would have saved him from a life of dysfunctional penetration. Literally my vagina would have been his road to salvation!" she wrote. The two did have sex, even though he purportedly didn't want her to touch his penis, and had difficulty getting aroused, which only caused Brie to brainstorm new solutions. Brie called the whole thing a failure, though she's apparently still friends with the man.
20. Lena Dunham garnered significant controversy for writing about her interactions with her younger sibling in her memoir, Not That Kind of Girl. She wrote that as a young teenager, she would masturbate in bed even when her sibling was sleeping next to her, and that when she was 7, she'd bribe her sibling into kissing her (comparing this behavior to that of a sexual predator), and also examined her sibling's vagina (who was 1 at the time) out of curiosity. Right-wing blog Truth Revolt referred to these incidents as sexual abuse, which Dunham later called "upsetting and disgusting."
She later issued a statement saying that her sibling had approved everything she wrote about them, and that she does not "condone any kind of abuse under any circumstances," adding, "Childhood sexual abuse is a life-shattering event for so many, and I have been vocal about the rights of survivors. If the situations described in my book have been painful or triggering for people to read, I am sorry, as that was never my intention. I am also aware that the comic use of the term 'sexual predator' was insensitive, and I’m sorry for that as well."
21. TI stated in a 2019 interview that every year since his daughter turned 16, he'd taken her to the gynecologist to check if her hymen is intact in order to see if she's still a virgin (for the record, this is not a good indicator of virginity, and the World Health Organization has called virginity testing "a violation of the human rights of girls and women"). TI later claimed he'd "embellished" and "exaggerated" the story, that he'd only gone to her doctor's appointments when she was younger, and that his daughter had no problem with it (though she did, he said, "have a problem with me talking about it," which he claimed to have apologized for).
"She understands my intentions and she knows who I am, who I’ve always been," he continued, but his daughter Deyjah's comments indicated otherwise. She claimed T.I. had come with her to her gynecologist since she was 14 or 15 and that she "couldn't have said no." She called the situation "a little traumatizing," saying she was "very shocked, hurt, angry, [and] embarrassed" that T.I. had spoken publicly about it.
22. Marilyn Manson made a number of disturbing claims in his 1999 autobiography, including that he once repeatedly harassed a "hot brunette" along with a friend. "I fell back on my usual deviant way of getting a girl's attention: malicious, asinine behavior." He said he would make threatening phone calls to her, telling her they were watching her and saying things like, "You better not leave work tonight, because we're going to rape you in the parking lot and then crush you underneath your own car." He then apparently made the calls daily for weeks, progressively getting "meaner."
Manson also claimed that he'd plotted to kill his ex-girlfriend and ex-bandmate Nancy. "She had to die," he wrote. "While I didn’t think it was right to take a human life, I didn't think it was right to deny myself the chance of causing someone to die either, especially someone whose existence meant so little to the world and to herself. At the time, taking someone's life seemed like a necessary growing and learning experience, like losing your virginity or having a child." He claims he and a friend followed Nancy to discover her routine, then came back to light her house on fire. He ended up getting spooked by sirens and decided that too many people would suspect him.
23. Porn star Riley Reid has told the story of losing her virginity multiple times, calling it a "fun story." She says she was at the movie theater with her then-14-year-old boyfriend (she says she was two weeks from turning 16) when they were fooling around in the seats. She asked if they could have sex, but he repeatedly said no, not wanting to lose his virginity in a movie theater. Despite his protestations, she says she sat on his lap, and the two had sex, with Reid saying she "forced him upon myself" and that he didn't push her off. She's even referred to the incident as rape in multiple now-deleted tweets.
24. In an interview for the 2003 documentary Living with Michael Jackson, Jackson admitted to sleeping in bed with young boys. "I've slept in the bed with many children. I'd sleep in the bed with all of them," he said. "When Macaulay Culkin [was] little, Kieran Culkin would sleep on this side, Macaulay Culkin's on this side. His sister's in there. We'd all just jam in the bed. And we'd wake up at dawn and go in the hot air balloon." When questioned on if this was "right," Jackson said, "It's very right, it's very loving. ... What's wrong with sharing the love?" He also said he had footage of them all sleeping together.
This was a bombshell revelation, given that in 1993 Jackson had been accused of child sexual abuse (he settled with the family out of court). Jackson was later found "not guilty" in an infamous 2005 trial, and the sexual abuse allegations continued after his death in 2009, most notably in the documentary Finding Neverland.
25. 50 Cent had rapped about his experiences selling drugs as a teenager, but didn't speak publicly about it until around the early 2000s. After his mom was murdered, he moved in with his grandparents, though on the streets, he was taken in by older boys. "They knew nobody was there for me, so they gave me a little three-and-a-half grams and said, 'Here, start hustling,'" 50 told Rolling Stone in 2003. He pretended he was in an after-school program and would sell drugs after school let out. He was eventually caught and arrested in the tenth grade, and later dropped out of school altogether. By the time he was 18, he said, he was making over $5k a day selling drugs.
When asked if he felt guilty for selling drugs, 50 Cent said he didn't, saying it seemed like the only option at such a young age. "I provide for myself by any means. I don't care about how anybody feels about it. 'Cause when I'm doin' it, I really don't have intentions to hurt nobody. I don't expect everybody to understand. But there's people that's from where I'm from that understand." As his arrests ramped up, however, 50 decided to transition into hip-hop, and the rest is history.
26. Ozzy Osbourne revealed that he once tried to kill his wife, Sharon Osbourne...and didn't even remember it. "All I remember is waking up in Amersham [England] jail and I asked the cop, 'Why am I here?' And he says, 'You want me to read your charge?' So he read, 'John Michael Osbourne, you have been arrested for attempted murder,'" he recalled.
Sharon confirmed the story. "I had no idea who was sat across from me on the sofa but it wasn't my husband. He goes to a stage where he gets that look in his eyes, the shutters were down and I just couldn't get through to him. And he just said, 'We've come to a decision that you've got to die.' He was calm — very calm — then suddenly he lunged across at me and just dived on me and started to choke me. He got me down on the ground on top of me." Sharon pressed the panic button on the table below her, causing the cops to come.
27. Writer Elizabeth Gilbert also confessed to wanting to kill someone: her partner, Rayya Elias, who was terminally ill when the two began their relationship (they had previously been best friends). In her book All the Way to the River, she goes into detail about Elias's relapse into drug addiction as she was dying, and the toxic state their relationship devolved into. "I was at the end of myself and she was at the end of herself. It was a situation that had become kind of the very definition of unmanageable," she recalled.
"Her drug addiction was so devastating and nightmarish and she had turned into somebody who is paranoid and abusive and aggressive, and who also wasn't sleeping because cocaine addicts don't sleep, and also wasn't allowing me to sleep." As things got particularly bad, Gilbert — who was dealing with a sex and love addiction — considered killing Elias by switching out her medication for sleeping pills and using fentanyl patches. "I could see no other way out," she wrote. "And it felt like the degree of my insanity ... as to how crazy I was was that it seemed like a really good idea in that moment." Elias died in 2018, eighteen months after she'd received her diagnosis.
28. And finally, this may not involve stars you know, but it's so shocking I had to include it: director Werner Herzog admitted to almost murdering the star of his movie Fitzcarraldo, Klaus Kinski. The 1982 German film was a notoriously troubled production, and Herzog and Kinski had a very contentious relationship. Things got so bad that Herzog set out to set Kinski's house on fire with him inside — but Kinski's dog attacked Herzog before he could do it. According to Herzog, Kinski also wanted to kill him. This isn't the first time the director and actor went at it. Herzog said that while filming an earlier collaboration, 1972's Aguirre, Wrath of God, he pointed a gun at Kinski — who had just threatened to walk off set — and threatened to kill Kinski and then himself.
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