Anyone familiar with privatized healthcare probably knows from experience that the Hippocratic Oath often gives way to hypocrisy in the form of surprisingly high medical bills for simple procedures. But sometimes, healthcare professionals also succumb to the temptation to sidestep government regulations and rake in millions of illegal dollars. And when exploitation becomes that profitable, it can inspire shockingly villainous levels of dishonesty—sometimes even blatant patient endangerment.

10Changing The Definition Of “Sick” To Admit More Patients

With the constant barrage of news stories about all the food additives and household objects that can give us cancer or otherwise damage our health, the last thing we need as a society is another excuse to descend into hypochondria. But even when we do succumb to the urge to treat every itch and hiccup as a symptom of the plague, we should still be able to trust nurses and physicians to set us straight with the proper diagnosis.

Florida-based Health Management Associates saw it differently. With the aid of complex software and a little old-fashioned strong-arming, the for-profit hospital admitted an excess of patients who needed little or no medical attention in order to bill Medicare. Hospital staffers were so eager to treat visitors that an infant whose body temperature registered at 37.1 degrees Celsius (98.7 °F)—one-tenth of a degree higher than the average temperature of 37 degrees (98.6 °F)—was documented as having a fever, resulting in needless and costly medical tests.

But not everyone involved in the hospital ruse was a willing participant. According to a whistle-blower lawsuit filed against the company, it was standard practice to fire physicians who refused to play ball, and administrators with ethical concerns about excessive hospital admissions suffered similar fates. Unfortunately, because of the increasingly convoluted financial affiliations and colossal scales that are coming to characterize groups like Health Management Associates, these kinds of abuses will likely be a persisting nightmare for regulators.

9Delegating Medical Treatments To Unqualified Staffers

Dr. Ravi Sharma was a certified thoracic surgeon who sought to help people lose weight through his Florida-based Life’s Image weight-loss center. And while one might not think of a chest doctor as the first person to run to with a severe case of glut-gut, it’s perfectly reasonable to expect the clinic to at least be staffed with professionals who know how to treat weight-related medical problems.

Unfortunately, Dr. Sharma was too busy being courted by dollar bills to worry about whether the people tending to his patients had any real clue what they were doing. Instead of recruiting certified professionals to perform vein injections and other invasive procedures, Sharma relied on untrained staffers—including an office manager—to do the work. The thoracic surgeon not only didn’t perform the procedures, he wasn’t even present to oversee them. Instead, he often texted the instructions for performing ultrasounds and varicose vein injections to his staff, according to one complaint against him.

To make matters worse, many of the invasive procedures were unnecessary, performed only for the purpose of charging extra money. Sharma, who only saw a few patients himself, sought Medicare payments for the procedures that his untrained assistants performed as well. But everything fell apart when he fired office manager Patti Lovell, who repaid the gesture by exposing Sharma’s indiscretions in a whistle-blower lawsuit. Sharma, however, having learned that money is the best medicine, simply made his troubles disappear by paying the government $400,000 and has since continued to practice medicine without further punishment.

8Exploiting Workers’ Compensation Claims

For the average Joe just looking to make ends meet, a severe workplace injury offers little more than physical agony and the dire prospect of being unable to provide for your family, not to mention the crippling debt of hospital bills. Thankfully, society has provided an invaluable safety net in the form of workers’ compensation, which covers the cost of recuperation from job-related accidents.

However, for orthopedic hospital owner Michael Drobot, workers’ compensation insurance was the unwitting inspiration for a 16-year, $500 million fraud. Through a series of bribes issued to doctors, chiropractors, and other professionals, Drobot’s clinic pulled in scores of patients who were undergoing surgery for work-related spinal injuries. Thanks to this scheme, many injured workers were sometimes sent hundreds of miles away from their homes for their operations instead of being scheduled for surgeries at the most convenient locations.

To ensure that his chicanery went unchecked, Drobot ingratiated himself with California state senator Ronald S. Calderon with the help of $100,000 in blatant bribe money. But since being apprehended, the corrupt hospital owner has done nothing but talk in attempts to reduce his punishment, dragging down Calderon and others in the process.

7Pretending Patients Are Terminally Ill To Get Medicare Funding

Hospices are essentially healthcare purgatories where the terminally ill wait out their final months under the care of staff trained to make their exit as painless as possible. They also happen to reduce hospital expenses and place a smaller financial burden on the Medicare program, which only covers expenses for hospice patients who are diagnosed with six or fewer months to live. Accordingly, hospitals and hospices have a large incentive to identify dying patients who no longer wish to extend their lives.

But between 2001 and 2013, Vistas Hospice Services, America’s largest privatized palliative care service, squandered millions of dollars in Medicare reimbursements on healthy and otherwise ineligible individuals. To promote these deceptive hospice enrollments, Vistas paid bonuses to staffers who played along, all while ignoring doctors’ and nurses’ concerns about the suitability of the care being administered. And in addition to this blatant subsidy abuse, Vistas also improperly identified some patients as suitable for crisis care, a highly expensive recourse reserved for patients who are severely impaired by illness. These bogus expenses were in turn passed off to taxpayers through Medicare reimbursements.

In one of the most telling cases, Vistas charged Medicare $170,000 to provide intensive nursing assistance to a woman who was not only not critically ill, but healthy enough to live on her own and perform household chores. Other patients who were supposedly knocking on death’s door were going to church and attending bingo halls. Because of such wholesale dishonesty, Vistas’s crisis care costs were almost six times that of the national average. These kinds of aberrations tend to attract the attention of the US government, which busted Vistas as part of a multibillion-dollar Medicare fraud investigation.

6Profiting From Dying Patients And Then Abandoning Them To Avoid Associated Costs

As we just observed, the best interests of the sick and dying sometimes take a backseat to the appeal of extended Medicare reimbursements. However, rather than blatantly lying about the condition of their patients like Vistas, many for-profit hospices opt for the more subtle approach of enrolling disproportionately high numbers of dementia sufferers, who sometimes live years longer than expected and—on average—require less care than other typical hospice patients.

The US government attempted to clamp down on this clandestine corruption by setting a $25,000 limit on the amount of money that hospices can receive without having to repay the government. However, numerous for-profit hospices nonetheless exceed their reimbursement caps by 50 percent or more. If they’re still in hot water, they can simply declare bankruptcy to avoid paying large debts, leaving ailing patients and their families to scramble for new providers while taxpayers foot the bill.

In a particularly striking case of this systematic abuse, Sojourn Care Inc. chose to close down after accruing $27 million in debt, then turned around and reopened under a different name. Consequently, the company was able to relinquish all previous legal obligations—which remained with the now defunct Sojourn Care—and then recruited the healthiest patients from its former incarnation in order to profit off them a bit longer. As a result, 180 of Sojourn Care’s 280 former patients were left to struggle, some dying in uncomfortable conditions as a result. The only thing more dispiriting is the fact that all of this is technically legal, meaning that for scores of families, justice may never be served.

5Conning Drug Addicts Into Entering Psychiatric Lockdown

Hardcore drug addicts are among the most desperate souls one can encounter in any society. Whether you sympathize with their struggles or chide them as harbingers of crime and social decay, there’s no denying that they lead lives of physical and mental enslavement at the hands of often deadly substances. So any efforts to help them break the chains of drug dependence should, in theory, be hailed as laudable endeavors.

But in Broward County, Florida, a group of executives overseeing a psychiatric hospital saw fit to provide a different kind of help for substance abusers. Over the course of nine years, the executives paid bribes and doctored documents all in the name of luring drug addicts to their hospital, the Hollywood Pavilion, where the addicts remained locked for weeks on end. But despite the glamorous connotations of its name, the Hollywood Pavilion was far from posh. Instead, patients were stuffed into insect-ridden rooms where they received little or no treatment and were kicked out as soon as their Medicare benefits had been exhausted.

After racking up $67 million in bogus reimbursements by offering empty promises of rehabilitation, the owners, Karen Kallen-Zury and Christian Coloma, received jail terms ranging from 12 to 25 years and were forced to pay millions in restitution. While none of these consequences can undo the injustices wrought against their victims, one can take some comfort in knowing that others in need of rehabilitation can’t be roped in by this toxic deception.

4Performing Fake Surgeries

One of the truly nightmarish aspects of surgery is the abject vulnerability of it. A patient must submit to drug-induced slumber so that a group of strangers can slice them open and proceed to poke, prod, and jostle their delicate innards. Were it not for the fact that this task was left up to highly trained experts, the surgeries would seem like blatant felonies. Unfortunately, some highly trained experts aren’t above behaving like felons.

Take, for example, Dr. Spyros Panos, an orthopedic surgeon at Saint Francis Hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York. Despite supposedly being fully capable of performing legitimate surgeries on his patients, it appears that the doctor opted to feign operations or perform them with the shoddiest of workmanship. A collection of 250 lawsuits filed by Panos’s former patients details how the surgeon performed excessive surgeries on some patients while not properly completing operations on others. In some cases, he sedated and opened up patients to give the illusion of surgery before sealing them right back up without making a single alteration.

Spanos’s exploits allowed him to schedule up to 22 surgeries per day, nearly 20 times the monthly average of his colleagues. And at least one of his dubious undertakings appears to have led to the death of a patient. While Panos has remained reticent about charges against him, his social media posts and personal blog ironically paint the picture of a doctor who takes patient care seriously. Fortunately for everyone, Spanos has since been convicted and has made a full confession.

3Recruiting The Homeless For Unnecessary Medical Treatment

By now, it’s abundantly clear that medical practitioners will sometimes travel great lengths down the path of dishonesty to make a few extra bucks. But we often expect that people who have dedicated themselves to saving lives will only go so far before succumbing to the pull of the angels on their shoulders. But if such a thing does occur, it certainly didn’t happen in California, where some of its most vulnerable citizens have been turned into fleshly ATM cards by hospital administrators.

A chain of Los Angeles-based medical facilities was caught enticing homeless people to submit to unnecessary medical testing. Lassoed in with miniscule bribes, homeless people were carted off to the hospital to receive second-rate treatment—or no treatment at all—before being loaded into ambulances and dumped in the famously seedy Skid Row. The bogus treatments were in turn billed to Medicaid. In one particularly horrifying instance, a homeless woman received a nitroglycerin patch for a fabricated illness, resulting in a dangerous drop in blood pressure.

All of this was made possible through a series of paid runners who collected and redeposited the homeless “patients.” The impromptu hospital visits accrued more than $16 million for the hospital chain. But the observant eye of Scott Johnson, an employee of Union Rescue Mission, caught on to the bizarre back-and-forth of makeshift homeless shuttles. After Johnson informed the police of the suspicious activity, a lengthy investigation busted the scheme wide open and led to a $16.5 million settlement.

2Unnecessary Chemo Treatments

Anyone with a passing knowledge of chemotherapy probably understands two things: It’s supposed to kill cancer, and the treatment’s side effects include hair loss and general anatomical misery. Because some chemo drugs can cause problems as severe as lung damage and permanent deafness, it’s imperative that the treatment only be administered when necessary.

But we live in a world rife with avoidable suffering, thanks in no small part to oncologist Farid Fata, whose litany of lies includes administering cancer drugs to people who didn’t have cancer. According to a complaint filed by the US government after a thorough FBI investigation, Dr. Fata issued $150 million worth of partially fraudulent Medicare bills over a three-year period. His chosen method of deception was to simply treat patients for the wrong illness or withhold valuable information about less costly alternatives. A nurse employed under Fata reported examining a chart of 40 of his patients and discovering that 95 percent of them were being improperly treated.

In some cases, Fata would write prescriptions for lifelong drug treatment even though curative surgeries were available. But the most shocking infractions involved his willingness to falsely diagnose patients with cancer in order to profit off the ensuing tests and chemotherapy. After finally being apprehended by authorities in 2013, Fata faces massive fines and a decade-long prison sentence.

1Performing Unnecessary, Life-Threatening Surgeries On The Elderly

Like all of the other facilities on this list, Sacred Heart was the site of systematic Medicare fraud at the expense of patients. To perpetrate this multimillion-dollar fraud, hospital administrators not only paid kickbacks to have patients artificially referred to them, but also had ambulances deliver patients to the emergency room to force automatic Medicare billing. They also artificially extended hospital stays and subjected elderly patients to unnecessary operations—sometimes with fatal results.

One of the hospital’s most wanton offenders, Dr. Vittorio Guerriero, reportedly induced breathing complications in at least 28 patients, at which point tracheotomies were required. In the course of performing these invasive procedures, which required holes to be drilled into the victims’ throats, five people died. The entire operation was so corrupt that Sacred Heart was forced to shut down after the authorities seized its financial assets.

A.C. Grimes is not a healthcare professional and can therefore be trusted. Feel free to check out some of his other writings on Cracked.com .

If you suddenly woke up inside a mental hospital, do you think you could convince everyone that you’re not crazy and to let you go home? Convincing the world you’re sane may not be as easy as you think. It is shockingly easy in the United States and around the world to be wrongfully and involuntarily committed to an insane asylum.

10 Banking Conspiracy Theorist

Gustl Mollath was an ordinary German man who made a living by restoring vintage cars. But then he stumbled upon a banking conspiracy so grand that the world thought he was crazy enough that he was institutionalized for seven years.

While Mollath made a humble living working on cars, his wife worked at one of Germany’s largest banks, HypoVereinsbank. It was through his wife and her work that Mollath discovered a massive tax evasion scheme undertaken by the German bank. Mollath’s discovery quickly caused conflict in the marriage. After allegations of domestic violence between the couple, the marriage was heading for divorce. Mollath took what he knew about the bank’s tax evasion scheme to the German public. He then filed a large criminal complaint against HypoVereinsbank and its employees—including his wife. He claimed that HypoVereinsbank was making illicit money transfers to Switzerland that would soon be labeled money laundering.

At first, the German media ignored Mollath’s claims, but the German authorities did not. Mollath’s wife went forward with the divorce and told the authorities that he had slashed her tires. She also claimed that he was abusive following his discovery of the banking conspiracy. German prosecutors charged Mollath and used his criminal complaint against HypoVereinsbank as “evidence that he suffered from paranoid delusions.” They successfully had him involuntarily committed to a mental hospital.

Though Mollath remained locked away in an insane asylum, not everyone thought he was crazy. Bloggers, activists, and conspiracy theorists began to investigate Mollath’s claims against HypoVereinsbank and found them to be correct.

Many years later, an internal report by HypoVereinsbank that proved the tax evasion and money laundering scheme was leaked to the public by a German newspaper. Mollath’s claims were found to be true and led to HypoVereinsbank being raided by German police on suspicion of tax fraud. Mollath was released from the mental hospital by a court.

9 NYPD Whistle-Blower

Adrian Schoolcraft was a New York Police Department (NYPD) cop. That is, until he decided he had to take a stand against corruption in the NYPD.

Officer Schoolcraft first started his effort to expose wrongdoings by his fellow NYPD officers in 2008. He secretly taped conversations among the NYPD from 2008 to 2009. The tapes contained evidence of widespread corruption that included the use of illegal arrest quotas that led to many wrongful arrests in New York City.

As Schoolcraft began compiling his tapes and voicing his dissent, he began experiencing harassment from other officers in the NYPD. When Officer Schoolcraft took his concerns to his superiors, they dismissed his claims and suggested that Schoolcraft was losing his mind. They recommended that he be given psychological treatment. When Officer Schoolcraft did meet with an NYPD psychologist, the psychologist made him surrender his weapons and Schoolcraft was reassigned to a menial desk job.

Schoolcraft persevered with his allegations of corruption and got his claims to the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau. The NYPD responded by putting Schoolcraft under “forced monitoring.” Soon after, an NYPD lieutenant confiscated the notes Schoolcraft had compiled as evidence of the corruption. Schoolcraft then received a call from his father, a former policeman himself, warning him about actions the NYPD may take against him. Mere hours later, members of the NYPD invaded Schoolcraft’s apartment after obtaining the key by telling Schoolcraft’s landlord that he was suicidal.

Just before the NYPD officers raided Schoolcraft’s apartment, he turned on two tape recorders to record the incident. After the NYPD officers broke into Schoolcraft’s apartment, they interrogated him before handcuffing him, taking him away, and involuntarily committing him to psychiatric ward in the nearby Jamaica Hospital Medical Center.

Schoolcraft was held in the psychiatric ward against his will. He was handcuffed to his bed and prevented from using the telephone to call for help at the orders of the NYPD.

After six days, Schoolcraft was able to leave the mental hospital and promptly filed a lawsuit against the NYPD and the mental hospital that held him against his will at the nefarious orders of the police. After his release, Schoolcraft was indefinitely suspended without pay from the NYPD. NYPD officers continued monitoring Schoolcraft and visiting him at his apartment for multiple weeks. Schoolcraft’s allegations of corruption, arrest quotas, and underreporting among the NYPD were later vindicated by the Village Voice.

8 The USSR’s Critics

The Soviet Union had a problem with its treatment of its dissidents and with its psychiatric practices that resulted in widespread abuse of the mental health system. During the 1960s and ’70s, the USSR systematically diagnosed its critics with mental illnesses in order to discredit them and move them from the general population to insane asylums.

The USSR even invented psychological conditions including “delusion of reformism,” and “sluggish schizophrenia.” The condition of sluggish schizophrenia was invented so that people could be diagnosed with schizophrenia even if no signs or symptoms were evident. One Soviet dissident, Valery Tarsis, was wrongfully diagnosed and forcefully committed to an insane asylum after he smuggled his novel The Bluebottle—which was critical of the USSR government—out of the Soviet Union to have it published.

Tarsis spent eight months locked away in a Soviet mental hospital. During his time there, he wrote one of the first literary works to address the USSR’s nefarious use of psychiatry, an autobiographical novel entitled Ward 7.

Soviet poet Jospeh Brodsky was also committed against his will in the same year as Tarsis, 1963. Brodsky was accused by Soviet officials of pursuing a “parasitic way of life.” He was diagnosed insane and forcibly institutionalized. Brodsky endured a horrendous treatment, being forcibly injected with tranquilizers and woken in the middle of the night by being immersed in cold water. He spent a total of 18 months in the insane asylum.

7 Pain Medication Side Effects

Back in 1993, a Nebraska man named John Montin took some pain medication to try to manage his chronic back pain. This action inadvertently got him committed to an insane asylum.

According to the psychiatrist who evaluated Montin, the pain medication he took induced a temporary psychosis. This dazed state caused Montin to go knock on the door of a rural Nebraska home and try to “take ownership of it” by claiming it belonged to his ancestors.

Accounts of what happened next differ drastically. Nebraska police initially claimed that Montin engaged in an 11-hour shoot-out with the cops that resulted in no injuries to either party. However, at Montin’s trial, the owners of the home were alleged to have pulled shotguns on a dazed Montin, which prompted Montin to hide in a nearby ditch overnight.

Most of the charges levied against Montin were dropped by prosecutors. Jurors presiding over the trial acquitted Montin of the remaining attempted murder and weapons charges. The jurors also cleared Montin of the charge of false imprisonment and use of a weapon “by reason of insanity.” Based upon police reports of Montin’s behavior during the incident, Montin was then involuntarily committed to a mental hospital.

When the affects of his back pain medication wore off hours after the incident, Montin was no longer insane. But when Montin was involuntarily committed to the psychiatric ward in Lincoln Regional Center Hospital, his psychiatrists never bothered to evaluate him to determine if he was still insane and worthy of being involuntarily and indefinitely committed to their psych ward. Instead, they relied upon the police reports of his behavior during the incident.

Montin remained involuntarily committed in that psychiatric ward for 20 years until he was finally able to convince a doctor in the hospital to reevaluate him. After examining him and hearing his story, Montin was found to be sane after all and released. Montin subsequently sued that Nebraska mental hospital for $33 million. The case has not yet been settled.

6 Anti-Segregation Activist

As a history professor at Alcorn State University, Clennon Washington King Jr. had an inside view of the racially segregated school system in 1950s Mississippi. Professor King began to attract attention from the public in 1957 when he wrote letters to the editors of local newspapers advocating for the end of racial segregation in schools, prompting some pro-segregation Mississippians to threaten to boycott Alcorn University.

Professor King was unfazed and continued to fight segregation. In 1958, he tried to enroll one of his own children in an all-white elementary school. His attempts were unsuccessful, and his wife and children ended up fleeing for fear of retaliation in the racially charged South.

Later that year, King, the well-qualified academic, tried to enroll himself into the University of Mississippi. The only problem was that in 1958, the University of Mississippi didn’t allow African Americans like King into their college. Not only was he rejected, but university officials literally thought he was crazy for trying to enroll at a university that barred black men. King was committed to an insane asylum as a result. Fortunately, his brother was able to free him after a 12-day stint in the mental institution.

Two years later, James Meredith succeeded where Professor King could not and became the first black student to enroll in the University of Mississippi.

King would later run as a presidential candidate in the 1960 presidential campaign for the Independent Afro-American Party. He received 1,485 votes in Alabama, making him the first black presidential candidate in the United States to run as a party nominee.

5 The Surveiled Honors Student

Sophia Chinemerem Eze emigrated from Nigeria to New York City to attend Brooklyn College as an international honors student, but her American dream turned into a waking nightmare.

The trouble for Eze began in her off-campus apartment, where she was suspicious that her former landlords and roommates were engaging in “potentially criminal activity” and defaming her on the Internet. Most startlingly of all, she thought that her landlord had installed a hidden camera in her bedroom.

Eze took her concerns to her college’s security and psychiatrist, but they didn’t believe her and offered her no help, even after she purportedly discovered a hidden camera inside her bedroom. Despite the fact that Ms. Eze had no history of mental illness, she was forced into an ambulance by school personnel against her will and taken to the psychiatric ward of a Kings County Hospital without her consent. She was then involuntarily committed and held for two weeks in that psychiatric ward.

When she was eventually released from the psychiatric ward, staff at Brooklyn College allegedly did not allow Eze to complete her final examinations. Eze has since transferred out of Brooklyn College.

Ms. Eze filed a lawsuit against the company that owned the mental facility that wrongly committed her for two weeks and won $110,000. She has also filed a lawsuit against Brooklyn College.

4 China’s Dissidents

Similarly to the USSR, The People’s Republic of China has also made a habit out of labeling its dissidents insane and forcibly committing them into mental institutions. One such critic was Xu Lindong, a 50-year-old farmer with a fourth grade education who spent his whole life working on his farm.

Lindong tried to help his illiterate neighbor claim ownership of a small piece of land next to her home and filed on her behalf to obtain the small plot. After the claim was rejected in a Chinese court, Lindong sent petitions to government officials to try to find someone who would help his neighbor.

The Chinese government took notice of his grievances but didn’t exactly address them. Instead, they decided that he and his grievances were insane and had him involuntarily committed to a mental hospital—despite the fact that he showed no signs or history of mental illness.

While Lindong was locked away in that mental hospital, he was given 54 brutal electro-shock treatments. He was also forcibly restrained and given medications against his will. He felt so hopeless that he tried to commit suicide three times. Xu Lindong ended up spending 6.5 years in two different mental hospitals until he was released after his brother was able to get a journalist to publish his story in the local press.

Lindong’s case isn’t out of the ordinary in China. Other cases include Xu Wu, a former security guard who petitioned the government in a wage dispute and was involuntarily committed for four years. Wu also faced electro-shock treatment and considered suicide.

3 Homosexuality As A Mental Illness

Psychiatry before the 20th century was considerably less scientific than it is now. The bizarre reasons one could be committed to an insane asylum included “laziness,” “bad whiskey,” “imaginary female trouble,” and “parents were cousins.” It was also common for gay and lesbian individuals to be committed for their attraction to members of the same sex and for young women to be committed for promiscuity if it was deemed that their sexual appetites were inappropriately voracious.

The practice had a longstanding influence. Until 1973, the American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality as a mental disorder. One shockingly recent case of a lesbian being wrongly committed is that of an American named Lyn Duff, now a journalist. In 1991, at age 14, she came out publicly as a lesbian. Her mother did not take the news well. She took Duff from their California home to Rivendell Psychiatric Center in Utah and put the teen in treatment.

Once at the Utah mental hospital, Duff was visited by Mormon missionaries who considered her homosexuality a mental illness. Hospital staff tried to use conversion therapy on Duff. One of the most bizarre treatments Duff was subjected to was being forced to watch lesbian pornography while smelling ammonia in a Pavlovian attempt to make her straight. She was given psychotropic drugs, put under hypnosis, and sent into solitary confinement.

Duff spent a total of 168 days involuntarily committed in the mental hospital. She eventually escaped in May 1992 and fled to San Francisco. Soon after, she successfully had her mother’s parental rights terminated by a California court and was adopted by a lesbian couple in San Francisco.

2 Ex-Muslim Nigerian

Being an atheist is hard in Nigeria, an ardently Muslim country where 51 persent of Muslims believe that all those who leave the religion of Islam should be put to death. Mubarak Bala was one of those former Muslims, but instead of being put to death, he was deemed insane.

Bala first went public with his non-belief in Islam when he told his family that he had renounced the religion. After his family heard that Bala had left the religion of Islam, they took him to a doctor, thinking he could be mentally ill. The first doctor they saw found no signs of mental illness in Bala, but the family was able to convince a second doctor that Bala’s atheism was a form of mental illness and a “side effect of a personality change.” Bala was involuntarily committed into a psychiatric institution and forcibly drugged by the hospital staff.

Bala began using Twitter and email to call for help from the world while he was locked away in the mental institution. Eventually, a humanist charity was able to help get him freed, and Bala was released after being held for 18 days. Unfortunately, things didn’t get much better after he was released. He claimed to receive death threats and went into hiding.

1 The First Hand-Washing Doctor

Back in the 19th century, medicine was a far dirtier practice than it is today. Doctors wouldn’t wash their hands—even before delivering babies. When one lone doctor suggested that medical professionals should more rigorously wash their hands, the medical community thought he was crazy.

While practicing medicine in a German hospital, Doctor Ignaz Semmelweis raised an eyebrow when he saw his fellow doctors walk from the bedsides of dead or dying patients directly into the hospital’s maternity ward to deliver babies. Pretty soon, Dr. Semmelweis suggested that the doctors wash their hands before handling newborn babies to reduce rates of infant mortality. The medical community was outraged at the accusation that doctors were inadvertently causing some of their patients horrid deaths with their dirty hands. One of his many detractors was Doctor Carl Levy, who published a paper rebutting Semmelweis’s claims: “He is concerned only with general infection from corpses without respect to the disease that led to death. In this respect his opinion seems improbable.”

Ever persistent, Semmelweis argued with influential doctors—and was eventually dismissed from his position at Vienna General Hospital. Left ostracized from the medical community and without a job, Dr. Semmelweis became impoverished, his mental state deteriorating as he fell into a state of depression as a result of his abjuration.

Dr. Semmelweis was eventually committed to an insane asylum in 1865. He tragically died in that mental asylum of a blood infection after a violent beating by workers in the asylum when he demanded to be released. Dr. Semmelweis died at the age of 47, long before the medical community realized his zeal for hand washing wasn’t mad at all.

Twenty years after Semmelweis’s death, his theory received widespread acceptance after French microbiologist Louis Pasteur penned the theoretical framework for the germ theory of disease. Soon after, doctors began to heed Semmelweis’s advice and washed their hands before delivering babies. Unsurprisingly, the hand-washing practice has dramatically reduced infant mortality rates during childbirth.

As a lesson to us all, the term “Semmelweis reflex” was coined in response to Semmelweis’s tragic story. It refers to the reactionary reflex to reject new ideas or practices when they oppose established norms, theories, or beliefs.

Nathan is a freelance journalist and screenwriter.

It’s generally agreed that ghosts, if they indeed exist, were once living, breathing human beings. And, unfortunately, human beings are more than capable of committing crime. So it may follow that ghosts also seek to transgress against their (former) fellow men. The following ten crimes were allegedly committed by paranormal entities. True ghostly perpetrators or just garden variety criminals trying to avoid punishment? You be the judge.

10 Celebrities Who Had A Terrifying Ghostly Experience

10 Ghost Indecent Exposure

Having sex in another person’s living room would definitely earn you a sentence for indecent exposure-and maybe for breaking and entering! Dianne Carlisle of Euclid Ohio claims that two ghosts are having sex in her home leaving her and her family members the unwilling voyeurs. She says that the ghosts are clearly copulating and she can even see “the lady’s high heeled shoes!”. Dianne is no stranger to ghostly apparitions. Her deceased sister contacted her via phone leaving her a message that simply said “I love you” and she has seen ghosts in mirrors and playing with her daughter, De’Onna. As for the phantom lovemakers, they were snapped in the act by Carlisle’s four year old granddaughter, Kimora, while the little girl was playing with a cell phone. Dianne is as astonished by the hanky panky going on in her living room as anyone saying: “I never seen anything like this…I mean, ghosts still have feelings? (They’re) having sex?” Carlisle says that the ghostly activity in her home has not lessened with time, but has actually increased.^[1]

9 Ghost Theft

You wouldn’t think a former police officer, charged with upholding the law, would be the one to commit massive theft but that’s what Joseph Hughes of Mount Gilead, Ohio was convicted of back in 2011. But did he do it or was it the work of something from the other side? Hughes claimed that the stolen goods found stockpiled in his basement, (including several air conditioners and a generator) were put there by a ghost. ‘It’s going to sound kind of ridiculous, but we believed that there was some kind of paranormal presence in the basement,’ Hughes said in court. ‘It sounds kind of ridiculous but there was evidence to support it.’ Though prosecutors were stunned by the creepy defense, they ultimately didn’t buy it and Hughes was found guilty of 18 of 20 charges.^[2]

8 Ghost Vandalization

Lisa and Phil Rigley of Clifton, Nottingham, were so angry about a serious of attacks on their vehicles that they set up some home cameras to catch the culprits in the act. But they got more than they bargained for: at about 1:30 a.m. on August 1st 2012, one of the cameras caught what looked like a child spirit in orb form, glowing white and wearing a hoodie, jumping over the roofs of their cars. The couple was shocked. Even skeptical Phil admitted: “I am cynical about ghosts because I don’t believe in them but this footage is strange.” Lisa added that she was “absolutely gobsmacked by this. I’ve got the footage here; it’s the image of a young child about four or five. It’s a ghost, it’s got to be.” Mrs. Rigley was especially convinced it was no ordinary child because their dog always barks if there are people around but did not wake the family that night. The Rigleys ultimately decided not to pursue the ghost for criminal damages after they could find no marks on the cars following the incident.^[3]

7 Ghost Harassment

Harassment of any kind is annoying enough, but to not even be able to see your bullies? One Saudi Arabian family though that was going too far-and actually took it all the way to court when they sued the “genie” irritating their household. The spectral harassment went on for some time with unruly spirits making life practically intolerable. Citing everything from threatening voicemails to the theft of their mobile phones, the family had had enough when the ghosts, in classic schoolyard fashion, began throwing stones at the children. The court gamely tried to verify the family’s claim of paranormal pestering “despite the difficulty” of bringing a harassment suit against the undead.^[4]

6 Ghost Disorderly Conduct

A teen nabbed in 2006 for swearing at officers and generally causing uproar had the unique defense that the foul-mouthed voice heard by the cops wasn’t his-but that of a disembodied pirate ghost. Thomas McGair, 18, of Glasgow Scotland blurted out “It wasn’t me, it was the pirate!” as he was being collared and charged. Sheriff Rajni Swanney was “intrigued” by the odd story and MGair’s lawyer, Andrew Kennedy, said in court that his client was “in a state of agitation because he claims he had just seen a ghost.” Though McGair admitted to a breach of the peace, he denies being under the influence of alcohol or drugs and maintains that a ghostly influence was to blame. When last heard from, his sentence had been deferred.^[5]

Top 10 Famous Real Ghosts

5 Ghost Assault

Sometimes a haunting is merely a pain in the emotional sense but sometimes it goes a bit further than that. A French family from Mentque-Nortbecourt said that ghosts in their home have escalated into full blown assault. One household member was injured so badly that he had to be hospitalized after being hit in the face by a flying chair and a soap tray to the back. A family friend visiting the house also had to seek medical attention after being hit by stones thrown by the petulant spirits. Local officials took the claims seriously enough to remove the family from their home, offering them temporary housing at a nearby campsite. The family says that they are currently working with an exorcist from a local church who has been visiting their house and attempting to cleanse it of the angry spooks.^[6]

4 Ghost Domestic Abuse

When an argument about family finances between Wisconsin man Michael West and his wife got out of control, she called the police and reported that West had beat, punched her in the face, and tried to strangle her. When police arrived at the couple’s home, they noticed that the woman was crying and that there appeared to be blood on the front of her shirt. When questioned, West initially claimed that his wife sustained injuries by repeatedly falling but later changed his story, claiming that “a ghost did it.” This explanation did not prove to be satisfactory to the arresting officers who charged West with strangulation, battery and disorderly conduct. After a struggle, West was transported to county lockup and his wife, one would hope, to therapy.^[7]

3 Ghost Kidnapping

This one is an example of crime happening to a criminal-and perhaps of cosmic karma. A burglar robbing a home in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, said that he was kidnapped and held against his will with no food or water for four days by a “supernatural figure”. Police official Abdul Marlik Hakim Johar confirmed that the homeowners arrived back from vacation and found the man, whose name was not released, in their home dehydrated and exhausted. He claimed that every time he tried to leave, the entity pushed him to the ground. An ambulance had to be called for the would-be pilferer who will surely think twice before attempting another breaking and entering.^[8]

2 Ghost Rape

This is an extremely sad and disturbing story. Apparently, between 2005 and 2009 over one hundred women in the Manitoba Mennonite colony of Bolivia have been reporting waking up to strange genital injuries, headaches, pain and pieces of rope tangled in their hair. They also found semen stains on their sheets. Sadly, the youngest of these victims was a three year old child. Local townspeople (largely isolated from wider communities and inexperienced with such crimes) first denied the women’s reports, dismissing them the products of overactive imaginations. But as the problems worsened, they turned to a supernatural explanation, claiming that demons were to blame for the sexual assaults. Even after the arrest of nine men in 2011 convicted of drugging and raping entire households, the community is still traumatized and seeking other answers. Some point to the fact that the violence continues to this day as proof that it is devils from another world, and not men of the community, to blame for these heinous crimes.^[9]

1 Ghost Murders

One can hardly imagine a bigger monster than a mother that kills her own children. Naiyana Patel of East Asheville North Carolina was arrested in late August 2011 for the murder of her two sweet and outgoing girls, 8- year-old Jiya and 4-year-old Piya. Worse, the murders were carried out in an extremely gruesome manner-with a hatchet. Patel’s husband, Lalo, made the grisly discovery when arrived home to find his wife hitting herself in the head with the hatchet and his children bloodied on the floor. He frantically called 911, but it was too late-Jiya was already dead and Piya would succumb to her injuries at a nearby hospital. According investigators, when asked about her motives for this senseless crime, Naiyana would only tell police that “the ghost killed her children”. She further added that she didn’t want to live and refused medical treatment for her self-inflicted injuries “It’s just a terrible, terrible incident that occurred, “said Lt. Wallace Welch, interim chief of police.^[10]

10 Murderers Haunted By Their Victim’s Ghost

About The Author: A.L. is a playwright and also the executive director of a historical museum in the United States. She has enjoyed the creepy, spooky and weird all her life.

The saying goes that history is written by the victors, and that holds very true when it comes to World War II. It is often referred to as the good war, with the Allies depicted as the shining white knights who came to save the entire world from the evils of Hitler and the Japanese. However, while the history books tend to depict the Allies as almost saintly, the reality of the situation was often a lot more disturbing and a lot less flattering.

The Allies committed many atrocities during World War II and its aftermath that they would rather you forgot. While there is no questioning that the Axis were certainly worse, it is clear from the many atrocities committed by the Allies that war brings out the brutality in all of us.

10 The Massive Bombing Campaign Against Civilian Targets In Japan

Most people know of the moment in history when the United States dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The famous argument for their use was that the Japanese were impossible to bring to surrender and that such a shocking display was the only thing that would prevent a land war that would last decades and cost millions of lives. However, well before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US had already been bombing Japanese civilian cities on a regular basis to demoralize the enemy and had caused quite a death toll.

In fact, General Curtis LeMay, who ordered the attacks, was of the mind that the Japanese might not actually surrender until they were pretty much all wiped out. It was for this reason that he decided the bombing campaigns of regular Japanese cities were not enough and that the US needed to go for one of their most major cities and do something drastic.

On March 9, 1945, he carried out his plan and ordered an air raid on Tokyo itself, but this was no normal bombing run. The bombers were dropping napalm cylinders and petroleum jelly to firebomb the entire city.^[1] More than 40 square kilometers (15 mi²) of city was burned to ruin, with many melted people stacked on top of each other. It was a horrific sight, with at least 100,000 civilians killed. General LeMay even remarked once that the United States may have killed more people firebombing Tokyo than they did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined and admitted that he would have likely been charged with war crimes if his side had lost.

9 Russian Soldiers Raped Women After Liberating Poland From The Nazis

Russia certainly doesn’t have the best reputation among the Allies today and was always the more dangerous part of the faction, but the country was basically essential to stopping Hitler. They not only slowed his advance but came roaring back, pushing across the territory Germany had taken and eventually straight on to Berlin itself. The Russian soldiers were exhausted and demoralized after so much fighting, and with society breaking down around them in many ways, they found it fairly easy to revert to primitive behaviors. While some of this only took the form of looting, the amount of rape that went on is incredibly disturbing. To make matters worse, Stalin actually approved of his soldiers raping enemies—he believed that it was a great way to psychologically destroy them.

There weren’t just revenge rapes against Germans in the major cities. The Red Army at the time was known for liberating camps in countries such as Poland and then raping all of the female victims.^[2] After so much horrific fighting, many of these men were only thinking about their basic instincts and also felt that they should be able to take what they want, considering how much of a favor they were doing Europe by liberating it from the Nazis.

8 Operation Paperclip Was Probably Even Worse Than You Already Thought

Not everyone knows it by name, but everyone knows the basics of what Operation Paperclip was. During World War II, the United States and many others had been eying the Germans’ technology and all the various things they were working on and desired to gain the Nazis’ scientific secrets. When the war ended, they found that the Nazis were working on many things they hadn’t even imagined, such as nerve agents and a weaponized form of bubonic plague. Instead of trying to destroy all the research on such horrible things, the US decided they needed these scientists for themselves.^[3]

The goal was to bring almost 90 German scientists into the United States, whitewash their past a bit, and get them to put their scientific knowledge to work for the US. Now, some may think this wasn’t really that bad, as they were just scientists and possibly following orders. However, these were not nice men. Some of them knew full well how the concentration camps worked and would personally handpick people to slave themselves to death on their projects—just to enjoy the cruelty of it. Others were, as we mentioned, working on chemical warfare and similarly terrible things, making it hard to simply accept the excuse of “following orders.”

Unfortunately, most of these men grew old and grey working for the US government and never saw any real consequences for their actions.

7 US Soldiers Started Collecting Japanese Skulls

The atrocities of the Japanese during World War II are very well-documented, and in the United States especially, their misdeeds are very well-known. Most people have heard of Japan’s Unit 731 as well as of actions like the Bataan Death March. The Japanese were known for incredibly brutal treatment of prisoners of war and in some cases were witnessed burying captured enemies alive.

However, war brings out the brutality in all of us, and as the campaign in the Pacific dragged on, US soldiers began to perform actions that many people today would find to be shocking and horrific. They started mutilating Japanese corpses and taking trophies, even going so far as to send them back home to civilians, who were actually thankful instead of disgusted. One of the most common things to take were ears because they were easy to cut off and haul away as a trophy, but skulls were the real coup de grace.

Unfortunately, neither process for obtaining the skull was anything short of barbaric. They would either have to boil the head to get the skin off or leave it out long enough for ants to eat all the flesh, leaving the skull underneath intact.^[4] To be clear, the United States military leadership officially was against the practice and tried to discourage it, but the soldiers kept taking skulls anyway.

6 The Americans Sent Soviet Dissidents Back To Russia To Die

The world was so excited when World War II ended and just so glad to move on that many people completely forgot about some of the worst atrocities that happened directly after the war. At the famous Yalta Conference, one of the less famous things promised was repatriation of citizens trapped in another Allied country’s territory or kept as their prisoners. This seemed like a good idea at the time, and everyone was riding high on their emotions, but before long, it became clear just how brutal and awful such a generalized policy could be.

The United States had a couple million people they had to send back, and many really didn’t want to go back to Soviet Russia.^[5] The Americans initially resorted to force, but this led to some suicides, so they started going for a sneakier approach, and the British followed suit. They actually started tricking people, telling them they were taking them somewhere else and then sending them back to the Soviet Union. Many of the people sent back were executed for desertion or other crimes, and others were sent to be worked to death at labor camps.

5 The US And The UK Used German POWs As Slaves Back Home

As World War II went on, the British started to end up with a bit of a problem: Storing all of the German prisoners of war and feeding them was becoming an incredible strain on the system. The United States, to help out their ally, agreed to take many German POWs themselves to ease the burden. However, this presented its own issue. The Americans had to find a safe place to put them, and they also were going to be dealing with an increasing burden to care for all these prisoners. And while the Allies did some atrocious things, actual concentration camps of the sort Germany and Japan used were completely out of the question. The Allies were also concerned with actually following the Geneva Conventions, which did not allow for captured soldiers to be used as slaves.

However, both countries quickly decided to go ahead and start using their captured Germans for mass labor, as they had a labor shortage from all their own men fighting the war and had to now take care of hundreds of thousands of prisoners.^[6] To get around the fact that they couldn’t technically treat them as slaves, they paid the POWs an incredibly tiny wage. (In England, this amounted to a single shilling a day.) The laborers were often not fed all that well, either, although the governments would claim their own people were also doing without due to war rationing. While Allied POW camps weren’t the horror shows that Axis camps were, abuse still happened, and the Allies still used enemy soldiers as slaves in all but name.

4 Millions Of Ethnic Germans Were Deported To Germany After The War

When the war ended, most people think that things quickly became sunshine and roses. However, the aftermath of World War II was incredibly ugly, and the victors didn’t always make decisions that kept the sanctity of human life in mind. In fact, there was a strong desire to get revenge on anyone involved. We all know that the Nuremberg trials brought justice to many Nazi war criminals, but the Allies didn’t save their anger for only the leadership and soldiers. After the war, they approved a plan to forcibly deport 12 to 14 million ethnic Germans back to the ruins of Germany from the various surrounding countries that they had been born in, including Poland.^[7]

Most Western history books don’t talk about this because of how shameful it turned out to be. Rough estimates say that about 500,000 civilians died as part of the largest forced migration in known history. To make matters worse, many of these citizens were actually placed into the remains of concentration camps around Germany and were forced to do hard labor as “reparations in kind” for what Germany had done to other countries around them. If this wasn’t bad enough, the vast majority of the people being forced to migrate were women, elderly people, and males under 16 years of age who had been too young to fight in the war.

The sad truth is that the concentration camps didn’t cease operation when the war ended but went on for years afterward, imprisoning ethnic Germans who likely had no say or part in Germany’s initial decision to militarize. In their quest for justice, in this particular case, all the Allies did is get revenge on the wrong people—the innocent.

3 Stalin’s Scorched-Earth Policy

Because the Allies won, when World War II atrocities are talked about, Western history books mostly mention the horrible things done by the Axis. Commonly mentioned is the scorched-earth policy put in place by Hitler. Essentially, if the enemy were going to take a territory, the Germans would burn down all crops, destroy all buildings, and ruin any railroad or other infrastructure to make it harder for the enemy to advance. Many of Hitler’s own commanders thought this was insane and got away many times with actively resisting it. Their argument was that they could always take the place back later, and they felt it would be easier to rebuild if everything wasn’t torn to pieces.

However, while most people only think of this as a Nazi thing, Stalin also put a scorched-earth policy in place.^[8] And his was likely much more brutal than the Nazis’. Stalin had an iron grip on his military, so there would be no ignoring his orders, and he wanted it done proper. He had little care for how it would impact his own civilians or how hard it would be to feed them or move them to a safe place. Stalin had special demolition battalions whose sole job was to destroy infrastructure, crops, and entire towns that they had to leave behind to the Germans.

Stalin’s scorched-earth policy hit Ukraine especially hard, as it was fought over by Germans and Soviets, both using a similar strategy to prevent the other side from advancing. By the end of the war, a huge portion of Ukrainian infrastructure had been destroyed.

2 The Americans And The British Turned Away Many Jewish Refugees

Whenever you mention any of the bad things the Allies did in the war, or anything that we put up with from Stalin, people will always argue that while it was bad, it was outweighed by the fact that we stopped the Holocaust from going any further. In fact, many people seem to be under the impression that the Holocaust was the main reason the United States and many other countries entered the war. The truth is that the United States officially entered the war after Japan attacked and had only been unofficially helping countries like France and England because they were allies.

While there was news filtering out of Germany about what was happening, most countries were more concerned about protecting their own borders than anything, and we didn’t know the full extent of the Holocaust until after Germany had been defeated. The world didn’t fully realize the problem, and Jewish people already had a history of being unwelcome in many parts of Europe and around the world, which made it easier for Hitler to massacre so many of them.

The United States in particular, while acting the hero today, turned away possibly as many as hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees over the course of the war, refusing to increase their quotas for those regions despite the horrific circumstances.^[9] Unfortunately, the British weren’t much better. While they did take in some refugees, they actually made it harder for the Jewish people to use an agreement that allowed them to take refuge in what was then Palestine. Many Jews who couldn’t make it to Palestine or into the US ended up being taken in by other European countries. Many of these countries then fell to Germany, putting the Jewish refugees right back in the arms of Hitler. Most died in the Holocaust.

1 Canadian Troops Burned Down An Entire Town In Revenge

Today, Canadians are known for being some of the nicest people on the entire planet. They take in loads of refugees with much less red tape than most countries, and their main national fault is apologizing too much—something they keep apologizing for and thus perpetuating the cycle. However, as previously mentioned, war brings out the brutality in all of us, and Canada was no exception. Near the end of World War II, part of the Canada Corps were fighting off some of the last German resistance and ended up in a pitched battle near a town called Friesoythe—home to about 4,000 German civilians.

While they were advancing on Friesoythe to mop things up, the Canadians’ leader was killed in the midst of battle. An erroneous report went around that he was killed not by a German soldier but by a civilian sniper who had cowardly shot him in the back. The acting commander was so incensed that instead of taking the time to find out if it was true, he decided to take revenge on the entire town. Once the town was taken over and the population had fled, the Canada Corps set about burning it all to the ground.^[10]

Famous people, just like everyone else, make dumb mistakes. The only difference between those in the spotlight and your drunken, idiot uncle is the deluge of media coverage that accompanies these ill-advised blunders. Such is the price of fame. 

Here’s our top 10 list of celebs who made headlines for all the wrong reasons. 

10. Justin Bieber

In the early morning hours of January 23, 2014, Miami Beach police allegedly spotted two exotic sports cars drag racing down a residential street. One of the vehicles, a yellow Lamborghini Spyder, was driven by 19-year-old Justin Bieber accompanied by model Chantal Jeffries. After failing a field sobriety test, the Canadian pop star was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence, resisting arrest without violence, and driving with an expired license.

According to the police report, Bieber’s entourage (which included his father) used several SUVs to block traffic, creating a drag strip for the singer to race his friend Khalil Amir Sharieff in a red Ferrari. The arresting officers estimated the cars were speeding at approximately 60 miles-per-hour in a 30 MPH zone. A toxicology test later revealed marijuana and Xanax in Bieber’s system.

The teen idol spent just under 10 hours in custody before being released on a $2,500 bond. He later recalled his harrowing ordeal in an interview, stating, “It was really cold. That was the worst part about it.” Bieber eventually reached a plea agreement in which the state agreed to drop the DUI charge in exchange for him pleading guilty to careless driving and resisting arrest. He also paid a $500 fine and was ordered to attend a 12-hour anger management course.  

9. Nicole Richie

Next up in our lineup involves another pint-sized offender who ran afoul of the law behind the wheel. In 2006, Nicole Richie, the waifish daughter of legendary singer Lionel Richie, drove her Mercedes-Benz SUV the wrong way on the Ventura Freeway just north of Los Angeles. Like her gal pal, Paris Hilton, she was arrested and charged with driving under the influence. Richie later admitted to smoking weed and popping Vicodin before hitting the road. 

The Simple Life co-star was sentenced to four days in jail at the Century Regional Detention Center in Lynwood, California, and fined $2,048. It was her second DUI conviction in three years. Due to overcrowding, she only served a little over an hour of actual hard time before being released. She then enrolled in a mandatory 18-month anti-drinking driver education program. 

8. Jim Morrison

As the lead singer of The Doors, Jim Morrison compiled an extensive arrest record before his death in 1971, thus earning permanent membership into the infamous “27 Club.” However, his first run-in with the law pales in comparison to the wild drug and alcohol fuelled shenanigans that marked his brief but colorful career.

While attending a football game at Florida State, Morrison stole an umbrella and a police officer’s helmet from a squad car. The Tallahassee Police Department charged him with “disturbing the peace by being drunk,” resisting arrest, and petty larceny. 

7. Eugene Robinson

Most athletes try to get a good night’s sleep to ensure peak performance — especially before playing in the Super Bowl. The Atlanta Falcons’ Eugene Robinson took a different approach, spending the night in jail after being arrested for solicitation of a prostitute from an undercover cop.

Despite his arrest, Robinson still suited up against the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXXIII. He probably should have stayed home and watched it on TV instead. The two-time All-Pro safety played dismally as the AFC champs romped to a 34-19 victory.

Robinson, a devout Christian, had recently received the Athletes in Action/Bart Starr Award, given annually to a player “who best exemplifies outstanding character and leadership in the home, on the field and in the community.” He later returned the award.

6. Robert Downey Jr.

Coming home late at night and passing out is usually not a crime. Unless it happens to be in your neighbor’s house, which is where Robert Downey Jr. found himself on the night of July 16, 1996, in Malibu, California. The incident led to criminal charges of trespassing and more jail time, but the troubled actor soon faced much bigger problems while in the grips of severe drug and alcohol addiction.

Few movie stars have endured such a lengthy stretch of substance abuse, arrests, rehab, and relapse — only to end up as the world’s highest-paid actor. But Downey, who began acting at the age of five, is no mere mortal. His perseverance and talents ultimately won out, resulting in a string of box office hits in roles, including the blockbuster Iron Man franchise. 

5. Plaxico Burress 

Possessing an unlicensed gun in New York carries some of the stiffest penalties in the country. NFL receiver Plaxico Burress learned this the hard way — and made the situation even worse when he accidentally shot himself in the leg at a nightclub in Manhattan.

Although the former Giants’ star would recover from the self-inflicted wound, Burress spent 20 months locked up at Rikers Island for his felonious fumble. He eventually returned to the gridiron in 2011 (this time in a Jets uniform) and went on to win the Comeback Player of the Year award.

As for that now-infamous nightclub shooting, Burress had this to say: “The stairway was narrow and dark and everything was black…I could barely see, and I guess I missed a step and my foot slipped. My gun came unhooked from my belt and went sliding down my right pant leg. My instant reaction was to catch it before it hit the floor, and I reached down with my right hand to grab it. And I guess my finger hit right on the trigger because it went off.”

4. Tim McGraw & Kenny Chesney

The old adage “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy” can be applied to not one but two Nashville crooners in 2000. Tim McGraw and Kenny Chesney were arrested in Buffalo after Chesney rode away with an Erie County deputy’s horse. McGraw and his manager Mark Russo then allegedly attacked other Sheriff’s Deputies who tried to stop Chesney from his galloping joy ride.

Both singers had performed earlier in the day at the George Strait Country Music Festival at Ralph Wilson Stadium in Orchard Park, NY. Chesney, McGraw, and Russo were arrested, arraigned, and released on bail.Local authorities charged Chesney with disorderly conduct, but McGraw was ultimately charged with a felony for assaulting a police officer who suffered minor injuries. 

A year later, all three men involved were found not guilty. According to Chesney, the ‘horsing around’ had been a misunderstanding that began when the daughter of a Sheriff’s Department Captain gave Chesney permission to sit on her father’s horse. “Unfortunately, what was meant to be a totally innocent and fun gesture, was blown way out of proportion,” Chesney said. “Tim McGraw and I have been friends for a very long time. When he saw me in danger of being harmed, he simply came over to help out his friend.”

3. Conor McGregor

The trend of celebrity-branded booze continues to flood the marketplace with a wide range of products, including Trump Wine, Absinthe Mansinthe, and Dennis Rodman’s Bad Ass Vodka. In 2018, former UFC champion Conor McGregor tossed his hat into the ring with “Proper No. 12 Whiskey” — a name that has nothing to do with the spirit’s vintage but rather the postal code in Crumlin, Dublin 12 where the fighter was born and raised. The launch would result in a flurry of brutal reviews and a well-publicized bar room punch.

On April 6, 2019, the Irishman insisted on pouring free shots of his whiskey to patrons inside Dublin’s Marble Arch pub. But when a 50-year-old customer refused, McGregor slugged him. The MMA headliner was charged with assaulting Desmond Keogh and slapped with a €1,000 fine. McGregor later bought the pub and promptly barred Keogh from the premises.

2. Paul Reubens

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0avQQ1T8ASY

Best known for his wildly popular character “Pee-wee Herman,” Paul Reubens enjoyed tremendous success at both the box office and on TV throughout the 1980s. However, his career took a sudden nosedive in 1991 after being arrested for indecent exposure at an adult theater in Sarasota, Florida. In addition to providing grist for the tabloid mill, his five knuckle shuffle also yielded a slew of jokes, such as: What’s Pee-wee Herman’s favorite meal? Stroganoff. 

Reubens pleaded no contest to the charge and agreed to 75 hours of community service. He would later earn critical praise in various projects, including roles on Murphy Brown, Reno 911, and The Blacklist. In 2009, Reubens resurrected his bow-tied, man-child alter ego with a successful stage show and five years later starred in the Netflix original film, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday.

1. Dennis Hopper

The sleepy town of Taos, New Mexico, is renowned for its picturesque Sangre de Cristo Mountains and thriving arts community. The rural setting also served as the longtime home of Dennis Hopper, who once shot a tree with a .357 Magnum, having mistaken it for a grizzly bear. 

According to biographer Tom Folsom, Hopper had been hallucinating after taking some LSD he’d won in a late-night poker game. Local authorities charged the actor/director with reckless driving, failure to report an accident, and leaving the scene. Coincidentally, the 1975 bust landed Hopper in the same jail used during the filming of his seminal counter-culture movie, Easy Rider. He later pleaded guilty and paid a fine.

The notorious Hollywood rebel somehow managed to survive decades of drug and alcohol abuse, and several troubled marriages, before finding sobriety in the late 1980s. In addition to his role as “Billy” in Easy Rider, in which he directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Terry Southern, Hopper portrayed several other iconic characters in films such as Apocalypse Now, Blue Velvet, Hoosiers, and True Romance. He also kept busy as a prolific photographer, painter, and sculptor. 

Shortly before his death from prostate cancer in 2010, Hopper was honored with a well-earned star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.