Historical Scandals

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What are some historical scandals you've read about that you find interesting, whether handled well or exploded horribly and caused harm to companies/individual's careers?

I've been reading about incidents in 1993 where people had been inserting needles and pins inside of Pepsi cans before sale and trying to cause Pepsi to have hurt reputation. A lot of the situations were revealed to be massive hoaxes where people would insert the objects in one of the points of the hoax (i.e. before checkout) and then cash in on the false claim, which Pepsi handled the scandal well by showing their factories wouldn't allow tampering with the product. It's interesting indeed, and shows how companies should handle crisis management.

 
The satanic daycare scare and razorblade apple scare are both fascinating for me, due to how bullshit they were.

A very passing interest in the Sacco and Vanzetti incident. (Spoiler alert: People'd want them to get life or worse if they did what they did in the present day, courts would probably give them ten to twenty. People who say they are innocent are blatantly ignoring the facts of the case.) Would probably find the Dreyfus affair interesting, if most of the primary sources were in English, which they aren't.
 
Satanic panic, Watergate, Teapot Dome, Fast and Furious, Iran-Contra are just some of the few scandals are interesting and historic (to an extent). The 2004 Super Bowl scandal where Justin Timberlake exposed Janet Jackson's pasty covered breast (and therefore called Nipplegate as a joke by some) is probably the most hilarious.
 
The Dreyfus affair is an interesting one. Essentially France was so eager to appear strong and look for enemies that when one officer was accused of treason they believed it and locked him up. Then when evidence emerged that he wasn't guiltly and it was possibly someone else, the army doubled down, forged evidence implicating Dreyfus, and you eventually had the whole thing turning into a huge drawn out affair.
 
The 2016 elections and trump making north korea willing to negotiate by shitposting kim
 
Lou Wrong said:
The satanic daycare scare and razorblade apple scare are both fascinating for me, due to how bullshit they were.
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Razorblade apples? Obvious hoax.

Razorblade Halloween candy, on the other hand, happens enough for Snopes to verify it. This is quite interesting because it's so similar to the Poisoned Halloween candy myth, which was abused by one guy stuffing their son's Pixie Stix with cyanide to cash out on the insurance.
 
Poisoned Halloween candy. While the myth of strangers putting razors, poison and other things in Halloween candy has been around for years, it's never been proven that some serial killing is out to slice up your kids mouth with a razor apple. There has been a lot of reports that turned out to be pranks at best or at worst some druggy trying to cover up the fact that their kid got in to their stash, saying it was in the candy.

The best know story of this is Ronald Clark O'Bryan. He put cyanide in his kids candy to get insurance, and to make it seem more like the myth he poisoned his neighbors kid too. Happened in the 70s in Houston. My mom remembers hearing about it. He became known as the man that killed Halloween, because after that the paranoia really got bad.

Foxxo said:
Razorblade Halloween candy, on the other hand, happens enough for Snopes to verify it. This is quite interesting because it's so similar to the Poisoned Halloween candy myth, which was abused by one guy stuffing their son's Pixie Stix with cyanide to cash out on the insurance.
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Beat me to it by a minute. :(
 
I may as well go with my chosen Kiwifarms name. Oscar Wilde suing Lord Queensberry for libel, losing the case and eventually going to prison for two years of hard labor for indecent sexual acts, because of his secret involvement with prostitutes and Lord Alfred Douglas.

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Any Victorian sexual scandal is interesting, really. There's so many.
 
I find it fascinating that Woodrow Wilson had a stroke, lied about it, and had his wife effectively illegally run the country through the tail end of 1919 and into 1920. It's also strange that said fact doesn't get more attention.
 
EurocopterTigre said:
I find it fascinating that Woodrow Wilson had a stroke, lied about it, and had his wife effectively illegally run the country through the tail end of 1919 and into 1920. It's also strange that said fact doesn't get more attention.
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Theres some debate over whether he lied about it or whether she just took advantage of it, and how much was his say versus her doing it on her own, considering how much control she had over access to him.
 
Give Her The D said:
What are some historical scandals you've read about that you find interesting, whether handled well or exploded horribly and caused harm to companies/individual's careers?

I've been reading about incidents in 1993 where people had been inserting needles and pins inside of Pepsi cans before sale and trying to cause Pepsi to have hurt reputation. A lot of the situations were revealed to be massive hoaxes where people would insert the objects in one of the points of the hoax (i.e. before checkout) and then cash in on the false claim, which Pepsi handled the scandal well by showing their factories wouldn't allow tampering with the product. It's interesting indeed, and shows how companies should handle crisis management.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=wi9xDEIHuWA:14
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Enron for sure.

There's probably a lot of little tykes here that don't remember Enron at all.

Back in 2000, Enron was the 7th largest company in the United States. It was fucking huge. It was a blue chip stock. It was talked about back then like Apple, Samsung, and Disney are talked about today.

Enron was an energy company. Specifically dealing with commodity trading, they were based in Houston and handled the sale and transport of astronomically large amounts of oil and gas products nationwide. They controlled most of the pipeline infrastructure in the American southwest and midwest and most of the refinery infrastructure in the Houston area. Like I said, 7th largest company in America.

One year later, Enron was bankrupt totally. It was actually that sudden. Some independent analysts nobody listened to, crackpots everyone called them, started to grumble about how Enron's earnings didn't quite add up and boom, less than 6 months later the entire company stopped existing.

Turns out that every single earnings report was falsified, and Enron had not turned a profit for a single year of its existence. Thousands went without jobs and millions lost huge chunks of their retirement. The collapse of Enron very nearly sent the US economy into a recession all by itself. Of course people don't remember it all too well now, especially since the other thing happened in 2001.
 
The McDonald's Monopoly scandal. Head of security at a marketing firm manages to steal the high winning monopoly pieces and passes them off to friends and family, swindling the company out of massive amounts of money.
When he was caught his trial was set just days before the 9/11 attacks and therefore was barely reported on.
 
Give Her The D said:
What are some historical scandals you've read about that you find interesting, whether handled well or exploded horribly and caused harm to
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The entire life of Alcibiades playing one sex scandal and drunken moment of stupidity to change positions and shift geo-politics. Dude was a fucking legend.

Basically, Alcibiades was a Athenian politician, renowned for good looks and sexual deviancy. Allegedly proposed Socrates for sex, which he declined. Eventually rose to prominence calling for an expedition to Sicily to counteract Sparta and gain dominance. Succeeded through popularity, though gained powerful enemies. One night, he allegedly gets drunk while preparing for the invasion, and breaks all the dicks off the statues. These statues were of Hermes and the erect dicks were for good luck or pointing directions as signs but basically its a bad omen if these are broken.

Alcibiades gets told to go invade, and he will be tried after the fact. Well, he recieves word during the expedition that he will be tried in absentee, and his enemies were turning the public against him. So, he decides his best course of action is to side with Sparta, and since he knows everything about the military operation because he planned and proposed the damn thing, he ends up winning the battle for the side of Sparta. He goes back to Sparta, where he hangs out and makes friends with the people of prominence, a few too many. Turns out, Spartas queen ends up having a baby that happens to look just a little bit too much like Alcibiades and not a whole lot like Spartas King.

So from there, cant go to Athens, so he goes to Persia, where he works to play the war in favor to them, but at the same time negotiates with Athens for his return. Fucking somehow after all this, Athens eventually welcomes him back. Not for long, because though he does well for awhile he loses a battle, and fearing repercussion goes back to Persia. Only this time everyone has had enough of him and he gets assassinated.

Mender Bug said:
The Zimmerman Telegraph,
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"Hey Mexico, you know how your country is poor and racked by a civil war at the moment? Dont you think right now is a great time to jump into the biggest war in human history to attack your Northern neighbors who kicked your ass in the last one and have since eclipsed you economically and in population? We cant send you any help but this is something that totally will work in your favor and not just be a sacrificial lamb to buy us time.

Sincerely,
Kaiser Wilhelm II"
 
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The Bofors scandal in the 80's, selling weapons through India using bribery, kickbacks and there's also some weapons smuggling.

Bofors dates back to the 1600's as a steel plant, in the late 1800's they started to make canons and after being bought by dynamite-man Alfred Nobel they started making gun powder and more weapons.
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Alfred Nobel.

Q: Bofors? They make the boomtube right?
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No, that's Saab, we'll get back to them.

India wanted to buy howitzers and guess what Sweden had?
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So this guy, Olof Palme, the socialist version of Ronald Reagan in Sweden, offered to sell guns to this guy,
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, Rajiv Gandhi, the prime minister of India and successor to that position after his mother Indira Ghandi got assassinated by her bodyguards. Assassination comes into play later and lets just ignore the nepotism in Indian politics.

The Wallenberg family was involved, that's not unusual it's hard for them not to they own so much and they also own one of the biggest banks and money is said to have passed through there to accounts in Switzerland. The Wallenberg name might be familiar because the most well known member of the family is Raoul Wallenberg.
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Raoul Wallenberg, famous for saving ten thousands of jews in Hungary during 1944. A couple of hundred thousand jews were taken by train out of Hungary to concentration camps. He handed out tons of provisional passports, going as far as going to the trains and handing them out to jews in the freight cars. It fucking worked, Nazi's are sticklers for the rules. The Soviets later disappeared him and no one asked any questions.

Back to the bank, the one called SEB. It was blocked by the US until 1947 for being pro-German and a German collaborator under the leadership of Jacob Wallenberg.
Here's that section of the family tree.
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It is also strange that countries all over the world got memorials way before Sweden did, first one showed up in 1999 and his existence wasn't much of a topic in schools, maybe saving jews isn't that popular...

Back to the 80's and the Howitzers.
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Olof Palme who had brought Rajiv Gandhi the offer to buy the weapons had gone and gotten assassinated. Who did it? The South-Africans? The Kurds? Some doped up weirdo like when Batman lost his parents(they were walking home from a movie theater at night)? No one knows. Anyway, Rajiv delivered the decision to buy the guns when attending Palme's funeral in Sweden. A bit weird, but we will get back to assassinations.

Bofors now had a contract worth 1,500-crore rupees, I don't know what that means, but then there was bribery and Rajiv Gandhi couldn't be prime minister anymore, then before he faced trial he got assassinated by natural reasons and now India is thinking about buying our disco jet-fighter that SAAB built. Fin.
 
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