25+ Historical Figures Who Were Secretly Terrible People

In history, celebrity status, and influence, we like to remember the good guys — the people who made big changes or heavily influenced culture. We mean, Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl created some of our favorite stories, but do you know the dark secrets they kept hidden about their lives? Let’s take a deep dive into some historical figures who we think were pretty great, but it turns out they are downright awful.

As an author, Ted Geisel — better known as Dr. Seuss — made a huge impact on many of our childhoods with some of our favorite rhymes and colorful stories. The Lorax and The Cat in the Hat were some of his most successful writing works. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows with Dr. Seuss, though. His first wife, Helen Palmer, was diagnosed with cancer, and he decided to cheat on her while she was already suffering. When Helen found out, she took her own life, and then Dr. Seuss went on to marry his mistress.

Jerry Lee Lewis greatly impacted the music industry and was known as rock and roll’s first great wild man. He really peaked in the 1950s and is still considered a legacy today. Jerry was actually a really violent person and is suspected of killing two of his wives. Lewis’s reputation went downhill when he married his 13-year-old first cousin. He was then married six more times, and two of the wives mysteriously died from overdoses and drownings. He was also repeatedly charged with a misdemeanor for shooting guns.

We’ve all seen The Greatest Showman, a moving story about the circus and embracing who you are as a person. Well, it turns out that the real-life ring leader, P.T. Barnum, was a pretty awful human being who did not value the talent brought into his circus. Barnum got his start in show business by buying an enslaved person called Joice Heth, who was conveniently left out of the film. The real-life people from the movie were exploited for their disabilities/appearances, allowing Barnum to profit off the word ‘freak.’

Charlie Chaplin rose to fame in the 1910s and continued his acting career well into the 1950s. He pioneered the silent film movement, and his persona, the Tramp, soon became a legacy. However, you guessed it, Chaplin was a bit of a weirdo. In the 1921 film The Kid, Chaplin, who was 32 at the time, starred alongside 12-year-old Lita Gray. He allegedly pursued her for years, then impregnated her when she was 15. A year later, the pair were married. They later divorced, and Lisa wrote an autobiography called My Life With Chaplin in 1966.