Top 10 National Sex Scandals
Sex scandals are as American as (sticking your wiener in an) apple pie. (Or should we say your Anthony Weiner?) The really unforgettable scandals leave us with a particular phrase or image burned into our brains. We could be a hundred years old and senile and we will still be able to recall Lorena Bobbitt tossing her husband’s penis out the car window; Clarence Thomas asking Anita Hill about a pubic hair on a coke can; and an astronaut driving hundreds of miles in a diaper to confront the lover who spurned her. Here are our nominations for the top ten sex scandals in this nation’s history, organized by the categories in which these events most often seem to occur. God bless (or should we say God save) America!
Sex scandals are as American as (sticking your wiener in an) apple pie. (Or should we say your Anthony Weiner?) The really unforgettable scandals leave us with a particular phrase or image burned into our brains. We could be a hundred years old and senile and we will still be able to recall Lorena Bobbitt tossing her husband's penis out the car window; Clarence Thomas asking Anita Hill about a pubic hair on a coke can; and an astronaut driving hundreds of miles in a diaper to confront the lover who spurned her. Here are our nominations for the top ten sex scandals in this nation's history, organized by the categories in which these events most often seem to occur. God bless (or should we say God save) America!
10. SPORTS: The Yankee Swap
In 1973, two star Yankee players, Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich, held a press conference during spring training to announce they were swapping lives. It started as a joke during a double-date with their wives (hey, it was the seventies) and suddenly they were agreeing to a full-on wife-swap. Initially they just knocked boots for an evening... but eventually they decide to swap permanently -- including kids, pets, the lot. Mike didn't last long with Fritz's former wife, but Fritz and Mike's wife are still married today with four children of their own. Guess that Yankee doodle diddling was dandy.
Sports runners-up: Duke Lacrosse; Jerry Sandusky (we feel queasy just typing his name), and Tiger Woods (enduring image: a reporter from the National Enquirer secretly stealing the bloody tampon that one of Tiger's mistresses removed and tossed in a parking lot in order to have a quickie with the golf legend).
Author: Em & Lo9. STATE POLITICS: The (Hypocritical) Democrat Edition: Eliot Spitzer
This New York governor was trapped by the very measures he put in place to crack down on corruption! Oh Client 9, is their no limit to your hubris? We're extra pissed at Spitzer because we always thought he'd make a pretty fine U.S. president one day. Then again, second acts seem to be increasingly common in this country...
Runner-up: Anthony Weiner's wiener. Tweeted.
Author: Em & Lo8. COULDA-BEEN-A-CONTENDER POLITICS: John Edwards
We're not sure which cost North Carolina Senator John Edwards more potential presidential votes: the fact that he impregnated his mistress (and then used campaign funds to try to hush the matter up and also had a campaign aide falsely claim to the be father) while his wife was suffering from breast cancer-- or the fact that he regularly spent $500 on his haircuts.
Runners-up:
Gary "Monkey Business" Hart and Jerry Springer. (Did you know that back in the seventies, before he conquered daytime television, Springer had a bright and shining career in politics? He had to resign from his Cinncinati city council seat after getting busted for writing a personal check to a prostitute. A personal check, dude -- seriously?)
Author: Em & Lo7. HOLLYWOOD: Heidi Fleiss, Hollywood Madam
By 27, Heidi Fleiss was running an infamous prostitution ring in Hollwood with a seriously A-list group of clients. She made millions a year until she was busted and sentenced to seven years in prison (though she only served two months in prison, then three years in a halfway house). But she never named names -- saying, "That's not my style" -- and to this day, so far as we know, the only celebrity confirmed in her little black book is Charlie Sheen (and we're pretty sure he announced that himself).
Runners-up:
Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian's sex tapes; also, Ingrid Bergman, who may not have been born in the U.S., but was called "an instrument of evil" on the floor of the U.S. senate after cheating on her husband with (and getting pregnant by) director Roberto Rossellini in 1950.
Author: Em & Lo6. RELIGION: Jimmy Swaggart Calls the Kettle Black
Back in 1986, TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart used his screen time to attack fellow televangelists, Marvin Gorman and Jim Bakker, for having affairs. Gorman then hired a private investigator (oh, those forgiving evangelists!) to uncover Swaggart's own dalliances with a prostitute. Swaggart teared up on TV, saying, "I have sinned against you, my Lord, and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God's forgiveness." Three years later, he was busted with another prostitute. We hope those seas of God's forgiveness run real deep.
Runners-up:
Ted Haggard (preached against gay marriage to millions while paying for gay sex and crystal meth); also the Catholic Church's cover-up of child rape by priests (which would be more than a runner-up except for the fact that the U.S. doesn't have a monopoly on this sex scandal).
Author: Em & Lo5. SUPREME COURT POLITICS: Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill
Clarence Thomas had been a judge for just over a year at his Senate hearings and confirmation for the U.S. Supreme Court -- after he was nominated by then-President George H. W. Bush -- and so his good character was considered a primary qualification. But then it turned out that he had repeatedly sexually harassed his employee, Anita Hill, including describing his sexual prowess and anatomy in graphic detail and, on one this-will-go-down-in-the-history-books occasion, asking, "Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?" Boys will be boys! The U.S. Senate eventually confirmed Thomas by a vote of 52–48, which was the narrowest margin since the 19th century.
Author: Em & Lo4. HIGH SOCIETY: Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit
Chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit was only sixteen when she met famed (and married) architect Stanford White, who seduced her in his pied-a-terre, which contained a red velvet swing (apparently he got off on naked swing pushing).
Nesbit later married and told her husband, Harry Kendall Thaw, that she'd lost her virginity to White in a not-exactly-consensual champagne haze. Thaw couldn't get past this and later shot White three times in the face at close range, during a performance at the Madison Square Garden's roof theatre. They sure knew how to do sex scandal back in the early 1900s.
Runner-up:
Sydney Biddle Barrows was busted in 1984 for running an elite escort service in New York City. She was dubbed the Mayflower Madam by the New York Post for her classy Mayflower heritage and said, “I ran the wrong sort of business, but I did it with integrity.” Now that's good breeding.
Author: Em & Lo3. JUST PLAIN FOLK: Mary Kay Letourneau
Mary Kay Letourneau was a (married) elementary school teacher in Seattle when she first met Vili Fualaau -- he was in second grade at the time. She waited until he was 13 to start sleeping with him. Her husband found out and a year later she was arrested for rape... then gave birth to Fualaau's daughter. Letourneau pled guilty and was given a suspended sentence, but was sent back to jail when she was busted in a parked car with Faulaau. A year later she had another kid by Faulaau. She got out of jail in 2004, and in 2005 -- reader, she married him. They're still together. Which just goes to show, sometimes sex scandals have happy endings.
Runners-up:
John Wayne Bobbitt (and Bobbitt Jr.). Also, Lisa Nowak, the former astronaut who, in 2006, drove across five states wearing adult diapers (and a wig and trench coat) to confront -- and attempt to kidnap -- her ex's new girlfriend.
Author: Em & Lo2. OLD SCHOOL PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS: Thomas Jefferson
Yes, that Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, principal author of the Declaration of Independence, one of the greatest minds of his generation. He carried on a years-long affair with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, and she had multiple children by him, possibly as many as six -- the first when she was only seventeen. Jefferson's will decreed that Sally was allowed to live with her children, though she was not officially freed. Whatta guy.
Author: Em & Lo1. NEW SCHOOL PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS: William Jefferson Clinton
How many thousands of years will pass before Bill and Monica are no longer the hands-down winner in any list of sexual scandals? It's like some marketing genius designed the entire freakin' affair for viral appeal: the cigar, the Altoids, the thong, the DNA-stained dress, the erotic reading material, the beret, the back-stabbing BFF, the "It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is"... Clinton was subsequently impeached but not removed from office. We'll say that one more time while you read through entries ten through two again: Clinton was impeached. On the plus side, nothing untoward happened to his bobbitt.
Runner-up:
JFK and Marilyn Monroe (also, JFK and his White House intern; JFK and the mafia boss's girlfriend; JFK and his wife's press secretary; JFK and Marlene Dietrich, JFK and the C.I.A. wife, who was murdered a year after JFK was...)
Author: Em & Lo
