← Back to the front page

Famous Historic Figures’ Public Image vs the Reality of their Lives

Khalid Elhassan June 3, 2020 34 min

John Ford - The Searchers — John Wayne. Pintrest

30. The Cradle-Robbing Orgy Addict

Another contrast between Charlie Chaplain’s public image and the actual man was his penchant for orgies. He liked to organize them with his friend and fellow comedic film star, Fatty Arbuckle. Those orgies came to a screeching however in the aftermath of a scandal that rocked the country in 1921, when Fatty Arbuckle was prosecuted for raping a woman to death.

Arbuckle was acquitted, but the duo’s orgy parties never resumed. Chaplin’s greatest scandals, however – the ones that most damaged his public image – arose from his propensity for cradle robbing: he liked much younger women. It proved his undoing.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.