Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Spanking Fetish, and Other Famous People’s Unexpected Behavior

19. When Rousseau’s Desire For a Spanking Almost Ended in an Unexpected Severe Ass Kicking

When he was eight-years-old, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was sent to live with a Calvinist minister named Lambercier, and his daughter. Mademoiselle Lambercier treated young Rousseau as if he was her son – and disciplined him as a mother would have in those days. That included spanking when he misbehaved. Rather than be terrified by the punishment, Rousseau discovered that he rather liked it. As he described it in his autobiographical Confessions: “I had found in the pain, even in the disgrace, a mixture of sensuality which had left me less afraid than desirous of experiencing it again from the same hand. No doubt some precocious sexual instinct was mingled with this feeling, for the same chastisement inflicted by her brother would not have seemed to me at all pleasant“. From then on, he deliberately misbehaved in order to get spanked, until Mademoiselle Lambercier finally gave up on trying to discipline him.

That left Rousseau with a lifelong spanking fetish. Years later, he reminisced: “Who would believe this childish discipline, received at eight years old, from the hands of a woman of thirty, should influence my propensities, my desires, my passions, for the rest of my life, and that in quite a contrary sense from what might naturally have been expected?” Rousseau was shy around women, and spent his life wanting to get spanked, without mustering the courage to ask a woman to do that. The repressed desire got so bad, that he haunted dark alleys to expose his bare butt to passing women. He never got a spanking, but on at least one occasion, almost got an ass kicking from an enraged crowd. Some girls who saw his butt screamed. Rousseau was chased in the night and cornered, but escaped a beating way more severe than a spanking by feigning insanity.

18. The Painter and the Prostitutes

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 – 1901) was a Belle Epoque painter who made Parisian nightlife and France’s world of entertainment his specialty. He documented what he saw with keen psychological insight. De Toulouse-Lautrec was among the pioneers of the Post-Impressionist period, and he ranks along the likes of Gauguin and Van Gogh. An extreme simplification of outlines and movement was a hallmark of his paintings, combined with the frequent use of large color areas. The man also had a thing for ladies of the night. As in, he had a strong prostitute habit. So strong, that Toulouse-Lautrec actually lived in brothels. His private life was marked by a fixation on hookers, which spilled over into his art and influenced his paintings. When he was a teenager, Toulouse-Lautrec suffered a pair of accidents, in which he broke his thigh bones.

The mishaps required extensive periods of painful convalescence. To fill the lonely hours, he turned to painting. The accidents left him with atrophied legs, and made walking difficult for the rest of his life. He moved to Paris in the early 1880s, and devoted his life to art and a quest to become an artist. He also devoted himself to the nightlife and prostitutes. When he was not in Parisian brothels, Toulouse-Lautrec frequently visited cabarets in Paris’ Montmartre district, such as the Moulin Rouge. There, he associated with many courtesans – prostitutes, but of a higher caliber. He was such a favored customer of the Moulin Rouge that the cabaret actually reserved a table for him every night, and displayed his paintings. He also liked to frequent the theater, circus, and dance halls, while accompanied by prostitutes.

17. A Famous Artist Devoted to Ladies of the Night

Prostitutes liked Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec just as much as he liked them. Parisian ladies of the night befriended him, modeled for him, and even supported him when he was broke. Prostitutes and madams accepted the crippled artist as a fellow outcast. He liked their company so much, that he would sometimes pack up and move into brothels, to live there for months on end. Toulouse-Lautrec liked to shock people by giving the address of a famous brothel as his place of residence. He was allowed to freely wander around the establishments, to sketch and paint what he saw as the muse took him. The results were reflected in his body of work, and he became known for his depictions of sex workers.

The Belle Epoque era in which Toulouse-Lautrec lived was one in which prostitution was widespread. Most men routinely made used their services, with little stigma attached. Still, even in the socially liberal France of the late nineteenth century, hookers were a subject handled with discretion, and seldom discussed openly. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings of prostitutes as they were broke such taboos. His portrayals neither glamorized nor vilified them, but simply depicted the everyday life that he shared with them in a near-documentary fashion. He died at age thirty six from advanced syphilis, which he got from one of his prostitute friends – make of that what you will.

16. The Kochs

The United States’ most powerful dynasty is probably the Koch family. They own Koch Industries, America’s second biggest privately owned company with revenues of $125 billion in 2021. The Kochs have been politically active for decades, and are known as generous patrons of conservative and libertarian figures and causes. More recently, the brothers David and Charles Koch have headed a network of hundreds of libertarian and conservative candidates, policy groups, and think tanks. The rise of the fiscally conservative Tea Party movement owed much to Koch generosity. The dynasty’s power was so great that in 2011, House Speaker John Boehner turned to David Koch when he needed votes to prevent a government shutdown.

Climate change skeptics have received generous financial support from the Kochs. However, although staunchly libertarian and conservative, the Kochs have at times partnered with progressives. In 2015, for example, they worked with the American Civil Liberties Union on criminal justice reform, specifically on the issue of asset forfeiture. Given their track record, it is no surprise that the Kochs have been adamant opponents of communism and just about anything that has the least connection with socialism. However, as seen below, the Kochs did not let such aversion get in the way of making a dollar, as the dynasty’s founder worked for Joseph Stalin and helped him modernize the Soviet Union’s oil industry.

15. Unexpected Twist of Capitalists Working for Communists

Fred C. Koch (1900 – 1967), the paterfamilias of the Koch dynasty, founded the Winkler-Koch Engineering Company with an MIT classmate in 1925, and went into the oil business. Business in the US was not good for the senior Koch and his partner early in their career. They lost a series of patent infringement lawsuits to bigger oil companies, and things got that so bad that they gave up on making it in America, and decided to seek their fortunes overseas. So they headed to the Soviet Union, where they helped Joseph Stalin modernize the country’s oil industry. Koch and his partner built fifteen thermal cracking units to turn crude oil into gasoline, and trained Soviet engineers. Fred finally had a change of heart and became a radical anticommunist after Stalin reneged on their deal, purged his soviet trainees, and deprived him of promised payments

Joseph Stalin was not the only totalitarian dictator helped by Fred C. Koch. He worked with American Nazi William Rhodes Davis, who had personal ties with Adolf Hitler. Shortly after things went sour for him in Communist Russia, Fred headed to Nazi Germany, where he built the Hamburg Oil Refinery, the Third Reich’s third biggest refinery. Fred came to like and admire the Nazis, as seen in a 1938 letter he wrote: “Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard“. The Hamburg refinery built by Fred C. Koch was a big help to the Nazis as they swept through Europe, until it was finally taken out of action by Allied bombing in 1944.

14. The “Magick” Man

Aleister Crowley (1875 – 1947) was an English writer and occultist who claimed to be a magician. Not the stage tricks kind of magician, but the warlock, spells and sorcery type. An L. Ron Hubbard type before there was an L. Ron Hubbard, Crowley founded a religion in the early twentieth century, Thelema. He declared himself its prophet, and announced that the new faith’s goal was to guide mankind to a new age. A key principle of Thelema was that the twentieth century would usher in the “Aeon of Horus”, which would overthrow all current codes of morality and ethics. In the new age, people’s “True Will”, which they would discover via magick (how Crowley spelled “magic”), would be all that matters. Crowley summarized the Horus era’s ethics as: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law“. Crowley’s magick religion included lots of carnal relations with his followers.

He called it “Sexual Magick”, whereby orgasms and bodily secretions were used as components of spells. A main precept was that all adherents should be completely open and uninhibited about intercourse, without social limitations or restraints. Followers should also expose their children to intercourse from infancy, and get them used to seeing all kinds of explicit activity. There’s a word for that, nowadays. In 1920, Crowley and his followers established a religious commune in Sicily, the Abbey of Thelema. It was not long before the perverse and weird goings-on there led to controversy, scandals, and denunciations, that became regular fodder for the British and Italian press. In response to the outcry, Italy’s government finally shut down the commune and evicted everybody in 1923. Crowley then hit the road, and split the final two decades of his life in travels between Britain, France, and Germany, to promote his religion.

13. Charles Darwin’s Unexpected Exotic Feasting

Charles Robert Darwin (1809 – 1882) is best known for his theory of evolution. When he set sail aboard the HMS Beagle in 1831 for what turned out to be a five-year journey, few knew that his observations would revolutionize science, and the world, for that matter. Yet, that is precisely what happened. His Victorian contemporaries were shocked by his assertion that humans and animals shared a common ancestry. Today, his notion that all species are descended from common ancestors, is widely accepted. His take that species evolved into their current forms because of changes in heritable characteristics is a fundamental concept of science. One of history’s most influential figures, he was honored with burial in Westminster Abbey when he died.

The Father of Evolution was a late addition to the Beagle as a supernumerary naturalist. He spent his time studying plants and animals, and gathering data for his theory of evolution through natural selection. Less known, is that Darwin, an adventurous gourmand, ate every animal that he discovered. As a student in Cambridge University, long before he became famous, the inventor of the theory of evolution had been a member of the Glutton Club. The student group’s members were in the habit of wolfing down “birds and beasts which were before unknown to human palate“. Among other things, they ate hawks, herons, and a brown owl so nauseating that the club dissolved after tasting it. However, as seen below, Darwin did not lose his taste for exotic meat.

12. Darwin’s Rare Bird Dinner Bird

As HMS Beagle made its journey around the world, Charles Darwin’s exotic meals included a puma, which he thought tasted like veal, and dined on iguanas and armadillos as well. He ate a twenty-pound rodent, probably an agouti, which he described as “the very best meat I ever tasted“. He not only ate Galapagos giant tortoises, but also drank their bladders: “The fluid was quite limpid, and had only a very slightly bitter taste“. His penchant to eat whatever he came across led him on one occasion to accidentally devour a highly sought after bird, a lesser rhea. No specimen of the bird – South America’s version of an ostrich – had ever been seen in Europe, and Darwin was determined to become the first naturalist to send a specimen back home. He spent months trying to catch one, but the bird was fast, agile, and incredibly hard to catch.

One day in 1834, a shipmate showed Darwin a bird he had just shot and asked if he wanted it, or whether they should cook it for dinner. Absentmindedly, Darwin said they should eat it. Later that evening, Darwin was halfway through dinner when he suddenly jumped up, and shouted at everybody to stop eating. He had just realized that they were eating a lesser rhea. He ran around grabbing bones from people’s plates, and rushed to the ship’s mess where he found the head, the neck bones, the feet, some feathers, and assorted bits and pieces. He packaged up all he could find, and sent it to a taxidermist friend in London. The buddy eventually managed to construct a bird using what Darwin had sent him, with the help of wires and feathers purloined from the more common greater rhea, for which there were many specimens available.

11. Byron and His Unexpected Relationship With His Sister

Lord Byron, or George Gordon Byron, 6^th Baron Byron (1788 – 1824), was a key Romantic Movement figure. A poet, satirist, politician and peer, his poems and personality captured Europe’s imagination. Among his best known poetic works are the short love poem She Walks in Beauty, the gloomy Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and the satiric Don Juan. Byron is widely regarded as one of Britain’s best poets, known and acclaimed for his brilliant use of the English language. However, he gained further fame – or infamy – and became even better known for his flamboyance and amorous lifestyle. Byron gained even more infamous because of the notoriety of his sexual escapades with both men and women. His most infamous sexual escapade was a years-long weird incestuous relationship with his sister. Lord Byron’s most problematic affair was an incestuous one with his own sister, Augusta Leigh, of whom Byron had seen little in childhood.

Byron made up for it – and how – as an adult, when he formed an extremely close relationship with her. In 1814, the poet fathered a daughter upon his sister, which made Byron the child’s uncle, as well as father. As befits a key figure of the Romantic Movement, Lord Byron was a sentimentalist. As such, he liked to keep mementos of his lovers. In those days, the norm for mementos was a lock of hair from one’s object of affection, perhaps tied with a ribbon. But he was Byron, Britain’s most flamboyant poet, eccentric aristocrat, and all around pervert. A simple lock of hair would not do for him. Instead, Byron liked to snip clumps of pubic hair from his lovers’ crotches, and kept them, catalogued and labeled, in envelopes.

10. Byron’s Other Infamous Affair

Lord Byron’s most infamous affair was with his sister, but his most famous one was with the married Lady Caroline Lamb. She rejected him at first, and described him as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know“. Lady Lamb changed her mind, however, and had a torrid affair with the poet that scandalized Britain. When Byron dumped her, a besotted Lady Lamb turned stalker, and pursued him relentlessly. She stopped at his house one time too many, and scribbled in a book on his desk “Remember me“. As seen below, the exasperated Byron responded with a poem entitled Remember Thee! Remember Thee! Fed up with Lady Caroline Lamb’s ceaseless pursuit and celebrity stalking, Lord Byron penned her a diss poem.

Remember thee! remember thee!
Till Lethe quench life’s burning stream
Remorse and shame shall cling to thee,
And haunt thee like a feverish dream!

Remember thee! Aye, doubt it not.
Thy husband too shall think of thee:
By neither shalt thou be forgot,
Thou false to him, thou fiend to me!

Britain eventually became too hot for Byron, because of his mounting scandals – especially the one with his sister. So the Romantic poet hit the road, and roamed Europe for years at a stretch. That included a seven year stint in Italy. Restlessness eventually led him to join the Greeks in their war of independence from the Ottoman Turks. However, he was disappointed with the Greeks of his day, because they differed greatly from the heroic Hellenes described by Homer. As he moped about that discrepancy, Byron caught a fever and died in a Greek backwater at the age of thirty six.

9. Il Duce’s Seedy Side

Benito Mussolini (1883 – 1945), founder of his country’s Fascist Party, was Italy’s prime minister and leader from 1922 to 1943. He was the first European fascist dictator, and was an inspirational figure for Adolf Hitler, who modeled himself after Mussolini in his own rise to power. Eventually, the Italian dictator was overshadowed by his German imitator, and Mussolini ended up as Hitler’s sidekick. Mussolini had delusions of grandeur, and sought to revive the Roman Empire. Neither he nor Italy were up to the task, however, and Mussolini often bit more than he could chew. Things did not turn out well, the results were often farcical, and led to sundry humiliations and setbacks. Towards the end of his career, after he dragged an unprepared Italy into World War II and bungled it badly, Mussolini’s image morphed from that of a great statesman to a hapless buffoon.

When his countrymen captured Mussolini in WWII’s final days, they killed him and his mistress, and displayed them in downtown Milan, suspended upside down by their ankles from meat hooks. That the man was a comic dictator was well known. That he had a seedy sensual side and habitually penned erotic letters, few knew of at the time. To unwind, Mussolini liked to write erotic letters. The fascist dictator habitually wrote cringe-worthy dirty letters, as was discovered when the diary of Clara Petacci, the mistress killed and strung up by his side, came to light in 2009. For all his shortcomings, one thing Il Duce (Italian for leader) had going for him was an incredible libido and remarkable sexual stamina. As described by Petacci, Mussolini often had up to fourteen mistresses at a time, and would regularly go through three or four different women in a single evening.

8. Mussolini’s Unexpected Erotica Side

Mussolini was jarringly loud during sex: “his screams seem like those of a wounded beast“, as Petacci put it. He was insatiable. As he described it, after his first sexual encounter with a hooker at age seventeen: “Naked women entered my life, my dreams, my desires. I undressed them with my eyes, the girls that I met, I lusted after them violently with my thoughts“. Luckily for him, many Italian women had the hots for him as well. At the height of his power, thousands sent letters in which they propositioned him every day. Mussolini’s underlings sorted his fan letters by senders into “known” and “new”. After police background checks on the “new” women, the more interesting ones were put in folders and passed on to him. Those who caught his eye – usually big breasted and broad hipped – were summoned for an afternoon liaison at his palace.

Mussolini got started immediately on the carpet, against the wall, or on a stone window seat. Those he liked were added to his many mistresses. In writing them, Mussolini held little back. E.g.; ” Orgasm is good for you: it sharpens your thoughts, it widens your horizons, it helps your brain, makes it vivid and brilliant“. Or “Be afraid of my love. It’s like a cyclone. It’s tremendous; it overwhelms everything. You must tremble.” And “I tremble in telling you, but I have a feverish desire for your delicious little body which I want to kiss all over. And you must adore my body, your giant…” Or “Your flesh has got me – from now on I’m a slave to your flesh.” And ” I’m bad – hit me, hurt me, punish me, but don’t suffer. I love you. I think about you all day, even when I’m working.”

7. Sinatra, the Star …

Crooner Frank Sinatra (1915 – 1998) is not as well known today as he was in his heyday in the mid-twentieth century. At one time, though, he was huge. The man known as Ole Blue Eyes and Chairman of the Board (although he loathed the latter nickname) captured the hearts of music lovers around the world. His music sold about 150 million records, which puts him among history’s top artists by volume of sales. When he died in 1998, Sinatra had already established himself as an iconic figure in the same league as an Elvis or Marilyn Monroe.

Plenty of self-respect is one thing that Sinatra did not lack. At the start of his career, at a time of significant anti-Italian sentiment, bandleader Harry James recommended that he change his name because it was “too Italian”. He replied: “No way, baby. My name is Sinatra. Frank fucking Sinatra“. It’s a good thing he kept the name: bobby soxers, enthusiastic 1940s adolescent female fans of pop music, loved it and him. Their passion for Ole Blue Eyes never dimmed for the rest of their and his life. While Sinatra was an all-around class act, he did have some seedy aspects – and not just his mob ties. As seen below, there was that unexpected episode when he was arrested for “seduction” of a reputable woman.

6. … and Sinatra, the Seducer

Old Blue Eyes had a criminal rap sheet. Not a long one, to be sure, but he had one. In 1938, when he was 23-years-old, Sinatra was arrested in New Jersey for the seduction of a reputable woman. At the time, seduction was actually a criminal offense, and an old girlfriend accused him of breach of a promise to marry her and used that to get back at him. Per FBI reports: “On the second and ninth days of November 1938 at the Borough of Lodi … under the promise of marriage [Sinatra] did then and there have sexual intercourse with the said complainant, who was then and there a single female of good repute“.

Sinatra was duly arrested and booked for seduction, and released on a $1500 bond. The archaic charge was dismissed when it turned out that the supposedly single woman in question had actually been married when she got it on with him. Presumably, the fact that she had broken her marital vows meant that she was not “of good repute“, after all. However, that was not the end of Sinatra’s troubles. A month later, the charges were amended, and he was arrested again, this time for adultery. He was released on a bond of $500. Eventually, that charge, too, was dismissed, and Ole Blue Eyes was free to go on with his seductive ways.

5. The Kabuki Star and the Deadly Fish

Japan’s most prominent and revered kabuki actor from the 1930s until his demise in 1975 was Bando Mitsugoro VIII. He specialized in the aragoto style, which emphasizes exaggerated dynamic forms of movement and speech. He was the eighth in a family line of Mitsugoro kabuki performers, and his son and grandson took the name to become Bando Mitsugoro IX and X, respectively. So great was Bando Mitsugoro VIII, that the Japanese government officially designated him a “Living National Treasure” in 1973. Then his life, full of accomplishments, came to a funny – or not so funny, depending on how you look at it – end when he tried to prove that he possessed a superhuman liver.

Mitsugoro and friends went to a Kyoto restaurant on January 16^th, 1975, and he ordered puffer fish. Puffer fish is lethally poisonous, and must be carefully prepared by a highly qualified chef to remove the toxic parts without contaminating the meat. Mitsugoro ordered four portions of puffer fish liver – the most poisonous part of the fish. So poisonous, that its sale is prohibited by law. Nonetheless, the restaurant owner felt that he could not refuse the famous actor. Mitsugoro, who enjoyed the pleasant tingling puffer fish gave his lips and tongue, wanted to demonstrate to his friends that he could survive four times the poison that would kill a normal person. He could not. The tingling spread from his mouth to the rest of his body, was followed by unexpected paralysis of his limbs, difficulty breathing, and finally, death seven hours later.

4. A Han Emperor’s Unexpected Horrible Brood

Ancient China’s Emperor Jing of Han (reigned 157 BC – 141 BC) crushed feudal aristocrats who tried to run their fiefdoms as independent realms, and consolidated imperial control of China. All in all, his reign was a good one, and he governed with a light hand. He lowered taxes, lifted other burdens from commoners, and paved the way for the Han Dynasty to reach a pinnacle under his successors. In his own household, however, Emperor Jing raised some depraved monsters who would have gotten kicked off Tinder. First of those was Prince Tuan, who had some serious sexual hangups. That had some serious consequences, because one of the main tasks of a royal prince was to ensure the continuity of the dynasty, and to do that, he had to sire sons.

The problem was that Prince Tuan simply could not get it up with his wives and concubines. He suffered what Chinese texts described as a “withering of his potency”. Tuan became physically ill whenever he had to approach a woman. The man was homosexual, but he nonetheless had an obligation to impregnate his women and continue the imperial line. The tensions eventually got too much, and got to him. He had a boy lover, but his lover was bisexual and also liked the ladies – particularly Prince Tuan’s ladies of the harem, whose needs the prince did not satisfy. When Tuan found out that his boy lover was also loving his harem ladies, he failed to see it as a win-win that relieved him of a task he neither wanted to nor could perform. Instead, he choked his lover to death with his bare hands.

3. The Imperial Psycho Siblings

Prince Chu, Prince Tuan’s brother, was even worse. Chu once had one of his concubines whipped, then personally chopped off her head. He had another concubine tortured with red hot irons. Chu’s wife accused one of his concubines of infidelity. So the prince had the accused whipped, then gathered the rest of his harem and made them burn her with hot needles. Princes Tuan and Chu had nothing though on their brother, Prince Chien. Prince Chien was an out and out sadistic monster. Unlike his brother Tuan, who did not like the ladies and felt sick looking at them, Chien liked the ladies – in a variety of sick ways, to their detriment and misfortune. Chien carried on incestuous relationships with his own sisters, and forced himself on some of them when they did not willingly submit to his advances.

Prince Chien also liked to torment the wives and concubines of his harem. Some of the harem women who displeased him – and who knew what might displease the psycho prince from one day to the next – he forced to sit naked in trees for days on end. Others, he forced keep time to a drum all day long. Others, he simply starved to death. He also liked to drown young boys and girls in a palace lake, as their desperate thrashings amused and aroused him. Princes Tuan and Chien were not the only degenerates in that family, and ancient Chinese sources hold that quite a few of Emperor Jing’s other relatives were also sick sadists. Per contemporary sources, male members of the imperial family routinely had incest with their sisters and other female relatives, and were not above assaulting any married woman that caught their eye.

2. Santa’s Origin

The modern Santa Claus is a product of inputs from the folklore of various cultures. The biggest single figure behind Santa is probably Saint Nicholas of Myra, also known as Nicholas of Bari (270 – 342 AD). One of the most popular minor saints of both the Western and Eastern churches, he was a generous man known for his gifts. He became associated with Christmas, and the tradition of gifts given that day. Nicholas was born into wealth, and used his riches to help those less fortunate. He traveled around, went on pilgrimage to the Holy Lands, and became associated with various good deeds, such as saving three innocent soldiers from wrongful execution.

Numerous miracles were attributed to Saint Nicholas. He reportedly calmed the sea, chopped down a demonic tree, and resurrected three kids who had been murdered by a butcher and pickled in brine for sale as pork during a famine. No wonder he became the patron saint of children. So Saint Nick was a good guy, and a worthy foundational figure upon whom to build the legend of the lovable and kindly Santa. However, Nicholas was not nice all the time. As seen below, he was not above settling debates by beating up those with whom he disagreed.

1. Santa’s Unexpected Temper

Things were chaotic in early Christianity, with little consensus about the new faith’s doctrine. In 325 AD, Emperor Constantine the Great convened bishops in Nicaea, in what is now Turkey, to sort things out in what came to be known as the First Council of Nicaea. It settled some core issues, such as the divine nature of Jesus and his relationship to God, the first part of the Nicene Creed, and when to celebrate Easter. The debates en route to consensus were heated, though. They were not like Ivy League discussion panels, where violence is the last thing expected from nerdy professors in bowties and thick glasses. Participants at the Council of Nicaea could and did settle debates with their fists. Forget passive aggressive cutting remarks: early church fathers could pull out knives in the middle of discussions to literally cut each other.

Saint Nicholas of Myra was among the bishops at Nicaea, and settled a discussion there with his fists. His victim was a priest named Arius, whose teachings had roiled Christianity and caused the convocation of the council in the first place. The controversy’s details seem esoteric and make little sense to modern ears, but they mattered a whole lot to people back then. Arius, who was accused of heresy, was invited by Emperor Constantine to defend his position. He got up and began to do so. His speech angered opponents, whose numbers included Nicholas – by then middle-aged, and apparently with a short fuse when it came to heresy. He reportedly did a Will-Smith-at-the-Oscars, rose from his seat, rushed Arius, and interrupted his speech with a punch to the face. For that, Nicholas was stripped of his bishopric, and imprisoned for a time.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Biography – Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Booth, Martin – A Magick Life: The Biography of Aleister Crowley (2000)

Cracked – 30 Famous People Whose True Story Left Us Flabbergasted

Crime Museum – Frank Sinatra

Daily Beast – Was Santa Actually a Badass Who Beat Up a Priest?

Empire Times Magazine, May 4^th, 2015 – Tolouse-Lautrec: The Prostitute Authority

Encyclopedia Britannica – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Fuchs, Jeanne, and Prigozy, Ruth – Frank Sinatra: The Man, the Music, the Legend (2007)

Geriwalton – Jean-Jacques Rousseau and His Sex Life

Gulik, Robert Hans Van – Sexual Life in Ancient China: A Preliminary Survey of Chinese Sex and Society From ca. 1500 BC Till 1644 AD (2003)

Gunn, Peter – My Dearest Augusta: A Biography of Byron’s Half Sister (1968)

Haboush, Kim JaHyun (Editor, Translator) – The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong: The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth Century Korea (2013)

History Collection – These Historic Figures Uttered These Shocking Words With Their Last Breaths

Live Science – Santa Claus: The Real Man Behind the Myth

Mayer, Jane – Dark Money: The History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016)

National Geographic Magazine, September 16^th, 2018 – Pick Your Poison: 12 Toxic Tales

National Post, April 18^th, 2017 – ‘I Want to Harm You, Be Brutal With You’: How Mussolini’s Last Love, Fueled by Sex and Power, Shaped Him

National Public Radio – Dining Like Darwin: When Scientists Swallow Their Subjects

New York Times, January 12^th, 2016 – Father of Koch Brothers Helped Build Nazi Oil Refinery, Book Says

Schulman, Daniel – Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty (2014)

Smithsonian Magazine, December 2005 – The Evolution of Charles Darwin

Spanking Art – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Spiegel, November 26^th, 2009 – In Bed With Benito: Sex Diaries Reveal Mussolini’s Soft Side