18. Mahatma Gandhi allegedly had a thing for young girls
One of the most revered figures of the 20th century, Mahatma Gandhi, famously led India’s struggle for independence. Along the way, he perfected the strategy and tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience and inspired other independence and civil rights movements around the world. Martin Luther King was a student of Gandhi’s methods and put them to use in America’s Civil Rights movement. However, in his personal life, Gandhi was… a complex man. Nowhere is that complexity more evident than in his sleeping habits.
In a nutshell, Gandhi liked to sleep naked with young girls. The story was that he did so in order to test his willpower and strengthen his resistance to the temptations of the flesh. In reality, it was probably less about spiritual experimentation, and more about Gandhi gratifying his desires. As one of the early acolytes who shared his bed put it after his death: “Later on, when people started asking questions about the physical contact with women … the idea of experiments was developed … in the early days, there was no question of calling it an experiment“.
