We hold celebrities at a disproportionately high regard, let’s be honest. Sure they wrote and produced a good song, made a good movie, painted a pretty picture, wrote an engaging book, but do they really deserve the attention and admiration of millions?
Even if you answered yes to that question, do you still think they deserve it if they’ve killed someone? Or less, if they brutally beat someone? What about sexual assault? Where does one draw the line when it comes to the misbehavior of those we adulate?
It’s an important question to ask because, among the pantheon of heroes we’ve exalted, quite a few are actually criminals in some regard. Some have been charged with minor crimes like possession of drugs, something to be expected from creative personalities, but the crimes I’m talking about are the ones that bring intentional harm to others.
One of the crimes that comes to my mind is Chris Brown’s beating of Rihanna. No one disputes that the crime was appalling, but Chris Brown was able to hire a deft crisis management team to reconstruct his public image and he enjoys relatively the same level of popularity he did before. Does that indicate a loyal and understanding fan base or that he simply committed a crime with little to no consequence on his career?
What about Woody Allen or Roman Polanski, two directors who both faced similar charges of sexually abusing a minor? Their crimes did not seem to affect their public image at all, even without them having to apologize or really address the allegations much.
But then, we cross into the realm of murder. The most puzzling example of a celebrity murderer I can think of is William S. Burroughs who reportedly shot his wife by accident during a drunken party. His motives and the exact circumstances of the murder are hotly disputed, but fans of Burroughs often gloss over the details of the shooting. They prefer to focus on how the trauma of accidentally killing his wife, Joan Vollmer, ultimately shaped his literary career. In other words, her murder was something that happened to him, not something that happened to her.
And there are others who have become famous because of the people they killed. Charles Manson comes to mind first, though technically he never killed anyone. Still, no one would have heard of Charles Manson, the steel guitar player and occasional hippie songwriter were it not for the Manson Family crimes.
An example of a very disturbing case of murderer-become-celebrity is Issei Sagawa, a man who killed and cannibalized a woman named Renée Hartevelt while
studying at the Sorbonne. Because of miscommunication between France and his home country Japan where he was deported, Sagawa never saw justice. Hartevelt was in fact able to make a living by feeding the Japanese public’s curiosity about his crime.
His case stands as an example of the disturbing extreme to which celebrity worship can reach. He was not just popular despite his crime, but because of it.
If a celebrity commits a crime and yet retains his or her popularity, all of his fans are condoning that crime whether they are doing it indirectly or not.
In the case of Issei Sagawa we are faced with a charming, educated and quite exceptional individual who has made every attempt to gracefully move beyond the sordid details of an event which transpired many years ago involving a young women who would otherwise probably never have been remembered.