In the music industry, it probably feels pretty
good to be at the top of your game. Unfortunately, it also means there’s only
one way to go from there: down. Just ask these musicians, whose careers were
destroyed by everything from criminal scandals to wardrobe malfunctions to lip-sync nightmares. In 1958, rock 'n' roll icon Jerry Lee Lewis
decided to take his underage wife with him on his tour of England. What happened next isn’t much of a surprise. Lewis had neglected to tell anyone he was
newly married, so when he rocked up with Myra Gail Lewis in tow, the British press were
naturally curious. A Daily Mail reporter, Paul Tanfield, happened
to ask how old the newlywed was. Lewis said she was 15 and ended his transatlantic
career in one fell swoop. The worst part of all this is that Lewis was
lying; Myra was actually 13. Oh, and she was Lewis' cousin, too. Naturally, his British tour collapsed. Those that showed up to his gigs only booed
him. Concerts were canceled, his expensive hotel
kicked him out, and when he finally hightailed it back to the States, he found he'd been
blacklisted from the industry. The radio would no longer play his songs,
he was dropped from TV appearances, and demand for his performances all but disappeared,
though he never lost his recording contract and continued to release a number of mostly
unsuccessful singles. DJ and songwriter Alan Freed's name is obscure
today, but he left behind one heck of a legacy. He's credited with being the guy who coined
the term "rock and roll”, threw the world's first rock concert, and was instrumental in
determining the course of postwar American music. Between 1952 and 1957, he was practically
the kingmaker of rock 'n' roll. But what happened in 1957? At the time, Freed had a nationally syndicated
ABC show, Big Beat, which broadcast his newfangled rock and roll to the entire country. One evening, however, something so unbelievably
and unremittingly anti-American happened that the network had no choice but to immediately
pull the plug. Big Beat showed a black performer dancing
onstage with a white woman. It might sound ridiculous to 21st-century
ears, but that one interracial dance was enough to get Freed's show canceled. And it couldn’t have come at a worse time
for Freed, whose health was collapsing and marriage was falling apart. Two years later, the final blow came. While still on the ropes from his Big Beat
controversy, Freed was investigated by the FBI for accepting cash to play records as
part of the payola scandal. What was left of his career was over, and
he died in 1965 as a penniless alcoholic. The moment that made Ashlee Simpson fade away
came during her SNL performance in 2004, when she realized her band was playing the same
song she had sung earlier in the show. Unfortunately, the vocals had been pre-recorded. Now, Simpson isn’t exactly the first artist
to lip sync a performance, but this practice is almost universally despised by fans, and
Simpson was not forgiven for her mistake. According to People, she was relentlessly
hounded by critics and former fans simply for the fact that she'd actually dared to
engage in deception via lip syncing. And when she tried to explain that a severe
case of acid reflux had prompted her decision to fake the performance, everyone just ended
up hating her more. Even today, Simpson hasn't shaken off the
experience. The two albums that followed her fateful SNL
performance undersold the one she'd been promoting at the time, and she hasn’t had a top 10
song since. At least Ashlee Simpson can take comfort in
knowing that she's not the only musician to have derailed her own career on Saturday Night
Live. In fact, SNL-related career derailment was
pioneered in 1992 by Sinead O'Connor, when she sang Bob Marley's "War" and ended her
performance by ripping up a photograph of the Pope. Generally, you’re not going to get a good
reaction by attacking the Pope on live television in a country where nearly 25 percent of the
population is Catholic. To be fair, however, she was protesting the
abuse of children in the Catholic church, a problem the general public is much more
aware of today than it was in 1992. And back then most Americans were especially
clueless about the issue, because at that point it was mostly being brought to light
only in Ireland. Still, O'Connor became so unpopular after
that little faux pas that she was booed at Bob Dylan's 30th-anniversary concert just
two weeks later. Not long after that, she announced her "retirement." She didn't stay retired, of course, but she
was never able to quite recapture the success she'd once had. "I was genuinely very angry with what the
church were doing. By ripping that picture, you know, I risked
my career, everything. I could have been a billionaire now if I wanted,
if I believed in it." During the halftime show at Super Bowl 38
in 2004, Justin Timberlake pulled down Janet Jackson's leather bustier and exposed her
breast to a television audience of roughly 100 million people. Both artists later said the stunt had only
been sort of intentional, Timberlake was supposed to reveal the red lace under Jackson's bustier,
but he ended up tearing off the whole thing instead. Inevitably, the American viewing audience,
Viacom, and the FCC proceed to lose their collective minds. Around 540,000 people complained to the FCC,
and the FCC responded by attempting (and failing) to fine CBS $550,000 for the incident. But the person who suffered most was Jackson. Viacom, which owns MTV, CBS, VH1, and a bunch
of radio stations wanted revenge, so they banned her music from all their properties. And then a bunch of other media companies
did the same thing, and pretty soon no one was playing Janet Jackson songs. Just to rub salt in the wound, she was also
uninvited from the Grammys. It's worth noting that Timberlake was not
uninvited from the Grammys, nor was he banned from MTV or Viacom. The Monkees got a lot of shade for being a
so-called "manufactured band," but they managed to survive for decades because they never
lied about what they were. History doesn't remember the '90s pop group
Milli Vanilli quite so kindly, because Milli Vanilli was all lies. Front men Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan had basically
just lip synced their way to fame and fortune, and it wasn't Ashlee Simpson-style "I have
acid reflux" lip syncing, either. Pilatus and Morvan didn't even do their own
singing in the studio, their voices were 100 percent other singers, who had been sworn
to utmost secrecy. So how did Pilatus and Morvan end up as the
faces of Milli Vanilli when other people were doing all the singing? According to Gizmodo, producer Frank Farian
thought the real singers were "unmarketable," so he hired a couple of models to pretend
they were the ones singing. What he didn't seem to comprehend was that
you can't keep a lie that size quiet forever, especially when it got you a Grammy. In 1989, Milli Vanilli was doing a live performance
on MTV when the backing track skipped. The media immediately took interest, did some
further digging, and discovered that Pilatus and Morvan actually did none of their own
singing for the group. Milli Vanilli lost their Grammy, and that
was pretty much the end of that. Michael Jackson's 2005 trial was the media
circus of the century. Jackson was accused of molesting Gavin Arvizo,
who was 15 years old at the time. He was acquitted, but since then no one has
really been able to agree on whether he was actually a child molester or just a seriously
weird dude who liked to have sleepovers with kids. Still, there's no doubt he made some incredibly
stupid and arrogant decisions. One of them was the fact that he regularly
allowed young boys to sleep in his bedroom and pretended like there wasn't anything weird
about it. And he even said as much in the 2003 documentary
Living with Michael Jackson, which was probably what led to his downfall. Police saw the fim, opened an investigation,
raided Jackson's Neverland Ranch, and the circus began. In the end, it didn't matter that he was acquitted
because most people had already made up their minds. In the years following the trial, Jackson
developed a dangerous prescription drug addiction. His dependence on the anesthetic propofol
deprived his body of real sleep and gave him severe symptoms of sleep deprivation, which
included an inability to remember lyrics or learn new dance moves. His career stagnated and his debts continued
to mount. Ultimately, it was propofol that killed him
in 2009. Even now, the eye-opening new documentary
Leaving Neverland seems on track to kill the last of Jackson’s positive legacy. "I was really into jewelry, and he would reward
me with jewelry for doing special acts for him." Fame does weird things to people, and no one
knows that better than George Michael, who was a renowned singer and heartthrob during
the 80s. In 1998, Michael was arrested for "engaging
in a lewd act" in a public restroom. You've gotta admire his attitude, though,
because after all that went down he didn't just crawl into a hole and hide, he actually
considered it his moment. The once-reclusive Michael was suddenly agreeing
to interviews, and by the end of the scandal he'd gone from a closeted pop star to an out-and-proud
gay pop star. Prior to this incident, Michael had only come
out to friends and family, although he had often alluded to it in the lyrics of his songs. Michael's career never really recovered, though,
at least not in America, where homophobia is still rampant. But to many, Michael is today remembered for
publicly embracing his sexuality and helping young gay people feel like they could do the
same. In 1990, police seized weapons, pornographic
videotapes, marijuana and hashish, and $130,000 in cash from Chuck Berry's home. Not long after that, a bunch of women filed
a class-action lawsuit against him alleging that he had video cameras hidden in the bathrooms
of his house and a restaurant he owned, cameras that he would use to record women, some of
whom were underaged, while they were dressing, undressing, or using the bathroom. In the end, Berry got off pretty lightly,
he was charged with drug possession and child abuse, but the child abuse charges were dropped
and he was sentenced to just two years of unsupervised probation, plus $5,000 paid to
a drug rehabilitation program. That seems like nothing, but the incident
also cost Berry $1.2 million in legal fees. Although his career wasn't ruined in the sense
that he was blacklisted or forced into destitution, pretty much no one could see him live without
feeling seriously icky about it. In 2014, CeeLo Green proved that a good career
can easily end over a heinous act of violence. Green's career-defining moment was the one
in which he took to Twitter to dubiously proclaim his innocence after he was accused of indecently
assaulting an unconscious woman. And then he also tweeted some nonsensical
stuff about how you can't be "with" someone if you're unconscious, which just served to
make him look even more guilty than he had before. Somehow, Green managed to squirm his way out
of the allegations and was convicted only on a lesser charge of supplying drugs, because
fame is powerful. He got three years' probation and community
service. But his career never really recovered, and
the most notable thing he's done since was a performance during the opening ceremonies
at the 2017 World Aquatics Championship in Budapest, as well as some voice work on the
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