Shocking Celebrity Scandals You Never Heard About Because They Happened Before Social Media
Celebrity scandals seem to happen all the time these days, but before social media, things were quite different. Back in the late '90s and early 2000s, stars' every moves were a lot harder to document in the age of AOL chatrooms and slow internet. The result? Famous folks like Backstreet Boys' Nick Carter and AJ McLean and even Leonardo DiCaprio got away with a lot of shocking behavior you probably never knew about.
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Click through the gallery to see why these celebs are glad social media wasn't around in their heyday.
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Backstreet Boys' AJ McLean would get drunk and irate in clubs.
“I’ll tell you this: There is some s–t that AJ and I both did that I’m really glad that social media wasn’t around for,” band member Nick Carter said in 2017. “Because Justin Bieber couldn’t hold a candle to what we did.”
AJ added: “We would have been like TMZ’s saving grace, bro …. just anything from me being drunk or irate at a club, or me walking naked down the hallway in a hotel for no apparent reason.”
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Jay Z stabbed a producer once in 1999.
Before he was Mr. Beyoncé, Jay Z was a struggling rapper who just released his critically acclaimed album, Vol. 3… Life and Times of S. Carter. However, rumors on the street said producer Lance "Un" Rivera was bootlegging the album weeks before it was due to come out.
When the two confronted at a launch party, Lance was left with numerous stab wounds in his abdomen. Jay Z turned himself in the next day, paid a $50,000 bail, pled guilty, and ultimately walked away with just a slap on the wrist.
However, if social media was around, perhaps the story would have had a different ending. To this day, Jay Z doesn't update his Twitter or Instagram accounts much, and he even told Meek Mill once that social media is for "fake people."
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The cast of 'Dawson's Creek' partied all the time.
"When I was on Dawson's Creek, I got so drunk one night that I dislocated my knee in a bar and got taken to an emergency room," Busy Phillips, who played Audrey on the show, said in 2011. "And it was not on Entertainment Tonight, it was not on anything!"
Fellow co-star Michelle Williams said something similar in 2016:
"We weren't always perfectly behaved, but we got away with it because…nobody was, you know, tweeting about what we did or where we went."
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Leonardo DiCaprio ran with a group of young Hollywood partiers called the "pu–y posse" in the late '90s.
According to an exposé written about the star in 1998, the posse included Lukas Haas, Tobey Maguire, director Harmony Korine, magician David Blaine, and a bunch of D-list former child stars. Together they would jet across the globe, get access to all the exclusive clubs, and brawl with paparazzi.
"He comes in here with all his friends and sits back like the Mack Daddy," a dancer in a strip club said in the feature. "He doesn't even tip!"
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The Spice Girls used to get into drunken brawls.
“Me and Melanie [Brown] had a fight once," Melanie C revealed in 2012. “We were too drunk. We got a bit pushy, shove-y, and Geri [Halliwell] stepped in the middle to break it up and ended up getting punched in the face."
In 2016, Mel C admitted that she was fortunate social media didn't exist back then.
“Being in the public eye now is a lot harder, and the intrusion from the media and things like social media is incredible," she said. "I’m just so glad it wasn’t around when the Spice Girls started.”
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Most of the relationships on 'The Hills' were fake.
Audrina Patridge revealed back in 2016 that the show would have been impossible to produce today since social media would have revealed all the show's secrets.
“[My relationship with Spencer Pratt] was all fabricated for drama because they needed something to film,” she said. "I think if social media was a thing, The Hills would never be what it was. Even now, going to dinner, [fans] sit there and take pictures and film and, like, listen. The secrets! There would be no secrets at The Hills anymore if there was social media back then!”
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Tara Reid once got so drunk, she passed out and had to be carried out of a club.
In 2004, the Sharknado star reportedly got in a fight with Shannen Doherty at a club in South Beach, Cali. before passing out.
"Back when I started [acting] there wasn’t social media," she said in 2016. "There wasn’t Twitter, there wasn’t Instagram, there was barely paparazzi."
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Mario Lopez cheated on his wife days before they got married.
Back in 2004, Mario hooked up with a woman during his bachelor party, just days before marrying Ali Landry. Once Ali found out about it, she had the marriage annulled just two weeks after tying the knot.
"It was spring break….everybody was hanging out," he said in 2011. "That was a situation where I was not mature and man enough."
"I’m just glad, thank God, TMZ and social media wasn’t around back then because things might have been different,” Mario said in 2016. “I was younger and had a lot of fun, let’s just say.”
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Peyton Manning allegedly sat on a female trainer's face in 1996.
Before he was a Superbowl MVP, Peyton was a star quarterback at the University of Tennessee. While being examined by the school's trainer, he reportedly pulled down his pants and sat on the woman's face.
"It was the gluteus maximus, the rectum, the testicles, and the area in between the testicles. And all that was on my face when I pushed him up," she claimed in her lawsuit.
Peyton wrote in his book that what he did was "crude maybe, but harmless" and was a misunderstanding.
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Sandra Bullock dated Ryan Gosling despite being 16 years his senior.
The two met on the set of Murder by Numbers in 2002 and dated for a full year without much commotion from fans or the press.
"I had two of the greatest girlfriends of all time," Ryan said in 2011, referring to both Sandra and Rachel McAdams. "I haven't met anybody who could top them."
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Natalie Portman was much wilder in her pre-social media days.
"I was in that lucky window: there was no Twitter, Facebook or Instagram," she said in 2015. "I went out and got drunk with my friends and no one knew."
In 2010, she even admitted to getting "flat out drunk" in college.
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