14. Tupac
Fame has a way of getting inside of you and effecting your judgment and actions. 2Pac’s skyrocket into stardom, as well as less than reliable teammates on his side, had a turbulent effect on the prolific poet. He began living his “thug life” persona and creating enemies left and right, which would ultimately lead to his own doom.
But before his fatal shooting, he took 5 bullets in a recording studio in Times Square in 1994. While the police took the assault as a mere robbery, Pac was convinced that Bad Boy Records labels, owned by Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs, had set him up because he refused to join them. This ignited the “East Coast vs. West Coast” war that would end with both 2Pac and Bad Boy Records star Biggie Smalls’ death.
2Pac makes several references to the set up in the song “Against All Odds” off of his final album, calling out several of his enemies by name. Included is James “Jimmy Henchman” Rosemond who has since confessed to orchestrating the shooting, but cannot be tried as he admitted it while involved in a drug-trafficking investigation involving millions of dollars of cocaine, which he was later convicted of running.
13. Larry Flynt
Larry Flynt is one of the biggest publishers of adult entertainment, best known for the magazine Hustler. Being one of the early adopters of the “sex sells” ideology, Flynt ran into plenty of legal troubles, which resulted in him becoming an unlikely champion of civil rights for his unwavering defense of the First Amendment.
Flynt was shot outside of a Georgia courthouse by white supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin. The injuries were severe, causing permanent paralysis of his legs. After the shooting, Flynt renounced his enlightened Christian thinking and retreated to his Bel Air estate with his wife, developing dependence to painkillers until multiple surgeries deadened the affected nerves.
Joseph Paul Franklin later confessed to the shooting, claiming he was outraged by an interracial photo shoot in Hustler. He was charged in Missouri for eight counts of murders, suspected to be as much as 20, as he “targeted blacks and Jews in a cross-country killing spree from 1977 to 1980.”
While he was put to death in 2013 via lethal injection, Flynt has stated that he did not want Franklin to be executed. “A life spent in a 3-by-6-foot cell is far harsher than the quick release of a lethal injection,” he stated in a guest column for the Hollywood Reporter, “I have had many years in this wheelchair to think about this very topic.”
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