5 celebrity scandals you've probably never heard of – including Jon Hamm's hazing incident

While Jerry's relationship with a minor in the '90s was scrutinised at the time, the comedian continued to enjoy a successful career and seemed to suffer no consequences beyond a few raised eyebrows and interview jabs.

Jerry was 39 when he met 17-year-old Shoshanna Lonstein in Central Park in NYC back in 1993. The Seinfeld star initially denied that the high schooler was 17 during an interview on The Howard Stern Show.

“So, you sit in Central Park and have a candy bar on a string and pull it when the girls come?" the shock jock joked, before Jerry insisted: "She's not 17, definitely not."

He walked back his words just a month later on the show, stating: "I didn’t realise she was so young. This is the only girl I ever went out with who was that young. I wasn’t dating her. We just went to a restaurant, and that was it."

The pair went on to date for four years, and Shoshanna often accompanied him to major Hollywood events. 

Jerry defended their romance by explaining that their age gap didn't register for either of them. "I am not an idiot. Shoshanna is a person, not an age,” he said. “She is extremely bright. She’s funny, sharp, very alert. We just get along. You can hear the click.”

“When I like someone, I don’t care about her race, creed or national origin," he later told Playboy. "If I like her, I don’t care. I don’t discriminate. If she’s 18, if she’s intelligent, that’s fine." 

The pair split in 1997, with Shoshanna citing the constant press coverage and her homesickness for New York City as the catalysts for the breakup.

The Mad Men star was embroiled in a media storm in 2015 when it came to light that he had allegedly been involved in a hazing incident at the University of Texas back in 1990, which resulted in a court case.

Jon was a member of the Sigma Nu fraternity, and according to court records, allegedly assaulted the victim by setting his jeans on fire and hitting him with a paddle.

"He rears back and hits me left-handed, and he hit me right over my right kidney, I mean square over it," the victim recalled in the lawsuit. "Good solid hit and that, that stood me right up.” 

The victim insisted that Jon had participated "till the very end", yet a separate assault charge was dismissed, and the actor received deferred adjudication for the hazing charge, completing a period of probation.

Four of the fraternity members were charged with misdemeanour hazing charges, and Sigma Nu was shut down on campus for good. 

When asked about the incident in a 2018 interview with Esquire, Jon insisted that the story was "sensationalised".

"I was accused of these things I don't…It's so hard to get into it. I don't want to give it any more breath," he said. 

"It was a bummer of a thing that happened. I was essentially acquitted. I wasn't convicted of anything. I was caught up in a big situation, a stupid kid in a stupid situation, and it's a f****** bummer. I moved on from it."

Another celebrity with a dark past is Mark Wahlberg, who was involved in a series of racial attacks as a teenager in Massachusetts. 

The first incident occurred in 1986 at 15 years old, when he and his friends chased a group of Black schoolchildren from a beach by throwing rocks and hurling racial slurs at them. 

He was issued with an injunction for violating the children's civil rights, yet was embroiled in another racial attack just two years later in Boston.

In 1988, Mark assaulted two Vietnamese men and called them racial slurs in two separate incidents that occurred on the same day. 

He was initially charged with attempted murder, but this was later downgraded to assault, and he spent 45 days in prison.

In 2014, Mark sought a pardon for his past crimes due to his desire to obtain a concessionaire's licence for his restaurant franchise, Wahlburgers, in a move which garnered a sea of backlash.

"I don’t think he should get a pardon,” said Kristyn Atwood, one of the Black schoolchildren who was a victim of Mark's 1986 attack, in an interview with the Associated Press.

"I don’t really care who he is. It doesn’t make him any exception. If you’re a racist, you’re always going to be a racist. And for him to want to erase it, I just think it’s wrong,” she said.

Mark later shared his regret over the situation, and insisted to The Guardian that he had done the inner work to learn from his past. 

“I took it upon myself to own up to my mistakes and go against the grain and not be a part of the gang any more – to say that I was going to go and do my own thing. Which made it 10 times more difficult to walk from my home to the train station, to go to school, to go to work,” he said. 

The father of four eventually dropped the request for a pardon. 

It was a rainy day in Northern Ireland when Matthew Broderick crashed into an oncoming car while driving with his then-girlfriend and Ferris Bueller's Day Off co-star, Jennifer Grey.

Matthew had been driving near Enniskillen on August 5th, 1987, when he suddenly swerved into traffic, hitting and killing 28-year-old Anna Gallagher and her 63-year-old mother, Margaret Doherty.

The star had no recollection of the events, and ended up in hospital with a concussion, broken ribs, a broken leg, and a collapsed lung, while Jennifer walked away with severe whiplash when her ligaments were ripped from her neck.

"I don’t remember even getting up in the morning. I don’t remember making my bed," Matthew recalled to The New York Post years later. 

“What I first remember is waking up in the hospital, with a very strange feeling going on in my leg.”

Meanwhile, Jennifer was awake for the whole thing and vividly recalled the horrific accident in a 2022 interview with Entertainment Tonight. "I thought he was dead,” she said. 

“I didn’t even know there were two other women who were tragically killed at the time. It’s just something that you just don’t come back from in the same way.”

“Being alone on a country road in the middle of nowhere with nobody else around or conscious was pretty terrifying…It led to so many other things in my life," she continued.

The Dirty Dancing actress added that the accident was one of the "top three traumas of my life, maybe top one". 

Matthew was fined a mere $175 and charged with careless driving, which greatly angered Margaret and Anna's family.

"Of course, you wonder if he got off lightly because of who he was,” said Martin Doherty, Margaret's son, to The Belfast Telegraph. “He got the same punishment he would have got if he’d run over cattle.”

Martin later publicly forgave Matthew for the accident, telling The New York Post: “He didn’t kill my mother and sister deliberately. There were strong feelings at the time, but I have since forgiven him and feel no anger toward him.”

Winona Ryder, who was everywhere in the '80s and '90s yet seemingly disappeared from the public eye in the ‘00s, made a major comeback in the 2010s with roles in Stranger Things and Black Swan.

The reason for Winona's Hollywood hiatus was due to the December 2001 shoplifting scandal she was involved in, which saw her steal $5,500 worth of designer clothes and accessories from a store in Beverly Hills. 

She was caught and sentenced to three years' probation, community service and drug and psychological counselling, leading to a five-year acting break that she later revealed was a godsend.

The actress told Interview magazine that she had been "starting to have some trouble" with her mental health before the shoplifting incident occurred.

“I think a lot of people think that that is what sort of sent me off in another direction, but I was actually starting to have some trouble a few years before,” she explained. 

“I did come up against what felt like a wall. And with what happened…I really needed the time off, which ended up being a couple of years.”

Winona shared with the publication that being able to step back from stardom was a blessing in disguise. 

"In a weird way, it was almost like the best thing that could have happened because I’d never asked myself the question before of, 'Is it okay if I’m not going to act? Is there anything else?' because that was all that I really knew."