Rules on How to Survive a Celebrity Scandal & Make a Comback

The most basic strategy follows a tried-and-trusted story arc. The classic scandal begins, of course, with the initial disgrace. This is quickly followed by a heartfelt mea culpa, rehab, some good works, a soft-touch interview on daytime TV, the public support of an understanding spouse and the final triumphant comeback with lessons learnt and a new album/movie/cabinet post in the pipeline. And the public plays their part because, while we love to see the rich and famous fall flat on their faces, we also love a good comeback story.

1 Get Out In Front Of The Story - The really good PR person will find out about the scandal just before it breaks, usually through media contacts. And they will do their level best to get their client's retaliation in first and put the most positive spin possible on the story. The classic way to do this is to use one gossip columnist to rubbish the scandal about to be broken by a rival. The story should be along the lines of "My family have been deeply hurt by these totally unfounded claims that I had an affair with our former nanny who, sadly, we had to let go after she became unstable. "And we are now prepared to help her get the professional help she desperately needs." If a celeb can muddy the waters enough, it might just head off a full-blown scandal. 

 2 Be Ready to Say Sorry -- A Lot - When Ben Dunne flew back from Florida on a grey Sunday morning in 1992, the papers were full of lurid tales of cocaine, call girls and panic attacks. The natural instinct for any person would be to find a deep hole somewhere and crawl into it. But the then Dunnes Stores supremo, possibly with the help of some very good PR advice, decided to invite journalists, one by one, into his home and talk frankly about how he had hurt his family and his friends. The media were shocked to have such open access and the public almost immediately came to see Big Ben as a basically decent man who made a bad mistake. There was no doubting his sincerity (this writer was one of those who interviewed Mr Dunne that morning). But it was also a classic case of the mea culpa defence and a shining example for any future Irish celebs encountering trouble. 

 3 Concoct an Explanation -- No Matter How Ludicrous -- And Stick To It - When Eddie Murphy was pulled over by the Los Angeles Sherriff's Department on a spring night in 1997, with a transsexual prostitute in his car, he was not -- repeat not -- soliciting kinky sex. No, Eddie (as he explained to the cameras later) was actually just being a good Samaritan. "I'm just being a nice guy," said Eddie as he blinked into the camera lights. "I was being a good Samaritan. It's not the first hooker I've helped out. I've seen hookers on corners and I'll pull over and they'll go: 'Oh you're Eddie Murphy, oh my God,' and I'll empty my wallet out to help.' Did anybody believe him? Well, Eddie did have plausible deniability and has gone on to make a string of successful family comedies for Disney. After all, if Bill Clinton could look us in the eye and state: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman", then it's possible we'll believe anything. 

 4 Keep Smiling - Inside, Victoria Beckham must have been harbouring bloody thoughts about a particularly sensitive part of David's body and an electric hedge trimmer. But when the Rebecca Loos story broke in 2004, the Posh'n'Becks PR machine swung into action and the couple were soon pictured cavorting on the ski slopes of Courchevel. Funnily enough, the "We've Never Been Happier" snaps were taken by Posh's favourite paparazzo, who just happened to be driving past their secluded chalet. And while the Beckhams did make lots of noise about suing Ms Loos and various newspapers, their lawyers never did get around to issuing writs. Still, at least Brand Beckham has survived and prospered (which is more than we can say about Posh's singing career).

5 Do Good Works - We're not suggesting Jonathan Ross should spend the next five years running an orphanage in Bangladesh. But we can expect to see the suspended BBC chat-show host appearing -- in a low- key way -- at a lot of charity events over the coming months; walking the red carpet and looking relaxed, confident and in no way desperate to get back on TV. Former British cabinet minister John Profumo was involved in the affair that, for many, heralded the start of the Swinging Sixties and the end of the stuffy empire and the deference that kept the sins of the rich and powerful out of the daily papers. Profumo was genuinely horrified at the scandal he had caused and, shortly after leaving office, he volunteered to clean toilets at a shelter for the homeless in the East End of London. Profumo worked for the charity for the rest of his life and ended up raising huge sums of money for worthy causes. "He had to be persuaded to lay down his mop and lend a hand running the place," said one colleague after his death in 2006. 

 6 Brazen It Out - Also known as the George Michael Defence. If you are caught soliciting a cop in a public toilet, make a song and a video about it and get the public to love you even more. After all, if you are going to go down, you might as well go down singing and dancing to a catchy tune.

7 The number of transgressions matters - A single misdeed can be explained away, especially when the person responsible has built up years of good will. Amber Heard accused Johnny Depp of physical abuse, but his previous partners haven’t reported the same treatment, so some fans have rationalized that she made it all up. Despite troubling photos of her bruised face, Depp doesn’t seem to have lost any jobs. Compare that to Cosby. It was no secret that Cosby had been accused of sexual assault in the past, but who wanted to believe that Dr. Huxtable was a predator? So the news media and the public chalked up one or two accusers to aberrations. But when 60 women stepped forward with strikingly similar stories, it became much harder to ignore. Regardless of what happens with Cosby’s legal woes, his career is over.

8 The justice system doesn’t dictate public sentiment - Long before he was famous, Nate Parker was tried for rape in 1999 and found not guilty. But that wasn’t enough to stop the backlash when allegations against him resurfaced earlier this year, casting a major cloud over the opening of his “Birth of a Nation.” Until then, he had seemed poised to conquer Hollywood as the latest actor-turned-auteur. Now the prospects for his film, and his future as a filmmaker, are looking less rosy. It turns out that circumstances matter. Parker was an athlete at Penn State at the time he avoided charges — the very place where Jerry Sandusky abused kids with impunity for so many years — which placed the old allegations against him into a troubling narrative. Then there was the bombshell that his accuser committed suicide in 2012. In the end, “Birth of a Nation” bombed at the box office. Now the once-surefire Oscar nominee isn’t looking like such a lock anymore. Meanwhile, Roman Polanski was accused of raping a 13-year-0ld girl in 1977. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge in exchange for a lighter sentence. But when it seemed like the judge was going to renege on the plea deal, Polanski fled the country. He has been living in France for the most part since then. Polanski has released nearly a dozen movies while in exile. His biggest hit was “The Pianist,” in 2002, a movie that also won him the best director Oscar. He was also nominated for an Academy Award just a few years after the scandal, for “Tess” in 1981. It’s hard to square the public’s reaction to Parker and Polanski — in part because they were at different stages of their careers, and their scandals broke in very different eras. It’s also too soon to know whether or how Parker will weather his storm. But it’s also worth noting that.

9 The celebrity’s public persona plays a role, but not necessarily how you’d think -   Celebrities on high horses have a longer way to fall. Parker had some lofty goals with his mission to bring the story of Nat Turner’s 1831 slave uprising to the screen: He wanted his movie to prompt national conversations and heal century-old wounds. A noble and worthy goal for a young actor, no? But once people learned of his past, his quest started to look a little grandiose. It didn’t help that his movie portrayed two rape scenes as a way to justify the motivations of the main character — a little tasteless for someone who had once been accused of the same crime. Whereas Woody Allen — well, didn’t people always think he was a little creepy? He can be tasteless and crass. Does that mean we hold him to a different standard? Possibly. Whether or not you believe the claims of Mia Farrow’s daughter Dylan, who says Allen sexually abused her when she was a child, he still emerged from the scandal of marrying Farrow’s other daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, with his career intact. As he told the Hollywood Reporter, “You can see I worked right through that, undiminished. Made films all through those years and at the same rate I was making them. I’m good that way. I am very disciplined and very monomaniacal and compartmentalized.”

10 Time heals (most) wounds -  If there was one person who seemed like he would never be forgiven, it was Mel Gibson, who offended just about everyone at one point or another. First it was the gay community, with homophobic comments during an interview. Then there was his anti-Semitic tirade (“F–ing Jews. … The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”) after getting pulled over for drunken driving in 2006. (He also called a female officer by a vulgar, sexist nickname.) Then in 2010, he was also caught on tape threatening his estranged wife and spewing racist gibberish. His talent agency dropped him — and so, it seemed, did most of Hollywood. But what do you know: He’s back after serving time in Hollywood’s version of solitary confinement (i.e., taking a role in “The Expendables 3?). This year, he will unveil “Hacksaw Ridge,” his first directorial effort since “Apocalypto” premiered just after his DUI arrest, and it’s getting major Oscar buzz. Perhaps smartly, he stayed behind the camera, letting Andrew Garfield be the face of the military drama. It seems as though Winona Ryder — one of the few women on this list — is forging a similar path to redemption. She took time off after getting caught shoplifting but has slowly re-emerged with buzzy roles in films such as “Black Swan” and, this year, Netflix’s summer hit “Stranger Things.” 

11 The type of transgression matters -  Clearly, some crimes are more serious than others. Hugh Grant had a dalliance with a prostitute, but did that really hurt anyone? Arguably only his girlfriend at the time, Elizabeth Hurley. One cheeky interview on “The Tonight Show” was more or less enough to absolve him and salvage his career. “I did a bad thing, and there you have it,” he said, while the audience cheered and clapped. That was easy. The same goes for Tom Cruise’s wild-eyed antics and couch-jumping. It wasn’t criminal behavior but it certainly startled people, forever saddling him with the label of loony cultist. Even so, it didn’t slow his box office success. It’s obviously harder to forgive something like sexual assault — at least these days, as Parker’s flailing, failed apology circuit shows us. What does all this mean for Billy Bush? In that leaked video clip, he came off as unctuous and pathetic, but he didn’t break any laws. And the things he said in private with Donald Trump weren’t all that shocking to anyone familiar with Bush’s smug on-air personality. Would anyone miss his obnoxious red carpet interviews if he disappeared? Maybe not, but people who refuse to fade from view are often rewarded. (Just look at Anthony Weiner.) Bush may not be long for the “Today” show. But he’s quite possibly one reality show away from being back in the good graces of an ever-forgiving public.

Pr campaign core story central narrative: Reinvention / Redemption / Ressurection / Freedom / Self reflection / Love / Survival

4 Tips for a PR Comeback:

Disappear for a while: earn a living, enjoy some free time, learn a new hobby. Take time for yourself.

Wait for your moment.

Become a thought leader: Write op-eds, make speeches, get booked on podcasts, etc. 

Get a good PR firm to help place your contributor pieces in newspapers/blogs/Medium.

Tylenol and how they survived the 80's tables poisoning scandal

• Added new seals to the new bottle designs 'extra secure'
• Said that 'This type of poisoning can never happen again with our new security measures.'
• Advertisement tag ''If anyone asks me if I still use Tylenol the answer is yes.''
• PR lined themselves with the story that ''A mad man did this to our brand.'' They were the victims just as much as the people who died from the poisonings.
• They organized a press conference with a buffet for all the media.
• Ran TV commercials ''here's an Important from the makers of Tylenol.''
• The medical directors gave press interviews.
• Displayed statistics on public opinion polls that '90% of the public believed that Tylenol is not to blame.'
• Put $1million into the investigation to catch the perpetrator.
• Re-launched the brand
• Thanked the media for reporting that Tylenol were also victims of ''A mad man.''

The Song That Became THE Anti-Woke Anthem

 

Over the past year the Woke movement has become short-hand for an agenda that has become more radicalized by the minute. It's turned into a mutated Frankenstein monster for the snowflakes of society, turning people against each other over the smallest micro-aggression, to the point that it has started to impact freedom of speech. 

Just like all the intelligent people in society we are against racism, and are for freedom of choice and life, but tip-toeing though a minefield of woke propaganda is no way to go through life. This is where the song Buttons comes in.

The band Paranoid Alice have released this exciting track (part of the new Punge Rock movement) which features a deadpan recital, ironic lyrics, ''You're still my favourite porn star", "Tell the world that it's going broke'' and "Hey bitch your like Destinys Child.'' Imaginative and with an infectious cheeky beat with a fresh approach. It offers many implications, but no straight answers – an excellent introduction to an intriguingly mysterious band that has dared to call out the Woke Movement. Even coining the phrase ''Drama-geddon''

The songs chorus, ''I was not happy last night TRUST'' is a chant about being trapped in bad scene after bad scene, the vocals lurch and spiral, sidling away from the unrelenting rhythm section and canine guitars like a child going floppy to escape her parent’s arms. Brilliant absurdity, their music is a mix of indie-rock and post-punk and it’s far from mainstream, but this danceable track will push the band and Punge Rock into the spotlight, and elbow Woke into the past, as we all learn how to just get along without complaining too much. 

Paranoid Alice: Facebook / Instagram

The Hysteria of the “War of the Worlds” Radio Broadcast

 

The mind takes the facts, it runs them through feelings and comes up with judgements.  On October 30, 1938 Orson Wells and the Mercury Theatre in New York broadcast over CBS radio H. G. Wells' 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds. The broadcast was heard by 6,000,000 people, some of whom believed that the story of the invading Martians was real. To the extent that a large number of people were deceived by the drama, this may be one of the earliest examples of mass hysteria induced by electronic media. It also was a dramatic illustration of the power of mass media to impact people's fears and feelings.

Orson Welles had walked into the Columbia Broadcasting Building on Madison Avenue knowing it was going to be an interesting evening broadcast. He was scheduled to present the regular series “Mercury Theatre on the Air,” a weekly hour-long broadcast. He had been inspired by a radio play he acted in the year before called “The Fall of the City.” It was a story about a conquerer that comes back from the dead to rule the city, but it was really an allegory on fascism. It made Orson Welles an overnight sensation in radio, and the style was something that was new. This new fad was taking hold that had been made popular by a radio program called “The March of Time”: the idea of telling a dramatized story as a live radio broadcast. Welles experimented with the realistic-sounding radio broadcast storytelling format a couple more times the next year with an “As-it-happens” drama called “Air Raid” and a historical piece about Julius Caesar. But what he had planned for the Halloween Special was something bigger – something special and he knew it would be ground-breaking. He discussed the idea of adapting a piece of Sci-Fi for a radio broadcast with producers John Houseman and Paul Stewart and they decided on a 19th century piece of Sci-Fi set in England: H.G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds.”

Midafternoon on October 30, 1938, just hours before airtime, Welles arrived in CBS’s Studio One for last-minute rehearsals with the cast and crew. Almost immediately, he lost his temper with the material. But according to Houseman, such outbursts were typical in the frantic hours before each Mercury Theatre broadcast. Welles routinely berated his collaborators—calling them lazy, ignorant, incompetent, and many other insults—all while complaining of the mess they’d given him to clean up. He delighted in making his cast and crew scramble by radically revising the show at the last minute, adding new things and taking others out. Out of the chaos came a much stronger show.

One of Welles’s key revisions on War of the Worlds, in Houseman’s view, involved its pacing. Welles drastically slowed down the opening scenes to the point of tedium, adding dialogue and drawing out the musical interludes between fake news bulletins. Houseman objected strenuously, but Welles overruled him, believing that listeners would only accept the unrealistic speed of the invasion if the broadcast started slowly, then gradually sped up. By the station break, even most listeners who knew that the show was fiction would be carried away by the speed of it all. For those who did not, those 40 minutes would seem like hours. Another of Welles’s changes involved something cut from Koch’s first draft: a speech given by “the Secretary of War,” describing the government’s efforts to combat the Martians. This speech is missing from the final draft script, also preserved at the Wisconsin Historical Society, most likely because of objections from CBS’s lawyers. When Welles put it back in, he reassigned it to a less inflammatory Cabinet official, “the Secretary of the Interior,” in order to appease the network. But he gave the character a purely vocal promotion by casting Kenneth Delmar, an actor whom he knew could do a pitch-perfect impression of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1938, the major networks expressly forbade most radio programs from impersonating the president, in order to avoid misleading listeners. But Welles suggested, with a wink and a nod, that Delmar make his character sound presidential, and Delmar happily complied.

These kinds of ideas only came to Welles at the last minute, with disaster waiting in the wings. As Richard Wilson observed in the audio documentary Theatre of the Imagination, radio brought out the best in Welles because it “was the only medium that imposed a discipline Orson would recognize, and that was the clock.” With the hours and then the minutes before airtime ticking away, Welles had to come up with innovative ways to save the show, and he invariably delivered. The cast and crew responded in kind. Only in these last minute rehearsals did everyone begin to take War of the Worlds more seriously, giving it their best efforts for perhaps the first time. The result demonstrates the special power of collaboration. By pooling their unique talents, Welles and his team produced a show that frankly terrified many of its listeners—even those who never forgot that the whole thing was just a play.

At the press conference the morning after the show, Welles repeatedly denied that he had ever intended to deceive his audience. But hardly anyone, then or since, has ever taken him at his word. His performance, captured by newsreel cameras, seems too remorseful and contrite, his words chosen much too carefully. Instead of ending his career, War of the Worlds catapulted Welles to Hollywood, where he would soon make Citizen Kane. Given the immense benefit Welles reaped from the broadcast, many have found it hard to believe that he harbored any regrets about his sudden celebrity.

In later years, Welles began to claim that he really was hiding his delight that Halloween morning. The Mercury, he said in multiple interviews, had always hoped to fool some of their listeners, in order to teach them a lesson about not believing whatever they heard over the radio. But none of Welles’s collaborators—including John Houseman and Howard Koch—ever endorsed such a claim. In fact, they denied it over and over again, long after legal reprisals were a serious concern. The Mercury did quite consciously attempt to inject realism into War of the Worlds, but their efforts produced a very different result from the one they intended. The elements of the show that a fraction of its audience found so convincing crept in almost accidentally, as the Mercury desperately tried to avoid being laughed off the air. War of the Worlds formed a kind of crucible for Orson Welles, out of which the wunderkind of the New York stage exploded onto the national scene as a multimedia genius and trickster extraordinaire. He may not have told the whole truth that Halloween morning, but his shock and bewilderment were genuine enough. Only later did he realize and appreciate how his life had changed. As we mark the centennial of Welles’s birth in 1915, we should also remember his second birth in 1938—the broadcast that, because of his best efforts but despite his best intentions, immortalized him forever as “the Man from Mars.”

The first two thirds of the program went on like this. To anyone who just tuned in, it would sound like a real news broadcast. There were weather reports and a supposed live broadcast of a musical performance from a local hotel: Ramon Raquello and his Orchestra. In fact, it was Welles’s intention to make these musical interludes last an uncomfortably long amount of time in order to add realism to the live broadcast style. A little bit after talking about the gas explosions on Mars, we hear about a strange meteorite landing. The broadcast was so realistic, we even go on to hear screams and a moment of dead-air, something that was a huge no-no in the conventional rules of radio. Eventually in the radio drama, the Martians are attacking and the broadcast focuses on the military units that are trying and failing. Then the broadcast turns to a supposed reporter on the roof of a building in Manhattan watching giant alien machines attack the city. The drama intensifies and then we hear the reporter become desperate. There are a few moments of silence and then we get the first indication since the program began that this isn’t real. “You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air, in an original dramatization of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. The performance will continue after a brief intermission. This is the Columbia Broadcasting System.”

There were only 4 instances throughout the entire broadcast to let listeners know it wasn’t real. The opening, before and after the middle commercial break, and at the very end. The commercial break itself was delayed 10 minutes later than usual to increase the realism of the piece. Later that night, three different times, disclaimers were read on the air to reiterate that the piece was merely fiction.  And the popular story about this broadcast – the reason anyone remembers it from the thousands of other radio plays in history – came about because of the many newspaper headlines that talked about it afterward. Headlines like “RADIO FAKE SCARES NATION,” “FAKE RADIO WAR STIRS TERROR THROUGH U.S.” and a lighted bulletin in Times Square reading “ORSON WELLES CAUSES PANIC.” The broadcast had started at 8pm that night. By 8:32pm, the CBS Executive Davidson Taylor was on the phone taking a frantic phone call. Producer John Houseman said he returned to the studio “looking white as a ghost.” He had been ordered by the higher ups at CBS to immediately interrupt the broadcast to announce that it was a dramatic work of fiction. Luckily for Welles and Houseman, there was a scheduled commercial break less than a minute away. That commercial break carried disclaimers about the program before and after.

But as the show continued on, a few policemen entered the room outside the studio. Then a few more. CBS pages and executives stood in front of the police, begging them to just wait. The police wanted to barge into the studio and stop the broadcast immediately. They, of course, weren’t allowed into the room. The program continued. The final third of the show was a more standard radio drama format without the realism of the news report break-ins and weather bulletins. We learn the rest of the story – that the Aliens have taken New York City and eventually have died of human pathogenic germs. The broadcast ended with Orson Welles once again telling the listeners that they’ve been listening to a radio play and that it was merely a holiday offering for Halloween.

According to Houseman, the next few hours were crazy. Here’s a quote from his 1980 memoir: “The building was suddenly full of people and dark-blue uniforms. Hustled out of the studio, we were locked into a small back office on another floor. Here we sat incommunicado while network employees were busily collecting, destroying, or locking up all scripts and records of the broadcast.” They apparently fielded a call from a small-town mayor who complained that his citizens were rioting in the streets. One of the reasons that is often given for the panic is that people were listening to another program on the radio, and switched to The War of the Worlds after the opening disclaimer. Another reason for the panic that’s cited is that radio broadcasts for weeks had been updating America on the growing war between Germany and Czechoslovakia, so people were already on edge. They were used to hearing important news bulletins interrupting radio shows.

The newspaper headlines followed and the rest became a lasting legacy. Most people today know the story about how this radio broadcast sent Americans into a panic. But there are more than a couple reasons to doubt that it actually caused any sort of widespread panic. Robert Bartholomew, a sociologist who is an expert on mass panic outbreaks, has said that “there’s a growing consensus among sociologists that the extent of the panic was greatly exaggerated.” First, there simply weren’t enough people listening. One of the pieces of evidence of panic is this treasure trove of 2,000 letters mailed to CBS and Orson Welles complaining about the broadcast. But when they were scrutinized, only about 27% of those letters came from people who were listening. It was originally reported that 12 million – or 1 out of 12 homes were listening to The War of the Worlds. But a survey was actually conducted that night during the broadcast. They had a sample size of only 5,000. But out of that 5,000, only 2% said they were listening to it. After all, it was up against the most popular radio show of the time, Edgar Bergen’s Chase and Sanborn Hour Variety Show. Mercury Theater on the Air had horrible ratings. Another survey which was conducted later at Princeton estimated the real number listening was closer to 6 million. When those people were asked if they were “frightened or disturbed” by the show. 1.2 million said they were. But there’s sort of inherent problem with that question. In that era, radio had the power to move people. It had the ability to shock, to frighten and disturb. It would be like asking you about the scariest movie you’ve ever seen and ask if it frightened or disturbed you.

So this brings us to what is the most likely reason for the overblowing of the panic. Newspapers. Newspapers, whose existence was threatened by social media, and before that by online news, and before that by television news, were threatened by radio. It was in their best interest to get the public to have a healthy distrust of what they hear on the radio. So these many newspapers stories talking about the mass chaos and public panic caused by the broadcast could have had a motive, whether conscious or unconscious, of telling the public – “look at this new medium and take it with a grain of salt, because unlike a trusty newspaper, the radio can mislead the public!” Take the New York Times, for instance, who said “Radio is new but it has adult responsibilities. It has not mastered itself or the material it uses.” So while the cultural lore about The War of the Worlds is one of groundbreaking realism and a story about not trusting everything you hear, the truth is probably a story that gives much more credit to the public at large. And proving that nothing is new under the sun, and proving history always repeats itself, the same thing happens today on Social Media. Celebrity death hoaxes are a weekly occurrence on Twitter. Fake News gets spread on Facebook by people who don’t take the time to find out whether or not it’s a true story. And certain news stations don’t cover major news events because of their own political interests. So in that way, what Orson Welles was doing really was groundbreaking. It was one of the first instances of nationwide trolling.