DON'T STOP, REACT, ATTACK

Could you give some examples of celebrities burying scandals by silence? I'm not questioning you or anything, I just don't know of any instances where that worked.

I think an excellent (and relevant) instance of this is Paul McCartney’s paternity scandal. Not only did he have a paternity case pressed against him, he actually faked a paternity test to get out of it. No one comments on this now, including the purported child. They have all gone silent on the matter.

Another example of this is the probability that Robert Wagner murdered Natalie Wood, and Christopher Walken is the only witness to it. No one has ever been charged, and neither Wagner nor Walken speak about it to this day. There was a brief re-opening of the investigation in recent years, but it was closed again because no witnesses came forward with additional information.

Michael Curtiz, the director of Casablanca, forced extras to work in a flooded warehouse in sub-zero temperatures for more than 18 hours. Three extras died, but the studio silenced the stuntman who reported it, and literally no one has spoken about it since.

Similarly, Howard Hughes caused the death of three pilots on the set of Hell’s Angels, which was hushed up, and in fact, not reported on at all until Hughes was in his old-man-crazy stage at the end of his life– and everyone else related to the case was deceased. 

Alfred Hitchcock sexually harassed most of his leading ladies, but he stalked Tippi Hedren, the star of The Birds. When she refused his advances, he tortured her on set (unleashing live, wild birds on her, for example,) and then bound her in a perpetual contract that subsequently destroyed her career. This is not how we remember Alfred Hitchcock, of course. We remember him as a directorial genius.

Celebrities throw all kinds of things into the memory hole. Jodie Foster does not speak about John Hinckley Jr., ever.. People ignore the fact that Lana Turner let her daughter take the fall for a murder she committed, look at the MASSIVE cult of silence around Bill Cosby’s decades-long trail of sexual assaults. Look at the pedophile ring that Corey Haim and Elijah Wood have both discussed in the media: dead silence from everyone else. 

A publicist will tell you that one of the best ways to make something go away is to simply pretend it never happened. Without comments, without evidence, there’s nothing to hang a discussion on. Without information to feed it, interest tides.