Index > Out of all celebrities who have fallen from grace, which one was your saddest, most disappointing/infuriating let-down?
Posted by Joe (@joe) on Feb. 1, 2026, 8:41 p.m.
I don’t know, tbh, so I’ll just mention one other people haven’t brought up
I know I’ve brought up the book Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee a number of times, and I remember talking about how it reveals Hubbard’s massive and unrecognized influence on popular culture. Another thing that came out with this book, which I’m not sure we talked about here before, was the fact that Isaac Asimov was a serial harasser of women, and publicly groped and fondled women all the time. In a sense it wasn’t a secret, he just did it constantly in public, but it was tolerated and and not widely discussed until recently. Once Nevala-Lee really looked into it he realized that countless people had stories about it. People who knew hi confirmed it, and countless fans had stories like “I took my girlfriend to a science fiction convention and we met Isaac Asimov. He shook my hand, and when she put out her hand he grabbed her breast and shook it instead.”
https://www.publicbooks.org/asimovs-empire-asimovs-wall/
His son David, who is not otherwise famous, was worse. He was arrested for having one of the biggest collections of child pornography in California history. Isaac probably didn’t realize what was going on though, they did not have a good relationship.
Asimov also died of AIDS, and his family covered it up for 9 years after his death. It actually had nothing to do with his sex life, he got it from a blood transfusion back when that was still one of the causes of transmission. But they hid it because of the stigma.