From royal scapegoats to wrongfully accused officers, history is full of people who took the fall for larger problems. Join us as we examine the most notorious cases of individuals who shouldered the blame for events beyond their control, and discover how their stories shaped the course of history.
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00:00Well, you know, I've been blamed, I don't know, maybe 30, 40 years now.
00:04Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at some of the biggest scapegoats in human history.
00:08For this list, we're looking at specific historical figures, not mythological ones like Pandora.
00:13What treasure was so great, it could never be seen by human eyes?
00:18Marie Antoinette. She never actually said, let them eat cake, but that doesn't really matter to an angry mob.
00:23No longer content with a constitutional monarchy and the end of noble and clerical privilege, many were now in favor of dispensing with both the monarchy and the church altogether.
00:34Or to pop history, as France starved and revolution brewed, Marie Antoinette became the face of elite indifference.
00:39Marie Antoinette likely never thought about how her actions appeared to others, until it was too late.
00:46Foreign, fashionable, and famously out of touch, she was blamed for everything from empty bread shelves to collapsing royal coffers.
00:53Never mind that her spending was a drop in the bucket compared to France's war debts.
00:56France's leading role against Britain in the Seven Years' War of 1756 to 1763 had drained its treasury, as did support of the American Revolution of 1775 to 1782.
01:10When the guillotine came down, it was less about justice and more about symbolism.
01:14She didn't cause the revolution, but history made her the scapegoat in a powdered wig.
01:18Oh, Mama, think of it. I shall be queen.
01:23I shall be queen of fun.
01:26Andres Escobar.
01:27In game six of the 1986 World Series, a slow ground ball slipped between Bill Buckner's legs.
01:32That error ultimately cost the Sox the series.
01:35Buckner was booed, harassed, and basically exiled from Boston for years.
01:39It's, you know, shown on TV, which, you know, I see at least once or twice a week for 23 years.
01:45Now imagine that, but with bullets.
01:47At the 1994 World Cup, Colombian defender Andres Escobar accidentally scored an own goal against the U.S.
01:53A few days later, he was gunned down outside a Medellin nightclub.
01:57It was at 3.30 a.m. in front of this restaurant.
02:0027-year-old Andres Escobar got into his car.
02:03He was a victim of cartel-linked gamblers furious over their losses.
02:07One slip turned him into a scapegoat for a nation's humiliation.
02:10It's a complete lack of respect for life, you know?
02:16Unlike Buckner, Escobar never got a second chance.
02:19Alger Hiss.
02:19He helped shape the post-war order.
02:21Then he got accused of being a traitor in a tailored suit.
02:23These documents were fed out of the State Department over 10 years ago by communists who were employees of that department
02:32and who were interested in seeing that these documents were sent to the Soviet Union,
02:37where the interests of the Soviet Union happened to be in conflict with those of the United States.
02:42Alger Hiss was a Harvard-educated golden boy, a key figure at Yalta and the founding of the United Nations.
02:47But in 1948, ex-communist Whitaker Chambers named him as a Soviet spy.
02:51Hiss denied it.
02:52Washington lit up.
02:53There were typewriters, secret microfilm, even pumpkin patches hiding documents.
02:56Five rolls of microfilm, which were called the pumpkin film because he took them to a pumpkin patch by his farmhouse in Westminster, Maryland.
03:08Took the top off and here these infants waiting such a dramatic exposure.
03:16Hiss was eventually convicted, not of spying, but of perjury.
03:18That didn't matter.
03:19To millions, he was proof the enemy was already inside the gates.
03:22He became a Cold War boogeyman.
03:24Piss was both the spark that lit Nixon's rise and McCarthy's witch hunts.
03:28He was blamed, buried, and weaponized more myth than man by the time it was over.
03:32I knew enough about politicians to know what political ambition sometimes leads people to do.
03:40J. Robert Oppenheimer.
03:41He built the bomb that ended a war, then got cast as the man who opened Pandora's box.
03:45J. Robert Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project, ushering in the Atomic Age with the blast at Trinity.
03:51Clearly, there was a radical break in international affairs in 1945.
03:58But victory turned sour almost overnight.
03:59As the U.S. stockpiled nukes, Oppenheimer spoke out.
04:02He opposed the creation of a hydrogen bomb.
04:04Warning against an arms race, he eventually questioned the morality of the monster he helped unleash.
04:09We had the pride of thinking we knew what was good for man, and I do think it has left a mark on many of those who were responsibly engaged.
04:23The government turned on him.
04:25In 1954, his security clearance was revoked after a brutal hearing laced with Cold War paranoia.
04:30He wasn't a traitor.
04:31He wasn't a spy.
04:32But he became the face of American guilt, blamed not just for building the bomb, but for daring to regret it.
04:37Mr. President, I feel that I have blood on my hands.
04:48Rudolf Hess.
04:49Even the Nazis didn't know what to do with Rudolf Hess.
04:51In 1941, Hitler's longtime deputy flew solo to Scotland on a bizarre, unauthorized peace mission.
04:57On the 10th of May, 1941, Rudolf Hess, the deputy leader of Nazi Germany, set off on a solo flight from Germany over the North Sea towards Britain.
05:08He was promptly captured, denounced by Hitler as mentally ill, and disowned by the Nazi regime.
05:13After the war, Hess stood trial at Nuremberg, despite playing no role in the Holocaust or front-line strategy.
05:18Hess was in poor physical condition when he arrived to Nuremberg in the autumn of 1945.
05:24He weighed little more than 10 stone and was paranoid that his captives in Britain had been poisoning his food.
05:31He was sentenced to life in prison.
05:33For over 40 years, Hess rotted in Spandau prison.
05:36To Germans, he was a symbol of guilt desperately forgotten.
05:39To the Allies, he was a war criminal who deserved his fate.
05:41But to many, Hess may have been involved, but he wasn't a mastermind.
05:44He was a fall guy.
05:45Rudolf Hess was, in many ways, the last of the senior Nazis to die.
05:50Yoko Ono.
05:51She didn't actually break up the Beatles, but millions of fans still act like Yoko Ono personally unplugged the amps.
06:05Ono was an avant-garde artist, activist, and John Lennon's creative partner.
06:09But when the world's most famous band imploded, she got the blame.
06:11The best couple of the year goes to John and Yoko.
06:17Never mind the clashing egos, business tensions, and growing creative rifts.
06:21Yoko became the easy target.
06:23She was too weird, too loud, too visible.
06:25To some, she wasn't John's partner, but a witch who ensorcelled him.
06:28She was a wedge, they said.
06:30Decades later, the narrative is slowly shifting.
06:32But for years, Yoko Ono carried the weight of a breakup she didn't cause.
06:35Just because she was there when it happened.
06:44William Tyndale
06:45William Tyndale gave English speakers the word scapegoat.
06:49Then himself was literally scapegoated to death.
06:51In reality, all Tyndale ever did was translate part of the Bible into English,
06:55so regular people could actually read it.
06:56But the church wasn't having it.
06:57Since 1408, the Oxford Commission had forbidden the translation of the Bible into the English language,
07:04even prohibiting its use in the training curriculum for preachers.
07:09He was branded a heretic, hunted across Europe, and finally betrayed by a supposed friend.
07:14They strangled him and burned his body at the stake.
07:16He was blamed for stirring rebellion.
07:18He was blamed for undermining authority.
07:19His last words were,
07:22Lord, open the king of England's eyes.
07:25Tyndale paid the ultimate price for spreading ideas that terrified the powerful.
07:29The ultimate twist?
07:30The very word used to describe history's fall guys is a gift from one of its earliest.
07:35Within one year of his death,
07:37a Bible was placed in every parish church throughout the whole of England by order of the king.
07:43Leon Trotsky
07:44Leon Trotsky was Lenin's right-hand man.
07:46Like his friend, his name has long been synonymous with the Communist Revolution.
07:50The two men developed an immediate bond.
07:52Lenin took Trotsky on as his apprentice,
07:54setting him to work as a writer for his communist newspaper, Iskra.
07:58He was the architect of the Red Army and one of the brightest minds of early Soviet power.
08:02But after Lenin's death, Stalin needed an enemy to consolidate his own rule.
08:05He claimed that Trotsky was trying to cause divisions within the party by trying to push
08:09out the old guards in favor of younger members who were more inclined to his will.
08:13Trotsky, with his intellect and independence, made the perfect foil.
08:16He was expelled, exiled, and turned into the ultimate scapegoat for everything that went wrong
08:21in Stalin's USSR.
08:22Grain shortages?
08:23Trotsky's fault.
08:24Descent?
08:25Take a look at that Trotsky guy.
08:26In 1940, even exile couldn't save him.
08:29Stalin's assassin found him in Mexico City and took him out for good.
08:32According to James P. Cannon, the secretary of the Socialist Workers' Party in the USA,
08:35Trotsky's last words were,
08:37will not survive this attack.
08:39Stalin has finally accomplished the task he attempted unsuccessfully before he died the
08:45next day.
08:46Sacco and Vanzetti.
08:47Two immigrants walked into a courtroom and never breathed the free air again.
08:51In 1920, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested for robbery and murder outside
08:56Boston.
08:57Both were carrying handguns when arrested, and both were caught lying to the police when questioned.
09:01The evidence was thin, but the atmosphere was thick with fear.
09:04They were Italian immigrants, they were radicals, and in post-World War I America, that was enough.
09:09Sacco and Vanzetti were essentially the poster children of what many thought was everything
09:13that was wrong in America at that time.
09:15They were immigrants, they were leftist anarchists, they were believed to have committed murder.
09:19Their trial was a circus of bias, bigotry, and political paranoia.
09:23Despite global protests and serious doubts about their guilt, both men were executed by electric
09:27chair in 1927.
09:29Sacco and Vanzetti didn't just die for a crime, they died for being immigrants at the wrong
09:33time.
09:34A century later, it's a reminder.
09:36When fear runs the show, scapegoats are never in short supply.
09:39Whatever the true verdict, the case of Sacco and Vanzetti had a huge impact on society,
09:44especially calling attention to a corrupt system.
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10:03Number one, Mrs. O'Leary's cow.
10:05A hoof kicked over a lantern and poof, Chicago goes up in flames.
10:08That's the myth anyway.
10:09The truth?
10:10A reporter made it up.
10:11The cow is innocent.
10:12So we'll stop milking this one.
10:14Definitely the stuff that myths are made of.
10:17Alfred Dreyfus.
10:18Captain Alfred Dreyfus didn't betray France, yet that didn't stop France from betraying
10:22him.
10:22Young Dreyfus resolved to become a soldier and to devote his life to uphold the honor of
10:27France.
10:28In 1894, Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was wrongfully convicted of passing
10:33secrets to Germany.
10:34In October 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was charged with passing military secrets to Colonel
10:41Max von Schwarzkoppen, the German military attaché in Paris.
10:46The real evidence was flimsy.
10:47The forged evidence was worse.
10:49But Dreyfus checked all the wrong boxes for a nation boiling over with anti-Semitism and
10:53fear.
10:54He was publicly stripped of his rank and exiled to Devil's Island.
10:57His reputation was savaged by the press.
10:59Dreyfus became a national punching bag.
11:01Even after the truth emerged that took years of protests and political chaos to claw back
11:06his name, the Dreyfus affair didn't just harnish one man.
11:09It cracked open divides that haunted France and the world for generations.
11:12In the presence of family and friends, Dreyfus received the cross of the Légion d'honneur
11:18in the same courtyard at the École Militaire, in which he had been degraded 12 years earlier.
11:26France, before the world, declared Dreyfus innocent.
11:30Who do you think got the rawest deal in history?
11:33Drop your pick in the comments below.
11:35Forgive my weakness.
11:36We must have courage.