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Words can tell a story, but it’s pictures that will make you believe in it. Such is the power of a photograph; the ability to strip away illusions, to illuminate something hidden, and sometimes force us to accept unpalatable truths. When it comes to scandal, seeing is believing – occasionally even to the point that a picture changes the course of history.

How might life have been different for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor had he not been photographed clutching the midriff of the 17-year-old girl he would later claim he had never met? Without this haunting triptych of the former prince, the late Virginia Giuffre and Jeffrey Epstein’s fixer, Ghislaine Maxwell, hovering in the background, there would have been nothing physical to connect the then prince with a trafficking victim. Though for years Andrew’s friends insisted that the photograph must have been doctored, buried within the Epstein files recently released by the US Department of Justice is a note from Maxwell that appears to confirm it is real.

But more often in what follows, the camera simply captures public figures as their publicists heartily wish you had never seen them. There’s then health secretary Matt Hancock, caught on office CCTV snogging his mistress in the middle of a pandemic, with absolutely no regard for social distancing; romantic lead Hugh Grant posing for his police mugshot after being caught with a sex worker; Michael Jackson dangling his baby son off a frighteningly high hotel balcony to show the fans below. So many of the pictures collated here expose a gap between carefully curated image and reality.

Sometimes the guilty party isn’t even in the shot. Think of Lewis Morley’s provocative image of Christine Keeler straddling a chair, imprinted on the collective memory long after the political details of the Profumo scandal faded. It was taken to promote a film about the affair that was never ultimately released, and Keeler didn’t want to be naked during the shoot but, according to Morley, the film’s producers insisted. His suggested compromise – a sexy but oddly vulnerable pose, showing her nude yet still mostly covered – reads today like a study of exploitation, first by the powerful men with whom she became entangled, then by the publicity machine that swallowed her up.

The story our pictures tell is, of course, partly one of changing mores: things that seemed scandalous only by the lights of a more repressed era, but also things that in hindsight should have shocked much more than they did. Paparazzi shots of the late George Michael cruising for sex in Los Angeles, which in 1998 forced him out of the closet, evoke nothing but sympathy now. The reverse is true of the pictures from what Hello! magazine called a “fairytale wedding” between the middle-aged Rolling Stone Bill Wyman and Mandy Smith in 1989; Smith was only 13 when they started dating (he was 47) and 18 when they married.

One constant theme for almost a century, however, is the use of female flesh to shock. The groundbreaking war photographer Lee Miller makes something unusually empowering of it, letting herself be captured in Hitler’s abandoned bathtub washing away the grime of weeks at the front. Everything about this shot is deliberately transgressive, from her filthy boots smearing the bathmat – she had come from documenting the newly liberated camp at Dachau – to the intimacy of her bare shoulders.

It reads as a powerful act of defiance: two fingers raised to a dictator by a woman some considered to have no place in a war zone, but also by her Jewish lover David Scherman, the photographer behind the camera. Having talked their way into Hitler’s Munich apartment, which had been taken over by advancing American troops, the pair took turns photographing each other in the bath. Afterwards, Miller slept in Hitler’s bed.

From the historic to the trivial, what makes many of these images unusually poignant in 2026 is that the era they represent – one of humans offering other humans visual proof of our shared world – is now under threat. Hoaxers have always existed, as the fakes in this collection show. But the proliferation of highly convincing AI-generated images, spread instantly and virally by social media, risks a much more serious erosion of trust in what our eyes are telling us.

Malign actors are already exploiting that technology. Will it become common practice for public figures snapped in blatant wrongdoing to blame AI? What you see here may yet come to be remembered as a golden age for photography: one in which cameras were quick enough to catch a fleeting moment of truth, and we were still capable of believing it.

Picture captions by Hannah J Davies and Gabrielle Schwarz

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Christine Keeler on a chair, 1963

By Lewis Morley

Sitting naked astride a chair, Christine Keeler looks the picture of the sexually liberated new woman of the 1960s. But there was more to it than that: Keeler, then a 21-year-old showgirl, was in the throes of a major controversy on account of her affair with the married British secretary of state for war, John Profumo.

The affair gripped the nation, particularly when it emerged that Profumo had lied about it in the Commons. Keeler was also said to be involved with Soviet naval attache Yevgeny Ivanov, raising national security concerns. The affair helped bring down the Conservative government of Harold MacMillan.

Despite her provocative pose, Keeler, who died in 2017, later pined for obscurity. Writing in her memoir, Secrets and Lies, she reflected that, while she liked the image, it was “a constant reminder of those difficult days”. HJD

* * *

Andrew with Virginia Giuffre, 2001

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is pictured with 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre, as Ghislaine Maxwell stands smiling. Before her death in 2025, Giuffre, who was a victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring, had accused Andrew of sexually assaulting her on multiple occasions.

While he has denied the photo is real, and claimed he never met Giuffre, one email in the Epstein files released in January seemed to confirm its veracity. Titled “draft statement” and sent in 2015 by “G Maxwell” to Epstein, it read: “In 2001 I was in London when [redacted] met a number of friends of mine including Prince Andrew. A photograph was taken as I imagine she wanted to show it to friends and family.” HJD

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Hugh Grant’s mugshot, 1995

By Steve Granitz

Hugh Grant had just shot to fame as the bumbling romantic lead in Four Weddings and a Funeral when he was arrested for “lewd conduct” after picking up a sex worker on Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard in June 1995. The British heart-throb’s sheepish mugshot was splashed across the news. “Hugh Dirty Dog!” one headline exclaimed.

Grant, Elizabeth Hurley’s partner at the time, gave a public statement: “I have hurt people I love and embarrassed people I work with. For both things I am more sorry than I can ever possibly say.” He received a fine and two years’ probation, and was ordered to attend an Aids education programme. But his career didn’t suffer: now he was just the lovable, suitably contrite, rogue.

These days he’s happy to joke about the affair – a few years ago he tweeted his mugshot with a caption addressed “to my dear trolls”. GS

* * *

The ‘car graveyard’ after the VW emissions scandal, 2018

By Lucy Nicholson

One of the biggest corporate scandals in recent history, “Dieselgate” kicked off in September 2015 after it was discovered that Volkswagen had sold millions of vehicles fitted with software that falsely calculated their emissions – sometimes allowing cars to emit over 40 times the legal limit of pollutants in the US. The scandal cost the company $31.3bn (£25bn) in fines and settlements in the US alone, and it was forced to buy back 600,000 vehicles, such as those in this “car graveyard” in California’s Mojave desert. HJD

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The Will Smith slap, 2022

By Brian Snyder

A scandal at the Oscars usually involves a hotly tipped frontrunner being snubbed – not the host being attacked on stage. This was, however, what unfolded in 2022, when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock over a joke the comedian had made about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, likening her bald head – the result of alopecia – to buzz-cutted action heroine GI Jane. The “slap heard around the world” generated wall-to-wall shock, and saw Smith banned from the event for 10 years. His actions, he later said, “were not indicative of the man I want to be”. HJD

* * *

Matt Hancock’s Covid kiss, 2021

The Covid-19 pandemic was a time of uncertainty and isolation for millions of people in Britain, making the then health secretary Matt Hancock’s kiss with aide Gina Coladangelo, captured here on the CCTV in his ministerial office, all the more contentious. Not only were both parties married at the time, but the leaked footage also appeared to show Hancock breaking his own social distancing rules.

“Covid was the moment where the personal felt most political,” says the Guardian’s deputy political editor, Jessica Elgot. “Matt Hancock’s embrace of Gina Coladangelo came at a moment where he was on television near nightly urging people to obey strict rules. When the pictures dropped on the front of the Sun, they were landing on the breakfast tables of families who had been unable to embrace loved ones in hospitals, after births or at funerals.”

Hancock soon resigned, and left his wife. “Not sure there’s much news value in that and I can’t say it’s very enjoyable viewing,” he said when first informed of the leaked video. HJD

* * *

Diego Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’, 1986

By Bob Thomas

One of the most infamous moments in footballing history came at the 1986 World Cup quarter-final, when Diego Maradona used his left hand to score for Argentina – and knock England out of the contest. Asked about the goal, the player the Daily Mirror labelled a “cheat” famously said it was made “a little with the head of Maradona, and a little with the hand of God”. He would later brand the moment a revenge of sorts for the Falklands: in his 2017 memoir, Touched By God, he said he had been “thinking about all the boys who had died in the Malvinas war”. HJD

* * *

Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake at the Super Bowl, 2004

By Donald Miralle

When Justin Timberlake ripped off a piece of Janet Jackson’s bustier during the Super Bowl half-time show, he accidentally exposed her breast to the 140 million-strong TV audience, in a “wardrobe malfunction” that lasted just nine-sixteenths of a second. But what “Nipplegate” really exposed was racist and sexist double standards. While he was forgiven, she had film roles and performances cancelled, and her music blacklisted by major TV stations. GS

* * *

Bill Wyman and Mandy Smith’s wedding, 1989

By Julian Parker

Age-gap relationships are a fraught topic and the headline-grabbing 1989 marriage of 52-year-old Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman and 18-year-old model Mandy Smith remains a disturbing example. (The couple had met when she was 13.) They divorced less than two years later. In a strange twist, he later became her step-grandfather, when his 30-year-old son from an earlier relationship married Smith’s 46-year-old mother.

Smith has since called for the UK’s age of consent to be raised to 18. “You are still a child at 16,” she said. “You can never get that part of your life back.” GS

* * *

John Stonehouse’s faked death, 1974

Amid rumours of his involvement with the Czech intelligence services, and facing financial ruin, Labour MP John Stonehouse faked his own death by leaving a pile of his clothes on a beach in Miami in 1974. He was located and arrested five weeks later in Australia, where this picture was taken of him and his wife Barbara in Melbourne.

If she looks annoyed here, it’s not surprising: Barbara was not in on his plan and had mourned her husband while he plotted a new life for himself and his mistress, Sheila Buckley, who would go on to become his second wife.

Incredibly, Stonehouse remained an MP long after his arrest; when he returned to the House of Commons, he described his behaviour as the result of a “complete mental breakdown”. He was later convicted and imprisoned on charges including fraud and wasting police time, going on to play chess with Moors murderer Ian Brady while the pair were imprisoned at Wormwood Scrubs in west London. HJD

* * *

Michael Jackson dangling his baby, 2002

By Tobias Schwarz

In November 2002, the singer became tabloid fodder yet again after he dangled baby son Prince Michael II over a Berlin hotel balcony. It was just the latest in a string of strange stories.

“There was this feeling of, this guy’s an oddball,” says music journalist Larry Fitzmaurice, who believes it helped press and fans offset the accusations of sexual assault against a minor Jackson faced in 1993.

That changed when Martin Bashir’s Living with Michael Jackson aired in 2003, bringing to light similar allegations and making more people feel “there’s something unseemly about him”, Fitzmaurice says. HJD

* * *

Charles and Camilla at a polo match, 1975

Rumours of an affair had circulated for years. Then in January 1993, a month after Charles and Diana’s separation was announced, the British tabloids unleashed “Tampongate”: the transcript of an intimate call, secretly recorded in 1989, between the future king and Camilla Parker Bowles, in which he joked he wished to “live inside” her trousers.

The public backlash against the couple only intensified, and old photos such as this one came under scrutiny (the moment was recreated by Josh O’Connor and Emerald Fennell in The Crown). As Guardian reporter Caroline Davies explains, after Diana’s death in 1997 “there was this near-hysterical grief which turned to anger against the ‘other woman’.”

“It was horrid,” Camilla later recalled in an interview. “I wouldn’t want to put my worst enemy through it.” GS

* * *

Spain’s Paralympian basketball team, 2000

By Rick Rycroft

The triumph of Spain’s basketball team in the intellectually disabled category at Sydney ended when it transpired that only two of the 12 were actually disabled. Spain were stripped of their gold medals, and all competitors with intellectual disabilities were banned until 2012.

Captain Ramón Torres – who is disabled and was not in on the plot – said in the 2021 BBC podcast The Fake Paralympians, “Everybody says time is a healer, but some things it doesn’t heal.” The incident, he added, “broke me in two”. HJD

* * *

Pseudomnesia: The Electrician, 2023

By Boris Eldagsen

In April 2023, German artist Boris Eldagsen made headlines when he turned down a prestigious photography prize for a work that was in fact AI-generated. The image, in a vintage sepia style, had been chosen as winner of the creative open category of the Sony World Photography awards.

Eldagsen submitted the work because he was a “cheeky monkey” and wanted to know if organisations were ready to deal with evolving technologies: “They are not.” He hoped his act would spur conversation about the issue.

The judges said they had known the image was created using AI – a claim Eldagsen disputes. But he got what he wanted: people were talking about it. GS

* * *

Anthony Weiner’s sexting selfie, 2016

Former Democratic US congressman Anthony Weiner has starred in not one, not two, but three sexting scandals. In 2011 the politician – and husband of senior Hillary Clinton staffer Huma Abedin – resigned from Congress after tweeting a photo of his underwear-clad crotch. He initially claimed to have been hacked before admitting to sending sexually explicit images to several women.

In 2013, when he ran for mayor of New York City, it emerged that Weiner, still married to Abedin, had continued to send lewd texts and photos to multiple women. His campaign imploded and he finished fifth in the Democratic primaries.

Worse was to come. In 2016, he and Abedin announced their separation after more sexting allegations. Weeks later, it was reported that he had been corresponding with a 15-year-old girl. He was eventually sentenced to 21 months in prison and registered as a sex offender.

That’s not all. On seizing Weiner’s devices, the FBI found messages that led them to reopen their investigation into Clinton’s emails – just days before the 2016 election. (Clinton, who had used a personal email server to conduct official correspondence during her time as secretary of state, was eventually cleared of wrongdoing.) Many commentators have suggested Weiner’s crime helped Trump become president. GS

* * *

The Duchess of Argyll’s nude photo scandal, 1930

The Profumo affair was not the only sex scandal that shook the British establishment in 1963: Margaret Whigham, the Duchess of Argyll (pictured here at a dress rehearsal for a ball), was pilloried when Polaroids were released showing her performing fellatio on an unknown figure (his head wasn’t visible) alongside others with a man masturbating in the background. She was quickly identified by her signature three-strand necklace; the identities of the men were never officially confirmed.

The images – whose whereabouts are unknown – came to light as part of a bitter split between Whigham and her husband, and were discovered after he hired a locksmith to break into her private drawers. In the ensuing so-called “divorce of the century”, the duke accused his wife of infidelity with 88 men. A press campaign against the “dirty duchess” followed.

In a 2021 interview, Sarah Phelps – who wrote the 2021 TV mini series A Very British Scandal about the case – said Whigham’s image was “trashed deliberately … the aristocracy are no worse than the rest of us. But they have a lot more time for debauchery and a lot more at stake.” HJD

* * *

Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub, 1945

By David E Scherman

Lee Miller worked as a Vogue model and fashion photographer before turning her camera on the ravages of the second world war. The images she and her lover (and fellow photographer) David E Scherman captured in Hitler’s Munich flat as the conflict neared its end are loaded with defiance, with the pair taking turns to leave their dirty boots – caked in mud from Dachau concentration camp – on the white bathmat.

For Miller, the most “chilling” thing about being in Hitler’s flat was “how normal” it was, says her granddaughter, Ami Bouhassane. A bathroom is “where you do the most private things. They have chosen to defile this place as the best way of getting under Hitler’s skin.” HJD

* * *

George Michael cruising in LA, 1997

The former Wham! singer is pictured leaving a public toilet in Los Angeles. It’s arguably an unremarkable image of an unremarkable moment – except a year later he would be arrested for engaging in a “lewd act” in the same spot.

Having neither confirmed nor denied his homosexuality in the past, George Michael had now been outed. Despite intense media scrutiny and homophobia, he embraced his gay identity, not least with his cruising anthem Outside, which cocked a snook at the press.

Adam Mattera was editor of Attitude from 1999 and 2008, and spoke to Michael for his first major interview with a gay publication. “There was a history of public figures being arrested for ‘cottaging’ and publicly shamed for it,” Mattera says. “What George chose to do, which no one had ever done before, was to do big talkshows such as Parkinson in the UK and Letterman in America. He addressed it with candour and humour, and no shame. He was defiant.” HJD

* * *

The Bullingdon Club photograph, 1987

By Rona Marsden

In 2007, the Mail on Sunday published a photograph taken 20 years earlier: a group portrait of the Bullingdon Club’s class of 1987. Ten young members appear in the bespoke uniform of the exclusive all-male “dining club” at the University of Oxford. Among them are two future luminaries of the Conservative party: David Cameron (standing, second left) and Boris Johnson (seated on the right).

The club’s reputation as a drinking society for badly behaved posh boys – in 1987, a plant pot was thrown out of a window during a Bullingdon party – made the photo a source of embarrassment for Cameron, then leader of the opposition. “We do things when we are young that we deeply regret,” he said in 2009.

Soon after, the company that holds the copyright for the image withdrew permission to republish it. This painting by Oxford-based artist Rona Marsden was commissioned by BBC Newsnight as an alternative. The image remains a striking illustration of the elitism of Britain’s ruling class, and the vast inequality within the country. GS

* * *

The Fyre festival sandwich, 2017

Two sad slices of bread and cheese in a polystyrene container became the visual metaphor for 2017’s Fyre festival. Billed as a not-to-be-missed luxury music festival, the event was a disaster. Tents came in lieu of promised high-end accommodation and attenders grabbed any food they could get.

Seth Crossno was one of its many disappointed customers: “There were mattresses all over the place – we were like, what is this?!” He says the event, co-founded by now-convicted fraudster Billy McFarland and the rapper Ja Rule, was “so dumb … it’s like if you had handed middle school students a project to run an event”.

Last year, McFarland announced plans for a Fyre festival 2 in Cancún with tickets costing from $1,400 to $1.1m. After disputes with local government, the event was postponed. HJD

* * *

The Coldplay concert couple, 2025

Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot shot to global infamy in July 2025 when they were captured embracing at a Coldplay concert in Boston, Massachusetts. Once they realised they were on the “kiss cam”, Byron ducked while Cabot hid her face. “Either they’re having an affair or they’re very shy,” quipped lead singer Chris Martin.

The fallout was brutal. Their identities were quickly discovered – they were both married to other people, and have children – and a false narrative of infidelity and impropriety between a tech CEO and his head of HR emerged. Cabot would later correct the record in an interview with the New York Times: she was separated from her husband at the time, she said, with Byron telling her that he was “going through the same thing”.

Shortly after she was identified, Cabot was doxed and received upwards of 60 death threats a day. A story that at first unfolded like a giddy viral soap opera has since became a cautionary tale about the perils of mass surveillance and online shaming. HJD

* * *

Oliviero Toscani’s Benetton campaign, 1992

By Therese Frare

“Other photographers are looking for consensus but I don’t care,” Oliviero Toscani once said. As the longtime art director of the fashion brand Benetton, Toscani, who died last year at the age of 82, regularly stoked controversy with attention-grabbing ad campaigns that had nothing to do with clothing.

Among his most polarising choices was using this image of the HIV activist David Kirby dying from Aids – with the Benetton logo splashed on top. It was originally shot in black and white (Toscani had it colourised with oil paint) by a journalism student, Therese Frare, and published in Life magazine in 1990. The photo was widely republished and credited with humanising a crisis often ignored, but the Benetton ad sparked a furious backlash from Aids activists, who accused it of commodifying their suffering and called for a boycott of the brand.

Kirby’s family argued that itraised awareness: “Benetton didn’t use us, or exploit us. We used them. Because of them, [the] photo was seen all over the world, and that’s exactly what David wanted.” GS

* * *

Beyoncé, Jay-Z and Solange’s elevator scandal, 2014

It was a rare look behind the curtain at one of showbiz’s most famous families – and it was messy. In May 2014, security footage of Solange Knowles lashing out at Jay-Z in front of her sister Beyoncé in a hotel elevator at a Met Gala afterparty was leaked online. Here they are leaving the hotel: a tense scene. The internet was ablaze with speculation that rumours of Jay-Z’s cheating lay behind the spat, but the family remained tight-lipped: “We’ve put this behind us and hope everyone else will do the same.” GS

* * *

Peter Viggers’s £1,600 duck house, 2009

What better image to encapsulate the expenses scandal that engulfed British politics in 2009? Over six weeks, the Daily Telegraph published a drip-feed of revelations about expenses claims, ranging from egregious to downright illegal, made by MPs from across the political parties. This photo depicts an ornamental “duck island” for which then-Conservative MP Peter Viggers was discovered to have claimed £1,645. It was built in the pond in his garden; the ducks, he later said, never took to it.

Viggers, who died in 2020, was among the scores of politicians whose careers were ended by the exposé. In total, 392 MPs and peers were ordered to repay £1.3m for misclaimed expenses; seven received jail time. GS

* * *

The Mirror’s fake Iraqi abuse images, 2004

In May 2004, Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan was ousted after images the paper published that claimed to show tortured Iraqi prisoners were revealed to be fakes. As doubts swirled over the images’ veracity, the late photographer and Guardian picture editor Eamonn McCabe gave his verdict. “These pictures are all too clinical, too pristine and too well shot for me to trust them absolutely,” he wrote. “While the images are powerful, the question is, can you trust them?” HJD

* * *

Marilyn Monroe’s early nude, 1949

By Tom Kelley

“I was broke and needed the money. Why deny it?” Marilyn Monroe told reporters when her nude 1949 photos taken by Hollywood photographer Tom Kelley resurfaced just as she was on the brink of fame, and were published in the first issue of Playboy. Studio executives feared they would affect her career, but she was unapologetic: “I’m not ashamed … I’ve done nothing wrong.”

Academics came to see the images – or rather, Monroe’s ownership of them – as a sign of the sexual revolution of the time. HJD

* * *

‘Monkey Jesus’, 2012

In the summer of 2012, Cecilia Giménez, an 81-year-old parishioner in the Spanish town of Borja, took it upon herself to touch up a badly deteriorated fresco in her church: an Ecce Homo of Christ from around 1930 by little-known artist Elías García Martínez. A photograph of the spectacularly botched restoration quickly went viral, garnering the nicknames “Monkey Jesus” and “Ecce Mono” (Spanish for “behold the monkey”). Though initially hurt by the reaction, Giménez came to appreciate the attention it brought to her home town: 40,000 people came to see the fresco over the next year, raising €50,000 for a local charity. GS

* * *

Brooke Shields’s Calvin Klein ad, 1980

By Richard Avedon

“Jeans are hard to sell: there’s only so much you can say about their cut,” says Guardian deputy fashion editor Chloe Mac Donnell. Outrage can help: witness Calvin Klein’s 1980 TV and print campaign shot by Richard Avedon and starring Brooke Shields, then 15. One ad featured the line, “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”

A furore ensued. TV networks banned the ad, the media hounded its star – and sales soared. Looking back recently, Shields said nothing untoward went on; in fact, she was so “naive”, she didn’t even realise it was “about underwear or sexual in nature”. GS

* * *

The Manson Family trial, 1969

“Many people I know in Los Angeles,” Joan Didion wrote, “believe that the 60s ended abruptly on August 9, 1969 … when word of the murders on Cielo Drive travelled like brushfire through the community.”

The night before, four members of the (seemingly) hippy cult known as the Manson Family had murdered five people, including heavily pregnant actor Sharon Tate, at the home she shared with film director Roman Polanski. Then the group – joined by leader Charles Manson (whose arrest is shown here) and two others – struck again, killing a married couple.

Obsession with the murders has never really abated. “How he gained control of his followers remains a mystery,” says Tom O’Neill, author of a book about the crimes. Their significance, though, was clear: as Didion put it, the countercultural dream had been shattered. GS

* * *

Boris Johnson’s Partygate, 2020

On 15 May 2020, Boris Johnson and his wife, Carrie, were photographed enjoying cheese and wine alongside staff in the garden of 10 Downing Street. That same day, the then health secretary, Matt Hancock, gave a press briefing urging the British public not to break Covid lockdown rules, which at the time allowed only one-to-one distanced socialising outdoors.

The photograph was shared with the Guardian in December 2021, as allegations of multiple lockdown-breaking gatherings on government premises began to emerge. Though Johnson defended the photo – “This is where I live, it is where I work. Those were meetings of people at work” – public anger about Partygate grew and the so-called Teflon leader eventually resigned from No 10 the following year. GS

* * *

The Iran-Contra scandal, 1986

By Lou Dematteis

This is the photo that kicked off the Iran-Contra affair. In October 1986, a Nicaraguan soldier shot down a cargo plane carrying military supplies to the rightwing rebel forces known as the Contras. Pictured is the crash’s lone survivor, American ex-marine gunrunner Eugene Hasenfus. His capture led to the revelation that the CIA was covertly supporting the Contras in their guerrilla war against Nicaragua’s socialist Sandinista government – and Ronald Reagan’s government had used proceeds from secret arms-for-hostages deals with Iran to help fund this mission.

The operations violated multiple laws, but an investigation was hamstrung by destroyed evidence – National Security Council aide Oliver North and his secretary Fawn Hall held “shredding parties” – and dishonest witnesses. As Malcolm Byrne of the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental organisation that collects declassified documents, says, “No senior officials were sanctioned, thanks to pardons, obstruction of investigations, and legal loopholes. The message to future presidents was that you can get away with a lot.” GS

* * *

Winona Ryder shoplifting, 2001

This blurry snippet of CCTV footage was splashed across the news after the actor was arrested for shoplifting at luxury department store Saks in Beverly Hills in December 2001. In the trial in 2002, Ryder was found guilty of stealing designer items worth $5,560. She was fined and sentenced to three years’ probation and community service.

The arrest sparked a media feeding frenzy. A “Free Winona” T-shirt became, Vogue said, “LA’s hottest accessory”. Ryder’s court fashion became another talking point, particularly after she showed up in a dress from Marc Jacobs – one of the labels she had walked out with. Jacobs later recruited her to be the face of his brand.

“Psychologically, I must have been at a place where I wanted to stop,” Ryder later reflected. She took a break from acting – only with the 2016 premiere of Stranger Things did her career kick off again. Ryder has described the drama as overblown. As she put it, “It wasn’t like the crime of the century!” GS

* * *

Bill Clinton hugging Monica Lewinsky, 1996

By Dirck Halstead

Some photos take on greater significance over time. That was certainly the case with the image of Bill Clinton embracing Democratic staffer Monica Lewinsky at a fundraiser in 1996. When news broke of the US president’s affair with Lewinsky two years later, the photographer’s assistant raked back through the photos he had shot that night. This one would end up on the cover of Time magazine.

Meanwhile Lewinsky, then 24, quickly became what has been called the “patient zero” of online shaming. She returned to the public eye in 2015, with a viral Ted talk about the “price of shame”. “Overnight, I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one worldwide,” she said. “It was easy to forget that that woman was dimensional, had a soul, and was once unbroken.” HJD

• These 33 images show moments of scandal from the 1930s on. Which others come to mind for you? Email saturday@theguardian.com