Celebrity Stories That Ended Up Being Total Lies

We love when celebrities share parts of themselves with us, whether that comes in the form of details about who they are dating, facts about how they grew up, peeks inside their homes, or something else entirely. We especially love when famous folk share unexpected things, like the struggles they have faced or weird events that have happened in their lives. But while we want to believe every single thing celebs have to say, it has become increasingly clear that many stories are at best, exaggerations, and at worst, total lies.

To compile our list of celebrity falsehoods, we chose to focus on less common lies. This means we opted to steer clear of celebrities caught lying about their age — which everyone from Eminem and Agyness Deyn to Jennifer Lopez has been accused of. Frankly, it is such a common practice that we should ask which celebrities haven't been deceptive about their true birth year. We also steered clear about untruths related to plastic surgery or other enhancements like hair transplant surgery or botox because, again, the list is so long that we just expect it by now. 

Instead, we collected instances of celebrities lying about things that fully shocked us once they got busted. Here are 14 celebrity stories that ended up being total lies.

Lindsay Lohan seems to have gotten her life back on track, as evidenced by her marriage to Bader Shamass and her much-discussed Netflix holiday movie, "Falling for Christmas." But for years, we have taken much of what the star has told us with a grain of salt. The actor has copped to some of her lies — like when she told Oprah Winfrey she had lied about never using cocaine — but there are still some serious question marks lingering. Like, what was the deal with her list of sexual conquests being leaked? Per E! News, Lohan has admitted she made the 36-name list, but some of the men have denied ever sleeping with her.

In a more straightforward lie that sounded incredibly ridiculous from the outset, Lohan once claimed to have come into contact with Whitney Houston's dead body. She told The Daily Telegraph that she arranged the body bag for the late singer's corpse while doing community service for the Los Angeles Coroner's Office. The lie was quickly debunked by the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner, which released a statement to E! News. "Ms. Lohan may well have cut and rolled plastic for us (which we use in lieu of body bags), but not specifically for any particular case," they said. Why she made this story up is still a mystery, but not as big of a mystery as that time she tried to kidnap kids she claimed were being trafficked, which remains unexplained as of this writing.

Justin Bieber has never been the most trustworthy of sources, and we have yet to be shocked when one of his lies has been exposed. He once famously lied about posting a screenshot during the height of his manager, Scooter Braun's feud with Taylor Swift, and once claimed to have gotten a $60 million jet for Christmas, which TMZ debunked. But the lie that we really want to zero in on here is the time that Bieber claimed his laptop was stolen. This happened in 2012, when the "Peaches" star tweeted (via Ok!), "Sucks when u take personal footage and people don't respect your privacy. Yesterday during the show me and my tour manager Josh had some stuff stolen. Really sucks. People should respect other's property."

A Twitter account under the name @gexwy then popped up and started a dialogue with Bieber — a public one, of course — claiming that they were the individual who had taken the goods. Outlets like MTV News quickly suggested that it was all a hoax to create publicity. According to Ok!, someone in Bieber's camp had created the @gexwy account, and the stunt was in promotion of his music video for "Beauty and a Beat." The singer proudly stated that it was all a joke. But confusingly, a rep for the star claimed to E! News that a laptop had in fact been stolen and a police report had been submitted for it. The truth is out there.

Let's be clear: This is not a Brandy situation, because Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth were, in fact, married. The issue? Well, Cyrus claimed to be married long before the pair actually tied the knot — a lie that she quickly walked back afterward. The turbulent couple went public with their romance shortly after filming "The Last Song" together in 2009. They broke up a year later, reunited a month after that, and broke up again two months afterward. So, obviously, they decided to get engaged! In May 2012, the pair announced their engagement — but by September 2013, they had called it off.

Before the end of their (first) engagement, Cyrus gave an interview to Cosmopolitan (via HuffPost) in which she referred to Hemsworth as her hubby and said, "I'm so happy I'm married." This was fiercely denied by their reps and proven to be false when they broke up months later, though that was not the end of their rocky love story. Cyrus and Hemsworth got back together in 2016, quickly got engaged again, and miraculously stayed together for a few years. They tied the knot in a secret wedding at the end of 2018, but Hemsworth filed for divorce only eight months after that. As of this writing, they have not gotten back together again — yet.

For years, the world only knew Brian Williams as a trusted journalist, most notably through his affiliation with NBC and his gigs as an anchor on NBC News and NBC Nightly News. But in 2015, we all came to question him regarding his story that a helicopter he was in had been shot down by enemy fire during the Iraq war in 2003.

When Williams' story was debunked, he told Stars and Stripes (via Politico) that he'd told the story in error — presumably repeatedly — and that it had been a helicopter ahead of his own which had actually been shot down. "I don't know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another," he stated. Soon after, many media outlets then quickly uncovered he had embellished — or flat-out lied — in multiple other instances.

According to The New York Times, an NBC internal probe found at least six more instances of exaggerated or false stories. For instance, Williams once told "The Daily Show" host Jon Stewart that he was so close to the men beating humans at a Tahrir Square riot in 2011 that he made eye contact with one of them. However, an investigation proved he was actually witnessing the protests from a balcony and wasn't on the ground at all. Williams was suspended for six months. Six years later, he left NBC. At the time, he had been an anchor on MSNBC and on "The 11th Hour with Brian Williams."

The vast majority of people who were alive on September 11, 2001, remember exactly where they were when the devastating terrorist attacks happened. Decades later, the date remains a sacred day for many Americans and one that is filled with much sadness and reflection. So, the idea of lying about being on the scene as the Twin Towers were hit is almost inconceivable. We say almost because, well, people have done it — which means it is sadly within the realm of believability. One person who lied about surviving the attack is comedian Steve Rannazzisi, who appeared on the FX series "The League" and then killed his career with this gross mistruth.

In a 2009 appearance on the podcast, "WTF with Marc Maron," Rannazzisi told the host he was working at Merrill Lynch at the time of the attacks (first lie) and that he was evacuated from his office when the first tower was hit (second lie). In 2015, Rannazzisi admitted to The New York Times that he had never been employed by Merrill Lynch — In fact, the company did not actually have offices in either of the Twin Towers, so it was not even a well-researched lie. The comedian was actually working in Midtown on September 11. "I know that I hurt a lot of people — people that lost people, people that helped people survive," Rannazzisi stated on a 2015 episode of "The Howard Stern Show." "And those are the people that I truly am sorry [to]. I feel awful."

During the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Ryan Lochte found himself caught up in a big scandal when he and three other Olympians claimed to have been robbed at gunpoint after armed men with badges stopped their taxi. "They pulled out their guns, they told the other swimmers to get down on the ground — they got down on the ground. I refused, I was like, 'We didn't do anything wrong, so — I'm not getting down on the ground,'" Lochte told NBC News. "And then the guy pulled out his gun, he cocked it, put it to my forehead, and he said, 'Get down,' and I put my hands up. I was like, 'Whatever.'"

Brazilian authorities were immediately skeptical of the story, which was no doubt enhanced because the athletes in question did not make themselves available to meet with authorities, per The Washington Post. While Lochte had returned to the United States by the time his story was confirmed to be falsified, authorities in Brazil tracked down the athletes who still remained in the country. Based upon security footage and witness testimony, the police uncovered that Lochte and his fellow swim pals had actually committed vandalism before being approached by an armed security guard. While he did not rob them or point a gun to their heads, they did pay him for damages. Lochte was charged for filing a false report, but the charges were dropped in 2021, per USA Today.

It is a little bit tricky to know for certain who is lying with this entry on our list. But clearly, somebody is bending the truth and if we had to put our money on it, we would say it is James Blunt. The British singer-songwriter is not even the main character in the lie, which has to do with a royal, a pop star, and a sword — which sounds like the start of a really great joke. The story broke in 2016 when The Sun published a report that Princess Beatrice had cut Ed Sheeran's face with the weapon after a dinner party mishap. She had reportedly been trying to fake-knight Blunt at the time, and an accompanying photo of Sheeran with a gash on his face seemingly confirmed the tale.

In March 2017, Blunt did an interview with Shortlist where he claimed the story was actually untrue. "Ed was drunk, messing around, and he cut himself. We made a fancy story up; people fell for it. It was very embarrassing," he said. But years after the "You're Beautiful" singer had convinced everyone that the British tabloid was wrong, Sheeran's manager, Stuart Camp implied that Blunt was lying to protect the Royal Family from embarrassment. He told the podcast, "Straight Up," that he and Sheeran had chosen not to publicly comment on the incident rather than lie about it. "I'm not lying because someone's a f***ing idiot and they've been waving a sword around when [they're] all drunk," he insisted.