Scandals That Haunt The Cast Of Seinfeld

In the fall of 2007, Jessica Seinfeld, wife of Jerry Seinfeld and mother of some kids with the comedian, published Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food. It was a cookbook with a powerful angle: her numerous recipes for child-friendly fare packed extra vitamins and nutrition because they all secretly contained flavor-masked fruit and vegetable purees. The book shot to the top of The New York Times bestseller list, but in January 2008, per Reuters, Jessica was targeted in a lawsuit from another cookbook author, Missy Chase Lapine, who alleged that Deceptively Delicious "brazenly plagiarized" from her similarly named, vegetable-smuggling cookbook, The Sneaky Chef. 

Jerry got himself involved in the affair when he appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman and teased Lapine and her filing, earning himself charges of defamation from The Sneaky Chef author. (The comedian had called the author a "crackpot" and likened her to an assassin.) However, both Seinfelds were eventually cleared of wrongdoing. 

In 2010, according to CNN, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled in Jessica's favor, noting that "stockpiling vegetable purees for covert use in children's food is an idea that cannot be copyrighted." Meanwhile, the defamation suit was thrown out of court after a judge ruled that it would have been "inconceivable that a reasonable viewer would have believed that Seinfeld's statements [on The Late Show with David Letterman] were conveying facts about Lapine."

In May 1993, according to People (via Gawker) Jerry Seinfeld was out and about in New York City's Central Park when a young woman caught his eye, and he asked for her phone number. That young woman whom the 38-year-old comedian and sitcom star found so attractive: 17-year-old Shoshanna Lonstein. When grilled by radio host Howard Stern about the budding relationship with someone 21 years his junior — and who was still in high school when they met — Seinfeld explained that Lonstein was "the only girl I ever went out with who was that young. I wasn't dating her. We just went to a restaurant, and that was it." 

That may be true, but the relationship quickly got more serious. Later in 1993, Seinfeld made trips to visit Lonstein at George Washington University, and Lonstein took frequent weekend trips to Los Angeles, where Seinfeld lived while Seinfeld taped. Lonstein told Details (via the Associated Press) that she transferred to UCLA to be closer to Seinfeld, but that they finally split up in 1997. According to Lonstein, she "wanted to run around and play," while Seinfeld seemingly "worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

Years after Michael Richards' obscene rant, Jerry Seinfeld came under fire for what could be called dismissive comments about race and gender in comedy, a world in which he's a giant and influential figure. "This really pisses me off," Seinfeld declared on CBS This Morning in 2014 when asked about the criticism that his streaming talk show, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, featured a preponderance of white comedians. "People think [comedy] is the census or something, it's gotta represent the actual pie chart of America. Who cares?" Later, he added, "Funny is the world that I live in. You're funny, I'm interested," and that he has "no interest in gender or race or anything like that." 

Seinfeld's comments were later criticized by a number of major publications, ranging from Time to the Independent. But in 2015, he doubled-down on his remarks. On the radio show, The Herd (via Vulture), he recalled an exchange with his teenage daughter, in which she labeled something as "sexist." He went on to claim, "They just want to use these words. 'That's racist. That's sexist. That's prejudice.' They don't know what the [expletive] they're talking about." Yikes.

It's always a little embarrassing to get fired from a job, regardless of the circumstances or even the position. It happens to the best and the worst of us — and in 1979, it happened to Jerry Seinfeld, one of the hottest rising stand-up comedians in America at the time. It's even more wince-inducing 40 years after the fact, because of the workplace that callously terminated Seinfeld years before he'd co-create and star in one of the most popular sitcoms of all time. 

The comedian-actor was unceremoniously dismissed from his role on the broad and silly ABC comedy series, Benson, a spinoff of the provocative Soap, in which smart aleck butler Benson Dubois (Robert Guillaume) goes on to perform the same job for a governor. In three 1980 episodes, Seinfeld played Frankie, a courier who fancied himself a stand-up comedian who would launch into his routines at inopportune times. Per The New York Times, Seinfeld and the show's producers couldn't get on the same page about how Frankie should be played. They ultimately agreed to disagree, and the Benson producers got rid of Seinfeld.

But as Seinfeld claimed in 2006 (via Sitcoms Online), "They didn't bother to tell me," until after he showed up for rehearsal. "I was angry," he continued. "That doesn't happen in stand-up. Once you get to a certain level, they don't make you go back to the beginning." The experience led Seinfeld to put all his effort into his comedy career, saying, "Because I can control that."

According to The Wall Street Journal, Seinfeld co-creator Larry David wrote the show with a thesis statement in mind: "No hugging, no learning." That made Seinfeld a lot darker and more brutally funny than most other sitcoms of the 1990s — treacly, moral-enriched fare like Growing Pains and Full House. But the show reached new depths in 1996, when it killed off a major character. Susan Ross, played by Heidi Swedberg, was George Costanza's fiancée, even though he didn't seem to like her all that much. He was off the hook of marriage and a single guy again when Susan died after ingesting fatal amounts of glue by licking the inexpensive wedding invitations that George had selected.

The real reason Susan died? Several Seinfeld big shots didn't want to work with Swedberg anymore. "Her instincts for doing a scene, where the comedy was, and mine were always misfiring," Jason Alexander (George) told Howard Stern in 2015 (via The Hollywood Reporter). So, he'd try a different acting strategy to match Swedberg's: "And I'd adjust, and then it would change." Alexander revealed that he confided his frustrations to co-star Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who reportedly remarked, "Don't you wanna just kill her?" When David heard all the negative chatter about Swedberg — namely that the main cast found her "f**king impossible" to work with, he got rid of her by getting rid of Susan.

Alexander quickly apologized to Swedberg when the reveal made headlines, calling her "a kind, lovely person" whom the cast apparently "really liked."

Seinfeld was such a popular and successful show — the No. 1 show on TV in its final year, and the winner of 10 Emmy Awards — that it was a hard act to follow for its main cast members. But despite raking in a ton of money and accolades from their nine seasons on Seinfeld, actors Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Michael Richards, and Jason Alexander all wanted to continue appearing in things — and TV networks were eager to green-light projects starring such beloved stars. The only problem? Audiences didn't seem to care about any of those post-Seinfeld shows starring Seinfeld stars that were not Seinfeld. 

Over the years, the embarrassing notion that the performers were under some kind of "Seinfeld Curse" persisted, such was the abysmal failure of their 2000s TV projects. For example: The Michael Richards Show and Alexander's Bob Patterson each lasted nine episodes; Louis-Dreyfus' Watching Ellie made it 17 installments; and Seinfeld's bickering couples game show, The Marriage Ref, faded away after 24 airing. Thankfully, the unofficial curse was unofficially broken when Louis-Dreyfus took on the title role in HBO's Veep — a comedy that won the Emmy for outstanding comedy series three times in its seven-season run.