5 Disasters When Fans Asked for Celebs’ Autographs

5 Tupac

In 1992, Tupac Shakur performed at the annual Marin City Festival in California. Afterward, he headed to the neighborhood where he’d grown up, and fans followed and asked for his autograph. He signed stuff for a bunch of them. Then something happened, and we aren’t exactly clear on what, but it ended with a six-year-old shot in the face dead. 

You’d think the death of a child would prompt a formal murder investigation, but though police showed up and arrested a bunch of people, they released them all without charges. It took a later wrongful death lawsuit to bring together at least some clues about what had happened. 

The boy, Qa’id Walker-Teal, had been on his bike in a schoolyard 100 yards from the house. The gun that shot him had been ed to Tupac. But that’s where the information ends. Tupac claimed he’d dropped the gun and someone else picked it up, and no one was able to prove who fired it or why. One says Tupac’s stepbrother fired the gun in the air as a warning shot after a group of attackers managed to worm their way into the group. 

The suit ended with Tupac agreeing to settle for a reported $300,000. He also went on to namedrop Qa’id in a song, blaming his enemies for the death. We’d like to imagine Qa’id would take the mention as an honor, but he wasn’t a Tupac fan. He was just a random kid playing. 

4 Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays

For the MLB to ban someone from the sport of baseball, you’d imagine that must be a response to the player doing something outrageous that invalidates their whole career. Perhaps they were caught using some special steroid that’s more powerful than the steroids everyone else is on, or maybe an investigation revealed that the player was secretly five ferrets standing on each other in a team uniform. 

But the league also banned baseball legends Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, for separate incidents but for the same reason. Both made the mistake of doing events where they signed autographs for fans in a Vegas casino. Gambling in sports was so frowned upon that even acting in a semi-official capacity in the rough vicinity of gambling was a bannable offense. 

The bans did not actually keep either men from playing in games, as neither were going to be playing in games anyway, since both were retired. Still, this kept them from making money through appearance fees, and a later commissioner lifted the bans in 1985.

Anyway, the gambling taboo certainly stands in contrast to today, when fans can be formally banned from sports if they’re caught not gambling. 

3 Nicolas Cage and Vince Neil

Las Vegas is also the setting for this next story. Nicolas Cage and Vince Neil were both staying at the Aria hotel in 2016, when a women approached them, asking for Cage’s autograph. Maybe she got a little persistent. Still, that probably didn’t justify Neil grabbing her by the hair and pulling her to the ground, which is what he did. 

We don’t have footage of the incident, but we do have footage of Cage and Neil outside immediately after. “Fuck you, stop this shit now!” yells Cage. Then the two fight, or hug, which are really the same thing when two guys are close enough. 

All this ended in actual criminal charges against Neil, who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault. That cost him a fine and landed him with six months of probation. The exact reason he overreacted that day remains undisclosed, but it may have been because the fan neglected to ask him for his autograph. 

2 Ciara

Los Angeles usually puts on concerts in June alongside their Gay Pride Festival, and in 2013, Ciara performed. While she was doing her song “Promise,” someone in the crowd reached up toward her with a piece of paper, and she took it, figuring this was obviously someone who wanted her autograph.

It was not. It was actually a process server, handing her papers announcing she was being sued. She had earlier been booked to play somewhere else that same night, and this Pride event conflicted with it. The other place had leapt into action to file suit against her.

Naturally, this was all very embarrassing for her. At Pride, you come to serve, not to be served. 

1 John Lennon

December 8, 1980, was quite a notable day for John Lennon. In the afternoon, he posed for a photoshoot by Annie Leibovitz, producing that famous photo of him nude and scrunched up around a clothed Yoko Ono. At night, someone shot him with a revolver and killed him. Between those two events, he signed an autograph for a fan. An onlooker took a photo of this g. 

The g might not sound like such a notable incident. Except, that guy who asked for Lennon’s autograph was Mark David Chapman, the same person who’d track him down and shoot him a few hours later.

Chapman asked Lennon to sign his album Double Fantasy, and that signed album would go on to sell at auction for $922,500. That set a record, and it makes us wrinkle our faces in puzzlement over the analysis that bidders use to decide how much to offer. We have to assume that one party thought that $920,000 was a reasonable price to pay but that raising the bid to $925,000 made no sense. 

“I wouldn’t pay nine twenty FIVE grand,” we imagine the loser saying. “That almost seems disrespectful. A man died.” 

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