While not everyone framed for a horrible crime​​ goes on the run like Harrison Ford in The
Fugitive, the world is still full of grim cases of misplaced blame.
The following celebrities were all accused of crimes, but it was later discovered they
hadn't done the dirty deeds.
It's hard to imagine Keanu Reeves being accused of anything malicious.
He's got a reputation as one of the nicest guys in Hollywood, thanks to charitable actions
like giving up some of his potential Matrix earnings so that production could continue.
But in 2007, he was sued by a paparazzi photographer named Alison Silva.
It all evidently started when Silva followed Reeves to a medical facility, where the actor
was visiting a relative.
Reeves ignored the photographer, got in his car to leave, and inched forward.
At this point, Silva claimed that the actor crashed into him, causing a painful wrist
fracture that rendered him unable to lift the heavy camera that was necessary for his
profession.
Reeves disputed Silva's hit-and-run story, stating that Silva tripped over his own feet.
Silva demanded $700,000, but when the case made it to court, his so-called evidence shattered
worse than his wrist.
First, a radiologist's assessment showed Silva's wrist fracture was from a childhood soccer
injury rather than a recent incident.
More damaging, Reeves' defense team produced recent footage of Silva climbing over a fence
to snap a picture of Britney Spears, with the supposedly too heavy camera in hand.
Silva then admitted that his lawsuit was a cash grab and that he'd exaggerated his pain
levels.
The case was thrown out in less than two hours.
These days, Snoop Dogg is famous as one of the world's most beloved rap artists, his
friendship with Martha Stewart, and his open love and support of his favorite medicinal
plant.
But back in 1993, he faced an accusation that made headlines when the Los Angeles Times
reported he'd been charged with a deadly crime.
Witnesses claimed that the rapper and his bodyguard killed a man named Philip Woldemariam.
Two other suspects were arrested, and Snoop himself showed up at the police station alongside
his attorney.
He was freed on $1 million bail.
The case ended up lasting for three years, with the jurors ultimately believing Snoop
Dogg's defense.
His lawyers said that even though the rapper's bodyguard had shot Woldemariam, it had been
in self-defense, as Woldemariam had been threatening them with a gun.
Snoop Dogg was pronounced not guilty, and he left the courtroom holding his 2-year-old
son.
Nicolas Cage has gotten up to some crazy shenanigans over the years, but he made a point to prove
to the world that an outrageous dog-stealing story wasn't true.
The accusation came from actress Kathleen Turner, who starred alongside Cage in 1986's
Peggy Sue Got Married.
In Turner's autobiography Send Yourself Roses, she alleged that Cage had once happened upon
a chihuahua that he liked and placed it in his jacket.
She also claimed that the notoriously odd actor had been arrested twice for driving
drunk.
While Cage is famous for his eccentricities, he's also known for his love of animals, so
these claims got him pretty angry.
He sued Turner, and he must've done a good job of it because she eventually admitted
that her claims were false.
So no, Cage didn't get arrested for two DUIs, and he definitely didn't steal anyone's prized
chihuahua.
In June 2017, tennis star Venus Williams was involved in a terrible car accident in Palm
Beach Gardens, Florida.
Williams was driving about 5 miles per hour through an intersection when a Hyundai Accent
driven by a woman named Esther Linda Barson crashed into the passenger side of Williams'
car.
Though Williams herself was uninjured, Barson ended up with a cracked sternum and wrist,
and her 78-year-old husband, Jerome Barson, suffered ruptured arteries that took his life
a few weeks later.
Initially, Williams was blamed for the crash, with eyewitness reports stating that she'd
run a red light.
In the ensuing trial, video surveillance was brought to light as evidence, revealing that
the only reason Williams had slowed down in the intersection was to avoid crashing into
a Nissan Altima that had abruptly turned in front of her.
Furthermore, it turned out that Williams had actually driven through a green light, not
a red one.
In the end, this proved Williams wasn't responsible for the crash, though it rendered the accident
itself no less tragic.
Williams didn't blame Barson for the accident either.
Instead, she expressed her condolences and prayers to the Barsons for their loss.
"There's really words to describe it, how devastating and...yeah.
I'm completely speechless."
Amy Winehouse was one of the most iconic performers of the early 2000s, and her dramatic life
story is still being analyzed to this day.
She got into some legal troubles, but it's worth noting that when an incident involving
punching a dancer in the face ended up going to trial, Winehouse was found innocent.
She was backstage at the Prince's Trust Ball in central London's Berkeley Square in September
2008 when the burlesque dancer in question, Sherene Flash, tried to get a photo with her.
Winehouse reported feeling, quote, "intimidated and scared" by the dancer and asked her to
wait a few minutes before doing the photo op so she could first finish talking to a
friend.
Allegedly, Flash didn't abide by this request, and the dancer instead draped herself over
Winehouse's body.
Winehouse said that in response, she pushed Flash away out of fear, while Flash claimed
to have received a punch in the eye.
As for what really happened, almost all the witnesses were drunk at the time of the encounter,
which complicated things.
So the judge looked at the evidence on Flash's body.
A medical inspection of her face didn't demonstrate the sort of injury consistent with a punch
to the eye, lending credence to Winehouse's version of events.
As a result, the assault charges were dismissed.
Sean Combs, the rapper commonly known by such stage names as P. Diddy and Puff Daddy, faced
criminal allegations back at the dawn of the 21st century.
In December 1999, a confrontation in a Manhattan nightclub between men working for Combs and
a felon named Michael Allen led to a shooting that injured three people.
Charges were brought against Combs, his bodyguard, and his protege Jamal Barrow, also known as
Shyne.
The prosecution further claimed Combs had tried to bribe his driver with $50,000 to
say the gun was the driver's.
Combs said he had no role in the shooting, and further stated that when the shots were
fired, he had been scared that he was a target.
In 2001, both Combs and his bodyguard were eventually pronounced not guilty, much to
Combs' visible relief.
Combs would go on to deal with a far weirder and outlandishly falsified lawsuit 10 years
later when a woman named Valerie Turks sued him.
She not only accused the rapper of fathering her child 24 years earlier and never paying
child support, she also blamed him for stealing a casino chip worth "zillions of dollars."
Yes, zillions.
It gets even weirder: She also claimed that Combs had masterminded the 9/11 terrorist
attacks alongside his ex Kim Porter and Rodney King, the man who was brutally beaten up by
Los Angeles cops in 1991.
Unsurprisingly, this case didn't go anywhere.
Todd Bridges will forever be remembered for the NBC sitcom Diff'rent Strokes, in which
he played Willis Jackson, as in:
"What'chu talkin' 'bout, Willis?"
But in the decades since, Bridges has been in some rough situations.
To start, in 1989 he was charged with killing a man after reportedly firing eight rounds
into a convicted Texas drug dealer named Kenneth "Tex" Clay.
Bridges reported being high on cocaine at the time of the incident.
He had been using it every day at that time in his life.
But he also stated that even so, he didn't remember shooting Clay.
As the case concluded, Bridges was acquitted of the charges.
However, he still faced future charges of assault with a deadly weapon.
Less than a year later, he was arrested for cocaine possession.
Nonetheless, when the assault with a deadly weapon charges were finally brought against
him by late 1990, he was found not guilty, as the jurors argued that the prosecution
hadn't provided ample evidence.
Since those dark times, life seems to have turned around for Bridges, as he went on to,
among other things, write a memoir entitled Killing Willis: From Diff'rent Strokes to
the Mean Streets to the Life I Always Wanted.
"I love my life today.
My life is just totally amazing."
Though the singer of such classic songs as "Moonshadow" and "Wild World," today goes
by Yusuf Islam, the world will probably always remember him by his stage name, Cat Stevens.
In 2004, the British singer was flying to Washington D.C. from London when the plane
was diverted to Maine, where Islam was detained, questioned, and deported.
He was more confused about this than anybody, particularly when Homeland Security Secretary
Tom Ridge then publicly accused him of having connections with terrorist groups in the Middle
East.
Ridge didn't elaborate much on why the singer was on a terrorist watch list, but to groups
like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the unspoken reason was clear: Cat Stevens
was a high-profile convert to Islam with a record of donating to many Islamic charity
groups.
Islam himself found the whole thing "totally ridiculous," telling the press,
"Everybody knows who I am.
I am no secret figure.
Everybody knows my campaigning for charity, for peace.
There's got to be a whole lot of explanation."
Whatever weirdness happened back in 2004, it seems that the matter was resolved to Islam's
satisfaction over the next decade.
In 2014, he returned to the United States for a tour, proclaiming, quote, "I feel very
welcome now."
When Rubin "Hurricane" Carter first hit the middleweight boxing scene, he mesmerized TV
audiences with his speed and ferocity.
Ring Magazine named him one of the top middleweight contenders of 1963 after he knocked out 11
of his first 15 major opponents.
But then, after losing a title bout in 1964, even worse luck befell him.
In 1966, he was charged with a triple homicide and given three life sentences.
Allegations of racial bias in his trial stirred up immense controversy, and celebrities ranging
from Muhammad Ali to Burt Reynolds spoke up about how he should be freed.
Bob Dylan even wrote a song proclaiming Carter's innocence, and the ex-boxer himself penned
an autobiography from prison.
It wasn't until 1985 that a federal judge finally ruled that the original 1966 trial
had been prejudiced and agreed to release Carter back into the world.
By then, he had spent 19 years of his life in prison.
"My every day in prison was one of fighting against the entire prison system."
Carter went on to become an outspoken advocate for prisoners who were wrongly convicted of
crimes, just like him.
He served as the executive director of the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted
for 11 years, and his story was brought to the big screen in 1999's The Hurricane, with
Denzel Washington starring as Carter.
By his later years, Carter was seen as a source of inspiration for many.
He died in 2014 of prostate cancer.
Orlando Bowen, originally from Jamaica, made his name as a football player for the Canadian
Football League's Toronto Argonauts from 1999 to 2002.
Two years later, he won a new contract, and things were looking up, when suddenly he got
pulled over by two undercover cops.
These officers brutally beat him, planted cocaine on him, and threw him in the back
of their car.
The assault gave Bowen a concussion, and then he was left in a jail cell for 12 hours with
no medical attention.
As Bowen put it,
"Going back over what happened that night, there really are no other reasons other than
I'm a minority."
His lawyer agreed, telling the press,
"You don't need a statement from a police officer saying, 'I did this to him because
he's black.'
You can put two and two together."
As Bowen's case went to court, it was revealed that one of the arresting officers had been
dealing cocaine, and Bowen was pronounced innocent.
Unfortunately, his football career was finished due to the vicious concussion he sustained
during the attack.
In response, he filed a $14 million lawsuit against the police department, which was settled
out of court.
Since then, he's gone on to become a notable public speaker, and he even forgave the officers
who assaulted him.
"Even though difficult things may happen to us, and will happen to us, those things don't
have to determine who we are, first of all, or what we can become."
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