#7 - Jason Rohde
In July of 2016, prominent real estate executive Jason Rohde organized a company retreat
at the Spier Wine Estate in Stellenbosch, South Africa. As the CEO of the international luxury
realty brand Lew Geffen Sotheby’s, Rohde was a well-respected figure within the property
industry. While attending the retreat, he and his wife, Susan, had been staying at the Spier Wine
Farm Hotel. Rohde would later tell investigators that he’d awoken early on the morning of July the
24th to find that the bathroom door in the hotel room had been locked from the inside and that his
wife was nowhere to be found. He solicited the help of a maintenance worker, who managed to
open the locked door. Rohde claimed that he then made the horrific discovery that his wife was
dead. Susan’s body was found on the floor of the bathroom with the cord of a clothes iron wrapped
around her neck. The authorities initially assumed that the woman had taken her own life. However,
a medical examination of her corpse revealed it was far more likely that her cause of death
had been manual strangulation. Roughly a month later, law enforcement officers arrived at the
Rohdes’ Randburg home to arrest the real estate executive on suspicion of murdering his wife.
A police investigation uncovered that Rohde had been having an affair with a woman by the name of
Jolene Alterskye. Susan had reportedly discovered her husband’s infidelity, and the couple had
gotten into an argument the night before she was found dead. In the end, investigators
concluded that Rohde had fatally strangled his wife and staged the scene to make it appear as if
she’d hanged herself. He was ultimately convicted of the murder and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
#6 - Patrick Weeks The CEO of the U.S. Marshals Museum in Fort Smith,
Arkansas, was taken into police custody on December the 21st of 2021. The arrest of
53-year-old Patrick Weeks stemmed from allegations made by two employees of the regional utility
company Oklahoma Gas and Electric. The two men had reportedly been dispatched to Weeks’ neighborhood
in order to repair street lights near his house. According to the resulting police report,
Weeks had refused to allow the workers into his yard to make the repairs. A short time later,
the two men were sitting in their work truck when the homeowner approached them with a handgun and
pointed it in their direction. The workers then drove around the corner, but Weeks allegedly
pursued them on foot and continued to hold them at gunpoint. The men quickly left the neighborhood
and reported the incident to local authorities. Police officers arrived at Weeks’ residence, at
around 3 pm, whereupon they found the man sitting in an armchair with a pistol set down next to him.
The weapon reportedly matched the description of the one that had been used to threaten the utility
workers, and Weeks was then arrested and charged with two felony counts of aggravated assault.
#5 - Sam Johnson On April the 24th of 2021, a
high school senior named Dalton Stevens was at the Harpeth Hotel, in downtown Franklin, Tennessee,
where he and his boyfriend planned to take pictures before going to their prom. The
18-year-old soon became the target of ridicule and harassment of a man who was later identified as
Sam Johnson, the CEO of the telehealth technology company VisuWell. Stevens’ boyfriend recorded the
degrading exchange in which the 46-year-old man had hurled verbal abuse at the teen for
wearing a red dress. The 45-second video, which later went viral after being posted to TikTok,
showed Johnson insulting Stevens incessantly and making several comments that were described as
homophobic in nature. At one point, the VisuWell executive reportedly attempted to knock the phone
out of the boyfriend’s hands, but ended up hitting Stevens instead. Bystanders pleaded
with Johnson to stop the harassment, although it wasn’t reported how the altercation concluded
after the recording had been cut off. Franklin police officers arrived at the scene, in response
to the incident, at which point Johnson vehemently denied accusations that he’d harassed the
teenager. The video of the heated exchange spread quickly with the help of comedian Kathy Griffin,
who posted it to her Twitter account on April the 26th. A few days later, it was reported that
Johnson had been fired from his executive position at VisuWell. In August of 2021, the disgraced CEO
reportedly filed a lawsuit against his former employer in which he alleged that his termination
had been unjustly prompted by “an incomplete, edited, and out-of-context cell phone video clip”.
#4 - Gurbaksh Chahal On August the 5th of 2013, Silicon
Valley tech mogul Gurbaksh Chahal was captured on CCTV footage brutally beating his girlfriend
inside his multi-million dollar San Francisco penthouse. The 34-year-old CEO of the online
marketing company RadiumOne was consequently taken into custody and charged with a total of
47 felony counts. His arrest occurred after law enforcement officials had obtained the 30-minutes
of security footage that allegedly showed Chahal striking and kicking his girlfriend an estimated
117 times, before attempting to strangle her. The tech executive’s attorneys successfully contended
that the security video had been illegally seized by the authorities,
and a judge ruled that the footage was therefore inadmissible as evidence in court. As a result,
most of Chahal’s charges were dropped, and he ultimately pleaded guilty to just
two misdemeanor counts of domestic violence. Chahal’s eroding reputation continued to degrade
as he was pushed out as RadiumOne’s CEO. He would later deny the assault accusations in a blog post,
claiming that he’d simply lost his temper during a “normal argument” with his girlfriend but hadn’t
beaten her. Chahal was sentenced to three years of probation and was also ordered to undergo a
52-week domestic violence rehabilitation course. In 2016, the disgraced millionaire executive was
accused of domestic violence by a second woman, an incident that was considered a violation of
his probation. He subsequently resigned from his position as CEO of Gravity4, a software company
he’d started in 2014. Chahal was also sentenced to serve 6 months in San Francisco County Jail
following his second offense. #3 - Steve Easterbrook
In March of 2015, McDonald’s senior executive vice president and chief brand officer Steve
Easterbrook became the company’s CEO after his predecessor had stepped down a few months prior.
That same year, it emerged that Easterbrook had been romantically involved with 46-year-old
Denise Paleothodoros, who’d been assigned to work alongside McDonald’s public relations department
by the PR firm Golin. Although the fast food giant had a policy that forbade managers from engaging
in romantic relationships with subordinates, the board of directors ultimately concluded that
Easterbrook’s involvement with Paleothodoros didn’t violate the company’s code of ethics.
In 2019, reports surfaced that Easterbrook had developed a relationship with yet another company
employee, at which point the board voted to remove him as chief executive officer. McDonald’s
later filed a lawsuit against the former executive in which they alleged that he’d been
untruthful regarding the number and extent of his relationships with subordinate employees during
his tenure as the company’s CEO. Court documents revealed that Easterbrook had allegedly been
involved with a total of three female subordinates in the year before his termination, and had even
awarded one of them stock options worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The company also claimed
that the former CEO had used his corporate email account to exchange explicit photographs
and videos with his various love interests. In December of 2021, Easterbrook reportedly returned
$105 million in cash and stock to the company in what was described as one of the largest clawbacks
in the history of corporate America. #2 - Elizabeth Holmes
In 2003, entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes founded the biotechnology firm Theranos in Palo Alto,
California. The company’s expressed purpose was to “democratize healthcare”
and, by the end of the decade, Holmes’ venture was valued at upwards of $92 million. In 2015,
Forbes listed the 31-year-old CEO as the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire
in the United States after Theranos had risen to a $9 billion valuation. The impetus for the
company’s exponential growth was attributed to their purportedly revolutionary work. They
claimed to have developed innovative procedures in which unprecedentedly small samples of blood could
be used to run effective blood tests. In spite of legal and financial threats from Holmes herself,
journalist John Carreyrou published an article, in October of 2015, which delivered a devastating
blow to Theranos’ reputation and its CEO’s public standing. Carreyrou claimed that Holmes had lied
about her company’s supposedly pioneering work in the field of health technology. She’d allegedly
misled investors and the US government regarding the accuracy of Theranos’ blood-testing methods.
Holmes consequently faced fraud charges from the US Security and Exchange Commission. She
was forced to pay a half million dollar fine, return $18.9 million in shares to Theranos,
and relinquish voting control of the company. The former executive was also banned from serving as
an officer or director of a public company for ten years. Holmes and her former COO later faced
criminal charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. In January of 2022,
she was convicted of defrauding Theranos investors but wasn’t found guilty of defrauding the
company’s medical patients. She was scheduled to be sentenced for her crimes on September the 26th
of 2022. The maximum available penalty for Holmes’ charges was reported as being
20 years in federal prison and millions of dollars in fines and restitution payments.
#1 - Martin Shkreli On December the 17th of 2015,
FBI agents descended on the Manhattan residence of former hedge fund manager
Martin Shkreli. The reviled business executive, who served as the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals,
was taken into custody in connection to a federal indictment that had been filed in
the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Shkreli had become a controversial
figure leading up to his arrest due to his company obtaining the manufacturing licenses to various
drugs and then grossly raising the prices. The most notable case was with the antiparasitic
Daraprim, which Turing sold at $750 per pill from the previous $13.5, an increase by a factor of
56. As per the federal indictment, Shkreli had defrauded investors while he was in command of
the hedge fund MSMB Capital Management and the biopharmaceutical company Retrophin. Federal
prosecutors likened Shkreli’s fraudulent operation to that of a Ponzi scheme, as he had perpetually
relied upon new investments to pay back old debts associated with the funds. Unbeknownst to MSMB
Capital’s investors, however, Shkreli had actually lost all of the hedge fund’s investments and was
using false performance updates to convey the illusion that it was still financially
prosperous. He also allegedly siphoned money from his company, Retrophin, to pay off personal and
professional debts that he’d accumulated while running the scheme. In total, Retrophin and its
investors lost an estimated $11 million due to Shkreli’s misuse of company funds. Following
his arrest, he was charged with conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to
commit wire fraud. In August of 2017, the former pharmaceutical executive was found guilty by a
jury of his peers, and he was ultimately sentenced to 7 years in a federal prison.
Shkreli was also ordered to forfeit nearly $7.4 million in assets and pay $388,000 in restitution.
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