Getty ImagesIf history has taught us anything, it's that the truth eventually comes out.
And yet, someone is always lying about something. Despite the inevitability that they'll get caught, people are more than willing to set their own pants on fire.
E! News caught Brooks Ayers in a doozy this week when Southern California cancer treatment center City of Hope confirmed to us that he had never been treated there, prompting the Real Housewives of Orange County star to admit to falsifying documents.
He insists he really was ill, but let's just say this revelation has done nothing for his reputation around the RHOC water cooler, let alone the public that now knows him mainly as a reality-TV personality who faked a story about cancer treatments.
But sadly, Brooks is far from alone. Entertainers, politicians, authors and so many others in the public eye have been caught telling lies over the years, some of the innocuous "I'm actually not this age but that age" variety, and some that were infinitely more serious.
Remember these famous lies and the liars who told them?
1. James Frey: The only thing worse than everyone knowing you lied? Having Oprah Winfrey looking you in the eye and pointedly asking you why you "felt the need to lie." After Winfrey got sucked into the backlash once it came out that Frey had fabricated the most compelling parts of his 2003 so-called-memoir A Million Little Pieces, an official selection of Oprah's Book Club in 2005, she couldn't wait to get him in the hot seat. Among Frey's fictions: he had spent three months in jail and once underwent dental surgery without Novocain. "In order to get through the experience of the addiction, I thought of myself as being tougher than I was and badder than I was, and it helped me cope," Frey admitted in January 2006. "And when I was writing the book, instead of being as introspective as I should have been, I clung to that image."
2. Steve Rannazzisi: The stand-up comedian and a star of FX's fantasy-sports comedy The League made the wrong kind of name for himself when it was revealed in September that a story he'd been telling since 2009 about escaping from one of the Twin Towers on 9/11 was not true. "The moving-on process is apologizing to the people that I truly hurt," a repentant Rannazzisi told Howard Stern last month.
3. John Edwards: We were having trouble with this solution to our crossword the other night, "Kerry's running-mate in 2004," and now we know why. Presumably we had tried to block out his name. But it's tough to forget the former Democratic senator's denial that he had fathered a child with mistress Rielle Hunter (not to mention the initial denial that he had a mistress), which was followed by his admission in 2013 that he was indeed the father of Hunter's then-2-year-old daughter.
"It was wrong for me ever to deny she was my daughter and hopefully one day, when she understands, she will forgive me," stated the former presidential and vice-presidential candidate, who in 2007 called the National Enquirer exposé on his affair "tabloid trash that's full of lies." He continued: "I have been providing financial support for [daughter] Quinn and have reached an agreement with her mother to continue providing support in the future. To all those I have disappointed and hurt these words will never be enough, but I am truly sorry."
His wife, Elizabeth Edwards, who had been battling breast cancer since 2004, died in 2010.
4. Belle Gibson: The wellness blogger and cookbook author admitted to lying about having terminal cancer to help plug her brand, which relied on her claim that she had beaten brain cancer by adopting certain diet and lifestyle changes. "None of it's true," she confessed to Australian Women's Weekly. "I am still jumping between what I think I know and what is reality. I have lived it and I'm not really there yet." The lid was blown off the lie when Fairfax Media reportedly discovered that money she had raised had never reached the charities she claimed the money was for.
5. Manti Te'o: Who did what and why remains fuzzy, but the football star admitted in 2013 that he had made up a story about having a girlfriend who had died of leukemia the previous year, just as college-football season was getting underway. Te'o claimed he was catfished and therefore was too embarrassed to tell the truth.
"Katie, put yourself in my situation," the fan-favorite linebacker, who went pro that year and now plays for the San Diego Chargers, told Katie Couric in trying to explain why he kept talking about her as if she was real during Notre Dame's run to the Bowl Championship Series title game in 2012-2013. "I, my whole world, told me that she died on Sept. 12. Everybody knew that. This girl, who I committed myself to, died on Sept. 12."
And?
6. Josh Shaw: In other embarrassing college-athletics news, the USC cornerback told his team in August 2014 that he injured both ankles in a jump from a second-story balcony in order to get to the pool to save his nephew from drowning. Nope, turned out he made a painful exit from an apartment balcony reportedly because cops had arrived in response to a call about a loud fight he was having with his girlfriend. No potential drowning victim in sight. He was briefly suspended from Trojans football, but was reinstated in time to play the final three games of the season. He was selected in the fourth round of the NFL draft by the Cincinnati Bengals earlier this year.
7. Lance Armstrong: Blood is thicker than arrogance, Lance. And urine probably is for that matter, too. The seven-time Tour de France champion and cancer survivor adamantly denied cheating in the face of doping allegations that started all the way back in 1999. "I have never had a single positive doping test, and I do not take performance-enhancing drugs," he said in 2004. In 2005: "I have never doped. I can say it again, but I've said it for seven years." In 2010: "As long as I live, I will deny it. There was absolutely no way I forced people, encouraged people, told people, helped people, facilitated. Absolutely not. One hundred percent." In 2012, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency concluded that he had, in fact, used performance-enhancing drugs.
Armstrong opted not to fight the findings and he was stripped of his seven titles, but he said that year, "I have never doped."
Only in 2013 did he admit it. "All the fault and all the blame here falls on me," he told Oprah, to whom all truths are inevitably told. "I viewed this situation as one big lie that I repeated a lot of times. I made my decisions. They are my mistakes, and I am sitting here today to acknowledge that and to say I'm sorry for that."
8. Bill Clinton: It's not every day that a lie leads to an impeachment (though if it did, maybe people would tell fewer of them). But the two-term president of the United States proved as vulnerable as any average Joe when his "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" denial about having relations with Monica Lewinsky turned out to be what another gentleman close to the White House these days would call "malarkey."
Months later, he said in a national address, "I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression. I misled people, including even my wife. I deeply regret that...Indeed I did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible."
Clinton denied all of the charges that led to his impeachment, however, and he was ultimately cleared in February 1999.