From stars to criminals: the 5 expelled from Hollywood Academy

Will Smith resigned from Hollywood Academy two days after slapping Chris Rock in the middle of the 94th industry awards ceremony. He admitted that his habit of wandering was “shocking, painful and inexcusable” and asked to step aside. The Academy immediately accepted it and vetoed it for ten years.

Will likely slammed the door before he was expelled, among other things, to avoid being part of a select group of prominent personalities expelled from the entity for their heinous crimes. They were five and, with the exception of one, they had severely compromised justice.

1- Carmine Caridi

The only bizarre case on this list is that of actor Carmine Caridi, who had the misfortune to be the first to be expelled from the Academy. allegedly for lending some VHS.

Caridi is known for her small role in The Godfather II. A role he got out of pity, because Francis Ford Coppola called him after being convicted of leaving him in the first film of his famous trilogy.

Hollywood fired him in 2004 because they believed pirating the films the Academy gave him to watch before it was released. According to the actor’s version, it wasn’t him who copied the “two thousand” movies they gave him on his VCR, but a young man named Russell Sprague.

Sprague went to Carmine’s house to fix his VHS player and Caridi, noticing the young man’s admiration for his video library, gave him some movies (about 60) to watch at home. One noticed the business: he pirated the films given to him by the actor, he spread them to his acquaintances and published them on the Internet.

2- Harvey Weinstein

Harvey Weinsten’s case is paradigmatic. The producer of films such as Pulp Fiction and Shakespeare in Love was expelled from the Academy a month after the New York Times published a note in which various women accuse her of sexual harassment and abuse.

The endless accusations led the Academy to act without any hesitation. Today, the tycoon is serving a 23-year sentence.

3 Roman Polanski

The director of The Pianist and Rosemary’s Baby is an outlier. The Academy expelled her nearly twenty years after she fled the United States for accusing she received rape of a minor under the age of 13, in 1977, and in 2003, when she escaped several years ago to avoid jail, the entity that He awarded the Oscar for Best Picture in The Pianist.

The Academy decided to officially expel Polanski after the explosion of the #MeToo movement and the cases of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein.

They reviewed the Frenchman’s case and announced his expulsion almost simultaneously with Cosby’s: “The Board continues to encourage ethical standards that require members to uphold the Academy’s values ​​of respect for human dignity,” you can read in the statement released by the Academy when it removed the director.

4- Bill Cosby

Bill Cosby, like the previous two, was fired after dozens of women accused him of sexual harassment and abuse.

The star of The Bill Cosby Show was sentenced after he was accused by about 60 women of rape, drug-induced sexual abuse, sexual abuse, child sexual abuse and sexual misconduct. Cosby denied everything and the passage of time has led to prescribing many of the alleged crimes.

Eventually, the actor was found guilty of three counts of aggravated indecent assault and sentenced to three to 10 years in prison in September 2018. Soon after, Cosby was released because his conviction was overturned for legal subterfuge.

5- Adam Kimmel

Kimmel’s case is the most recent and less well known. The cinematographer of Capote and Lars and the real woman were kicked out in 2021 after records surfaced of two sex crimes committed by Kimmel in 2003 and 2010.

The director of photography was accused in both situations of sexual crimes against minors. After the first arrest, Kimmel was convicted of third-degree rape and after the second she was charged with fourth-degree sexual assault.