The 6 Most Outlandish Claims Made By Celebrities

There are some celebrities who have told tales so tall you could see your house from them.

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We've run plenty of articles on this site about celebrities who have amazing life stories. We've also run plenty of articles about celebrities who have been amazing liars. But there are some celebrities who have told tales so tall that you could see your house from them, but no one can actually prove that they're bullshit. So in the spirit of averting a lawsuit, here are some wildly improbable celebrity stories that we're not allowed to say didn't really happen ...

6. Jackie Chan Claims To Have Fought Off The Hong Kong Mafia With Guns And Grenades

It's hard to imagine Jackie Chan having any enemies. He's the goofy uncle of action stars, the kind of guy who can kick your ass while in the midst of comically falling down an escalator. But if you believe a 2012 interview Chan gave for the Chinese magazine Southern People Weekly, he had a serious beef with the Hong Kong Triads for decades, a war that he ultimately won by obliterating them with the kind of an arsenal even Rambo would find excessive.

According to Chan, he first became a victim of the Triads when they started extorting him and his actor friends for money. The constant terrorizing reached the point where he was forced to move to America, fearing for his life. Afterwards, he alleges that they opened fire on him at an airport the moment he stepped off the plane. Remember when you could smoke a guy in an airport? 9/11 ruined that for everyone.

Eventually, Chan returned to Hong Kong, ready to settle the score. As expected (inside Chan's imagination), when he was dining at a restaurant, "more than 20 people surrounded armed with melon knives." However, this time he was ready -- he stood up and confronted his attackers, pulling a gun on them. According to Chan, he had two other guns concealed on him at the time, as well as six grenades. Apparently, if you attack Jackie Chan in real life, he eschews his incredible martial arts ability and just blows you the fuck away.

Chan didn't disclose how the confrontation ended, but after the article was published, the Hong Kong police took notice, because it turns out that carrying hidden weapons and grenades is all sorts of illegal over there. After the interview, an investigation was opened into the incident. However, it was quietly closed again with no arrests or consequences. Which is exactly the result you would expect if it turned out that the entire thing, you know, didn't happen. Not that we're suggesting that.

5. NASCAR Racer Kurt Busch Testified In Court That His Ex-Girlfriend Is Secretly An Assassin

In 2015, Patricia Driscoll, the ex-girlfriend of famously hot-tempered NASCAR champion Kurt Busch, accused him of domestic violence and went to court to try to obtain a restraining order. In his defense, Busch offered the most insane counter-argument in American legal history: that Driscoll is in fact an assassin.

In many cases in which some idiot is accused of beating up his girlfriend, he'll whip out the old "she started it" misogynist gambit. But when questioned in court over the alleged abuse, Busch opted for the somewhat less popular "she kills people for money" insane person gambit. According to Busch and his lawyer, who must've bought his degree from the back of a Silver Age comic book, Driscoll was secretly working as a covert assassin for the CIA the entire time that they were dating. Specifically, Driscoll's after-hours activities involved "killing drug lords via long-range sniper rifles and close combat tactics, including the use of knives and poison." Remember all those news stories about drug dealers in Daytona Beach being sniped to death? Yeah, us neither.

Of course, his evidence backing up this wild accusation wasn't great either. It basically boiled down to claiming his CIA GF sometimes bragged about her murders, and one night slipped out of their hotel room in camouflage gear, only to return hours later in a bloodsoaked ball gown. If that sounds like the opening scene of a dumb action movie screenplay, Driscoll thought so too. She argued that Busch had concocted this entire scenario from a screenplay that she had been working on about a female assassin. Which, in fairness, is exactly the kind of cover story that you'd expect from an elite assassin.

But, you might wonder, what does this drivel have to do with a domestic violence case? Well, Busch argued that he couldn't possibly assault a woman who knows a hundred ways to snap a guy's neck the moment he looks at her funny. After all, no hamster-cheeked dweeb could ever truly assault a badass like, say, Terry Crews, right? Except that they totally can, and Busch might be the dumbest man to have ever qualified for a driver's license.

Somehow, the judge ruled against Busch and granted the restraining order, declaring Busch's testimony to be "implausible." We're not sure why, but the fact that Driscoll is a free woman and Busch still hasn't fled the country out of fear of getting a high-caliber bullet to the temple mid-race tells us he might not believe his own bullshit either.

Of course, she may have gone on to steal $600,000 from injured veterans, in case you were worried anyone involved wasn’t an asshole.

4. James Blunt Claimed He Personally Averted World War III

As we've already covered, sickly sweet love ballad crooner James Blunt was once a badass captain of the British Army who fought combat missions in Kosovo during the Yugoslav Wars. What you didn't know is that, at least according to Blunt, the guy who gives your grandmother twinges she hadn't felt since the Reagan administration is the sole reason that we're not all speaking Russian right now, with all their crazy backwards R's and N's and whatever this is:

Seriously, without context, how many of you would’ve guessed this was Klingon?

In 2010, Blunt recounted to the BBC a conflict during which he personally averted World War III. According to Blunt, he was ordered to attack and secure an airfield by a superior. But before Captain Blunt (whose name his subordinates must've gotten a lot of mileage out of) could reach the airfield, it had been taken by Russian forces. Nevertheless, American general Wesley Clark ordered Blunt to "destroy" the Russians and take the runway, even if it meant reducing the whole planet to a Mad Max-style nuclear dystopia.

Thankfully, Blunt ignored the order to launch a first strike against Russian soldiers, even though he knew it would probably result in him being court-martialed, stating, "There are things you do along the way that you know are right, and those that you absolutely feel are wrong" -- an instinct he somehow lost right before recording "You're Beautiful."

Thankfully, Blunt was immediately backed by a British general, who according to Blunt told the Yank, "I'm not going to have my soldiers be responsible for starting World War III." Now, we're not saying that a conflict between Russian and NATO forces at Pristina Airfield never happened (it has its own Wikipedia article, so we assume it's legit), but it'd be a slightly weirder and more wonderful world if future history textbooks would have to pay homage to James Blunt for singlehandedly saving the world.

3. Orson Welles Claimed That He Forgot He Met Hitler

Orson Welles was one of the greatest movie directors of his time, changing the face of both cinema and The Simpsons with Citizen Kane. However, in his later years, Welles developed a reputation for being a bit unpredictable, which is showbiz talk for "he stopped giving a damn." He babbled through wine ads, gave surreal Transformers performances, and generally couldn't be bothered with the opinions of other people. Which would explain why he once went on a talk show and made the wildest claim ever made on television: He had met Hitler, but he was too boring to remember.

In 1970, Welles was a guest on The Dick Cavett Show. After discussing his world travels during his youth, Welles was quizzed by the host about whether he'd ever met any world leaders, and Welles nonchalantly replied that he'd once had dinner with none other than Adolf Hitler himself. According to Welles, he was once hiking through Austria and Germany with some German kid who was a member of a "comical kind of minority party of nuts that nobody took seriously," or as we now know them, the Nazis. Due to his friendship with his Nazi pal, Welles claimed he was eventually invited to dinner with this "tiny little party of cranks." During this dinner, he was seated next to Hitler himself, whom Welles insisted he couldn't remember a single thing about -- Hitler was so phenomenally boring and devoid of personality that the entire experience was wiped from Welles' memory.

Now, we're no mathematicians (a judge told us we're no longer allowed to make that claim), but there are a few chronological squiggles that don't add up here. For starters, Welles was born in 1915, so Hitler had been the leader of the Nazi party since Welles was six, and had attained a powerful role in German politics by the time he was ten. Any later than that, and a pimply Welles would have been shot as an American spy long before he could smell the Fuhrer's bad sausage breath.

This leads us to the most important issue: the seating arrangement. Did Welles really expect us to believe that a random American child was not only invited to dine with the leaders of a major German political party as a plus one, but then wound up sitting next to the militant leader of this organization at the head table? When Hillary Clinton was giving a speech at the DNC, we didn't see a slightly tubby German kid sidle up to her with a large plate of pasta. Though maybe we shouldn't be too hard on Welles. Maybe he figured out that the worst thing you can say about a megalomaniac leader spouting hateful rhetoric is that they're utterly forgettable. Speaking of which ...

2. Tom Arnold Insists He Has Tapes Of Donald Trump Using The N-Word

Tom Arnold is the actor most famous for starring in True Lies alongside a much more famous Arnold, and for being briefly married to Roseanne Barr. The guy kind of struggles with relevancy, is what we're saying. But in 2016, shortly after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election, he finally found a way to crawl back into the limelight. He did so by going on a radio show and announcing that he possesses secret tapes of the newly elected president being openly racist -- as opposed to all the times he has been on live television being a massive, open racist.

The tapes, which Arnold claims were made during a recording of The Apprentice, supposedly capture Trump dropping the N-bomb more often than he lies about the economy. He says Trump is also heard dropping some C-bombs, as well as "calling his son a retard." It is impossible to know which son he could be referring to.

Of course, the media had many questions. For instance, how did Tom Arnold wind up with these tapes? Can we see them? Who made the original recording? Can we see them? How would it influence Trump's reelection chances? Can we see them? But despite being hammered by the press to elaborate on his claims, Arnold has never proved the existence of the evidence, always responding to requests with some variation of "Ehh, it won't make any difference."

It's tempting to believe that he's doing some kind of bit -- Arnold is a comedian, after all. But every time he's asked about the alleged tapes, he doubles down on both their authenticity and his absolute refusal to prove it. Most recently, on an episode of the Australian reality TV show I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here, Arnold repeated the claim to another contestant, with additional details. He says that two days before the election, he got a phone call from Hillary Clinton herself, who begged him to release the tapes. She told him, "The weight of the free world is on your shoulders." Hold on, that's exactly the kind of corny dialogue that a character in True Lies would deliver. Does ... does Tom Arnold think he's still in True Lies?

1. Steven Seagal's Entire Life Is Implausible

Steven Seagal has the tremendous honors of being both the silliest of B-movie action heroes and the one who takes himself the most seriously. He's the only one to consistently refuse to appear in the Expendables movies because he considers everyone else in the films to be beneath him. And he's absolutely right, because Seagal is the most amazing warrior in the world ... if you were to believe a word of what he says.

According to Seagal himself, most of his life has been like the plot of an action movie so bad that it ironically couldn't even get Seagal to play the main role. His tall tales start all the way back in the '80s. Receiving his martial arts training in Japan as a young man, Seagal returned to the island to be the very first foreigner to ever run a dojo. That's impressive on its own, but not impressive enough for a man like Seagal. During his time as a teacher, he claimed to have singlehandedly won a turf war against the Yakuza. In fact, he was such a legendary sensei that his students began worshiping him as a literal god, and so he ran off to Hollywood because "deification is a death trap." Only a true master would realize that immortality does not lie in worship and respect, but in the two-for-one bargain bin at Blockbusters.

Turns out godhood is way stupider than anyone could’ve guessed.

After Seagal moved back to America, he married the hologram dream girl from Weird Science and started making movies. Again, these are autobiography-worthy achievements, but Seagal needed there to be more. In 1988, he told The LA Times that he'd been working as a covert CIA agent for a decade after being recruited for his amazing fighting skills. He claimed to have pulled security detail for the Shah of Iran during the Iranian Revolution, as well as for Desmond Tutu and the president of Egypt. Seagal even claims that his first movie, Above The Law, in which he plays a covert CIA agent, was based on his life, which explains why it's so hard to accept Seagal as an actor throughout the movie.

Of course, the CIA neither confirms nor denies that Seagal ever worked for them (though you'll get a similar answer if you ask them about contact with Martians), but legit CIA mercenary Gary Goldman heavily doubts his story. Goldman himself claims to have been on a rafting trip with Seagal, during which Seagal had to be rescued due to rough waters, during which he cried and panicked. According to Goldman, not only did he not believe that Seagal had ever been a secret agent, but he "would surely die of starvation if he was given a compass and a map that led to a restaurant five miles away."

Seagal's career has dramatically waned in recent years, but that has only led to a rise in absurd claims. During his 2009 reality show Steven Seagal: Lawman, in which he cosplayed as a Louisiana policeman, Seagal claimed to have been working as a fully legit detective for the past two decades, in secret, solving "major cases" for the Louisiana PD. So secret, in fact, that the police department can't find any record of him working for them. That only means that he was really deep undercover, like in The Departed, which we assume is also based on his life.