Warning: This post mentions rape, domestic violence, abuse, and drug addiction.

Plenty of celebrities publish memoirs (or even multiple memoirs) throughout their lives, but what if they have a secret so scandalous, they don't want it to see the light of day until they're gone? Well, as it happens, some of the most shocking celebrity memoirs have been published posthumously.

Here are 14 shocking secrets celebs didn't reveal until after their deaths:

Lisa Marie and her first husband amicably ended their marriage after Michael professed his love for her on a Vegas trip. She wrote, "Michael said, 'I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm completely in love with you. I want us to get married and for you to have my children.' I didn't say anything immediately, but then I said, 'I'm really flattered, I can't even talk.' By then, I felt I was in love with him too." At the time, Lisa Marie was 25, and Michael was 35. They were married from 1994 to 1996.

2. Lisa Marie also shared that, following the death of her son, Benjamin Keough, in 2020, she kept his body on dry ice at home for two months with the help of a funeral director. She also had a hard time deciding whether she should bury him in Hawaii or at Graceland. She wrote, "That was part of why it took so long. I got so used to him, caring for him and keeping him there. I think it would scare the living fucking piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that. But not me. I felt so fortunate that there was a way that I could still parent him, delay it a bit longer so that I could become okay with laying him to rest."

Lisa Marie's daughter, Riley Keough, who helped finish the book after her mother's passing, added that the two of them got tattoos in Benjamin's honor before his burial. They wanted tattoos similar to the ones he had of their names, so they brought the tattoo artist into the room where his body was to take a closer look. Riley wrote, "I've had an extremely absurd life, but this moment is in the top five... [Soon after] we all got this vibe from my brother that he didn't want his body in this house anymore. 'Guys,' he seemed to be saying, 'This is getting weird.' Even my mom said that she could feel him talking to her, saying, 'This is insane, Mom, what are you doing? What the fuck!'"

3. In Glow, legendary funk singer Rick James wrote that, after his mother's death, "There was nothing to keep me from descending into the lowest level of hell. That meant orgies. That meant sado-masochism. That even meant bestiality."

4. In Call Me Anne, Anne Heche revealed that making her relationship with Ellen DeGeneres red-carpet official devastated her career. When she wanted to take Ellen as her date to the 1997 premiere of Volcano, four "suits" confronted the couple in a meeting. Anne wrote, "The first time you experience discrimination in the eyes of the people who represent you is the moment you decide who you are as an artist. I had already decided who I was as a person, but I hadn't been confronted as an artist until this moment. I looked at Ellen. She looked at me, consoling, as if to say, 'It's okay. Do this. We'll deal with your conundrum over it when it's over. I'll be waiting for you at home.'"

She continued, "There's not one moment that has defined my life more than that one. Anne, the artist, Anne, the daughter of a man who had hidden his sexuality — we're all the same person. I had no idea how much that one decision would impact my life and what I gave up for that decision... [After the movie, Anne and Ellen were] led through a back entrance, and shoved into our limousine so that there would be no pictures of us taken at the afterparty. The next day, I was fired from a multi-million-dollar-picture deal by Fox, then blacklisted. It would be ten years before I did another studio picture. I felt like patient zero in the cancel culture."

5. Anne also detailed a sex scene-gone-wrong with costar Alec Baldwin in The Juror. She wrote, "The patch of underwear they gave me for filming was just shy of a Band-Aid. It was meant to cover me enough to keep the sex scene from being a little too realistic, without showing up on camera." However, during filming, the underwear slipped. To make matters worse, Anne was on her period, and she bled all over herself, Alec, and the bed. But as the crew cleaned up, Alec purportedly just smiled at her and said, "Let's make the next take hotter."

When Alec appeared on Anne's podcast 25 years later, she brought up the story, but he didn't remember. She wrote, "He only remembered that lunch was called early — he did not remember why. It's highly possible that your most embarrassing moments are way more monumental to you than anyone else."

6. Old Hollywood star Loretta Young didn't write a memoir, but her authorized biography, Forever Young: The Life, Loves, and Enduring Faith of a Hollywood Legend by Joan Wester Anderson, was published after her death. The book revealed Loretta's most long-held secret: Her supposedly adopted daughter, Judy Lewis, was actually her biological daughter, and her Call of the Wild costar Clark Gable was the father.

Sadly, the full truth was much darker than Loretta shared. On the sleeper train ride home from Mount Baker after shooting Call of the Wild, Clark allegedly date-raped her. However, she didn't understand what had happened until decades later, when she heard the term "date rape" on TV. After asking a friend to explain it, she said, "That's what happened between Clark and me." Her daughter-in-law, Linda Lewis, told BuzzFeed News, "She was so humiliated, and what she would do when she was humiliated was just 'on with the show.' Because she had been trained since the age of 3, you put a good face on it, and you go forward. She knew she'd have to continue working with him."

As rumors circulated that Clark (who was married at the time) and Loretta had an affair, they finished filming their final scenes on the backlot. Loretta found out she was pregnant, but as a devout Catholic, she didn't want an abortion. So, her family helped her hide the pregnancy. After giving birth, she reportedly hid her daughter in orphanages and with other caretakers for the first 19 months of her life, lied about adopting her, and surgically altered the child's ears when she was 7 to hide her true parentage.

7. In Marvin Gaye, My Brother, recording artist Frankie Gaye revealed his famous brother's purported last words after being shot by their father the day before his 45th birthday. According to Frankie, Marvin said, "I got what I wanted… I couldn't do it myself, so I made him do it."

Their father was reportedly a Hebrew Pentecostal pastor who abused his children. Several months before his untimely death, Marvin moved back in with his parents because he was struggling with drug misuse, depression, and debt. On April 1, 1984, Marvin and his father got into an argument, which turned physical. As his mother tried to calm him down, his father grabbed the gun that Marvin had gifted him and shot him in the chest three times. Frankie, who lived next to their parents, held Marvin as he died.

8. In Insomnia, musician Robbie Robertson, who famously played guitar for Bob Dylan and was also the principal songwriter for the Band, alleged that, when he was working on The Last Waltz with Martin Scorsese, the director's assistant took so many sleeping pills that their mouth froze. The assistant was panicking, so Robbie rolled up a $20 bill and had them do three lines of coke. It worked. Robbie told the director, "Medicine is medicine."

9. Prince had only handwritten 28 pages about growing up for his memoir, The Beautiful Ones, before his death, but his chosen co-writer, Dan Piepenbring, completed the work. In the book, Prince revealed that his stepdad taught him about sex by taking him and a few friends to see "a raggedy R-rated [age-restricted] drive-in movie." However, Prince felt that this wasn't a very good way to be taught about sex. He shared that he thought that "the talk" should start with a specific book of the Bible, writing, "Having the Song of Solomon read & discussed with U by someone who loves U."

10. In The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, Paul Newman said that, after meeting his second wife, Joanne Woodward, he "went from being not much of a sexual threat to something else entirely." At the time, he was still married to his first wife, but he and Joanne had an affair. He described it as "brutal in [his] detachment from [his] family."

One night, after he'd divorced his first wife and married Joanne, she gave their bedroom a mini makeover with fresh paint and a "thriftshop double bed." He wrote, "'I call it the Fuck Hut,' she said proudly. It had been done with such affection and delight. Even if my kids came over, we'd go into the Fuck Hut several nights a week and just be intimate and noisy and ribald."

11. Ozzy Osbourne reflected on his experience with drug addiction in Last Rites, writing that drugs "help you bury some dark [expletive] in your past." The shame he felt growing up with dyslexia contributed to the darkness he felt. He wrote, "Having to get up and read in class when I couldn't make sense of the words felt like a fate worse than death." He was also haunted by a "sense of impending doom that followed me wherever I went."

12. Katharine Hepburn had a nearly 30-year affair with Spencer Tracy, who wouldn't divorce his wife, Louise Treadwell, because of his Catholic faith. In Kate Remembered, the posthumous biography written by Kate's friend A. Scott Berg, she said that Spencer once hit her as she tried to get him to bed. The author wrote, "He smacked the back of his hand across her face. She said he was so drunk she believed he neither knew that he'd done it nor that he'd remember."

He continued, "Dignity prevented her from telling him the next day — not hers so much as protecting his. She made her separate peace, privately forgiving him but never forgetting. 'Did you ever think of walking out?' I asked, our eyes now meeting. 'What would have been the point?' she asked. 'I mean, I loved him. And I wanted to be with him. If I had left, we both would have been miserable.'"

13. In Last Words, comedian George Carlin reflected on his and his first wife, Brenda Hosbrook's, drug misuse. He said that, on a family vacation to Hawaii, they waved knives at each other. Their daughter, who was only 10 at the time, witnessed the event and made them sign a contract promising they'd stop doing coke and weed. However, they ultimately didn't honor the contract. When they got home to California, George realized the sun looked different and became convinced it had exploded. So, he hurried to take his wife and daughter outside, and for eight minutes, he screamed that the world was ending in eight minutes. Eventually, he realized this wasn't true. Soon after, both George and Brenda sought sobriety.

14. And finally, in Everybody Came to Tana's: An American Dream Come True, Dan Tana, the restaurateur who founded the Italian restaurant and Hollywood hotspot Dan Tana's, revealed that O.J. Simpson used to be a regular at his iconic restaurant. However, after the former NFL player was accused of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, Dan himself told him to never return to Dan Tana's. O.J. was later acquitted of the murders.

However, that wasn't the restaurant's only connection to a true crime case. He wrote, "One night I will never forget: August 9, 1969. Celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, who had dated Sharon Tate, was hosting a party of six people at the restaurant. In the middle of dinner, someone called him. He paid the check and left. I think he then met Tate and several friends at another restaurant, and afterward they went to [Roman] Polanski's house. Hours later, Jay and the others were brutally murdered by three members of Charles Manson's family."

If you or someone you know is in immediate danger as a result of domestic violence, call 911. For anonymous, confidential help, you can call the 24/7 National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE) or chat with an advocate via the website.

If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), which routes the caller to their nearest sexual assault service provider. You can also search for your local center here. 

If you are concerned that a child is experiencing or may be in danger of abuse, you can call or text the National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-422-4453(4.A.CHILD); service can be provided in over 140 languages.

If you or someone you know has experienced anti-LGBTQ violence or harassment, you can contact the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs hotline at 1-212-71

The National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline is 1-800-950-6264 (NAMI) and provides information and referral services; GoodTherapy.org is an association of mental health professionals from more than 25 countries who support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.