That Time Annie Oakley Sued William Randolph Hearst for Lying About Her Having a Cocaine Addiction
Not the man, actually, but rather two of his Chicago-based newspapers that ran, on August 11, 1903, a sensational story claiming that the iconic globetrotting sharpshooter had just been arrested for stealing a pair of men’s trousers to support a cocaine habit. The piece described her as a destitute fallen celebrity, long since ruined by the debilitating addiction she’d picked up in the years since she’d last taken the stage.
In reality, Oakley was then quietly living stone cold sober in New Jersey with her husband Frank, nursing a terrible back injury that had forced her to retire from performing publicly a couple years earlier.
She was originally born Phoebe Ann Moses in a cabin near the edge of the woods in Darke County, Ohio, on August 13, 1860. Her dad died when she was five, and so her mother, left with seven kids and no source of income, placed Annie in the county poorhouse, where she stayed until she was taken in by a farming couple who promised her work and shelter but provided very little of either. They beat her constantly, often made her sleep outside, and forced her to labor for entire days and nights without any sort of compensation. She found comfort in very few things, but among them was trapping and, crucially, hunting with her father’s old muzzle loading rifle, which she first taught herself how to use when she was just 8-years-old.