People always seemed interested in Anna Nicole Smith, whether it was her rags-to-riches story in the ’90s or her tragic downfall in the early 2000s. Growing up in poverty in Mexia, TX, there was seemingly a certain savviness to Smith’s rise to fame. She made enough money stripping to buy herself breast implants, giving herself a figure that would bring her to the centerfold of Playboy and branding herself as the ’90s version of Marilyn Monroe.

Just as headline-grabbing as her famous figure was her marriage to billionaire J. Howard Marshall in 1994, who was over 60 years her senior. While many, including Marshall’s family, considered Smith to be a gold digger, Smith always insisted she wasn’t after his money. At the time of the wedding, she reportedly said:

I’m not marrying him for his money. He’s been begging me to marry him for over four years. But I wanted to get my own career started first. Have my own money.

When Marshall passed in 1995, Smith entered into a drawn-out legal saga with Marshall’s son over financial security she said he’d promised her. Smith again said she’d refused initial proposals from Marshall, “so nobody could call me a gold digger, but I guess that backfired, didn’t it?” Throughout the rest of her life, Smith continued to speak fondly of Marshall, saying:

He took me out of a terrible place, took care of me. He was my savior. It wasn’t a sexual “baby, oh baby, I love your body” type love – it was a deep thank-you for taking me out of this hole.

Smith eventually declared bankruptcy, and her dependency on prescription meds (which reportedly began due to pain from multiple surgeries) worsened. With other offers dried up, Smith agreed to participate in an E! reality series on her life, titled The Anna Nicole Show, which ran with the tagline “It’s not supposed to be funny – it just is!”

Many reviews of the show, which featured an often drugged-out Smith, likened it to a car collision, a train wreck, and a “cruel exploitative joke.” As Ken Tucker wrote for Entertainment Weekly, “In exploiting a barely coherent Anna Nicole Smith, E! is doing something that comes pretty close to being obscene.”

Five months after her son, Daniel Wayne Smith, passed from a lethal combination of substances, Smith passed in the same manner at age 39. Her passing was as much of a tabloid subject as her life had been, with National Enquirer running photos of her body with the headline “Chilling FINAL IMAGE of Anna Nicole Smith.”

When exes Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck got back together two decades after their initial relationship, the public collectively did a nostalgic shriek of glee for “Bennifer 2.0.” But the first time around, their romance wasn’t welcomed with such open arms.

Lopez and Affleck met on the set of their 2002 film Gigli. The couple quickly came to decorate the front cover of many a tabloid, with Us Weekly featuring them on 12 covers between 2002 and 2004. While they at times seemed to embrace the limelight, they soon reached a level of exposure neither knew how to handle, with paparazzi and tabloid culture coming to its peak.

When the two appeared in Lopez’s music video for “Jenny from the Block,” it was meant as a tongue-in-cheek parody of their public personas. Instead, people saw it as a rich, entitled celebrity couple complaining about their celebrity status. As written by Justine Ashley Costanza for International Business Times:

Poor J-Lo couldn’t lounge on her yacht, be adored in a hot tub, or wear her $1 million engagement ring without someone taking her picture… It’s not easy being overly wealthy superstars. The video’s premise shows Lopez dealing with the perils of fame the only way she knows how… by taking off most of what she’s wearing.

Much of the negativity seemed to center on Lopez specifically. Affleck was often portrayed as a serious actor and “regular guy” who had become ensnared by a vixen like Lopez. A Vanity Fair profile of Affleck at the time writes:

As one listens to the starry-eyed Affleck rhapsodize about his fiancee, it is difficult to reconcile his adoring view with Lopez’s flamboyant public persona. The girlfriend of Puff Daddy during his arrest and trial on bribery and weapons charges, she was shrewd enough to show up at the Grammys wearing a translucent dress that bared so much of her breasts that the question of how she kept her nipples from popping out generated international headlines. These days she is posing nude for her own fragrance ads.

Although she is a canny manipulator of her public image, sordid tidbits about her past keep slithering out from under discarded rocks like nasty little snakes, some of them supplied by Lopez’s first husband, a former waiter named Ojani Noa, who recently launched an ugly broadside in the tabloids. Describing Lopez as “a cold, heartless modern-day Elizabeth Taylor” who is “in love with herself,” Noa charged, “Wedding vows mean nothing to her… She moves on when she gets tired of sleeping with the same man.”

In the same profile, Affleck theorized on the reasoning for this narrative, saying:

I think it has to do with race and class, the fact that I’m white and she’s Puerto Rican. That’s what’s underneath, although nobody says it, because it’s not politically correct…

There’s a kind of language that’s used about her – the spicy Latina, the tempestuous diva. She’s characterized as oversexed. I mean, the woman’s had five boyfriends in her whole life! She’s a deeply misunderstood woman, in my opinion