Secret Sex Lives of Tyrants: Dictators ‘family values’ vs reality
From Goebbels’ affairs to Mao’s mistresses, uncover how dictators loved preaching 'family values' and breaking them in private.
Image: Mao Zedong | Secret Sex Lives of Tyrants
Dictators love a wholesome family photo. Why? Because if you can sell morality as a political ideal, you get a handy two-for-one: social control and a flattering glow for the leader who claims to embody it.
This is the backdrop for Secret Sex Lives of Tyrants, the new Sky HISTORY series that unpacks the private lives of rulers who publicly preached traditional values while privately flaunting the rules. The show starts Monday, 16 March at 10pm on Sky HISTORY
Here’s a closer look at the worst of the bunch:
Joseph Goebbels: the 'model' Nazi with an inconvenient mistress
Nazi ideology made a fetish of the respectable family. And Joseph Goebbels, the regime’s propaganda chief, was all in. His wife, Magda, was actively marketed as the 'perfect housewife' and an emblem of everything Nazism claimed to stand for.
Too bad Goebbels didn’t stay inside the picture frame. He pursued a high-profile affair with Czech actor Lída Baarová in the late 1930s. He wasn’t subtle about it either, and it soon became a political problem. Hitler eventually intervened and the relationship was ended (probably less out of moral outrage and more because scandals are bad branding).
Mao Zedong: the 'virtuous' revolutionary with an appetite for young women
Early Communist China was big on discipline and the idea that private life should serve the collective people. The state pushed new social rules around marriage and even commissioned taskforces (known as danwei) to monitor behaviour. Naturally, extramarital affairs were on their radar.
And then there was Chairman Mao himself. Accounts from people close to him (most famously his former doctor’s memoir) describe a private world where Mao had sexual access to a slew of young women.
Fidel Castro: the not-so-faithful leader
Castro loved to ham up the image of the self-sacrificing revolutionary. He was very much anti-bourgeois and pro "the cause". The catch? Even basic biographical facts complicate his monkish storyline…
Castro had at least eight children with multiple women, including kids from relationships outside marriage. In interviews, he’s also discussed his 'womanising'
ways with a kind of amused detachment. Unlike Casanova (who’s gone down in history as a bit of a loveable heartthrob), Castro definitely slots more into the hypocritical dictator category.
Saddam Hussein: violence behind closed doors
Saddam’s Ba’athist Iraq started off secular. But by the early 1990s (after military defeat) his regime leaned hard into religion and public morality. In 1993 he launched the Faith Campaign, which introduced restrictions and moral policing. Nightclubs and discothèques shut their doors, bans on public alcohol consumption came into play and there was a big push for Qur’an teaching and Islamic messaging.
At the same time, Saddam maintained a private world that was anything but pious. Sources describe the frequent use of torture and sexual violence. Not just by Saddam but also by his two sons, who seemed to take cues from their father.
Muammar Gaddafi: a predator in disguise
Gaddafi styled himself as a moral revolutionary. He even published his own ideological text called The Green Book. Yet history is littered with allegations of sexual violence linked to his forces.
Human Rights Watch documented patterns of sexual violence by pro-Gaddafi forces during the conflict. The International Criminal Court prosecutor also reported many cases of rape and sexual violence. His regime of terror and control is definitely at odds with his preferred public persona as Libya’s 'Brotherly Leader'.
Idi Amin: 'decency' for women and indulgence for the ruler
Amin’s Uganda is a good example of moral control aimed downward. Under his leadership women became a target, with things like miniskirts and makeup framed as social threats.
Meanwhile, Amin’s own domestic life was anything but restrained. Not only did he have multiple wives but his regime was plagued with violence. It’s an ugly double standard of public decency enforced on women’s bodies and private entitlement exercised by the man at the top.
Want the full set of case files and all the gory details? Secret Sex Lives of Tyrants digs deep into the men whose private behaviour clashed with their public personas.
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