A new Sky HISTORY series, Secret Sex Lives of Tyrants, examines the shocking sexual appetites of some of the world’s worst tyrants and dictators – and the findings are shocking
Legendary President of Cuba Fidel Castro was said to have slept with 35,000 women. Similarly reputed to have thousands of concubines, Communist China’s Chairman Mao liked sharing his sloping bed with several young peasant women at the same time. Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels was a philandering sex pest. While Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and Iraq’s Butcher of Baghdad Saddam Hussein’s sexual depravity knew no bounds.
Fathali M. Moghaddam, Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University, says: “Tyrants often deviate in their sexual behaviour because they can. Because they deviate in all their other behaviours. They deviate in the use of power. They deviate in the use of relationships, generally. So, the deviation of tyrants in the sexual arena is just a reflection of their general deviation.”
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A new Sky HISTORY series, Secret Sex Lives of Tyrants, examines the shocking sexual appetites of some of the world’s worst tyrants and dictators.
Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, whose revolutionary forces overthrew dictator Fulgnecio Batista on 1 January 1959, reputedly had 35,000 lovers. Earning the nickname “El Caballo” or The Horse at university, in 1948 he married Mirta Díaz-Balart. But, as he became more involved in radical politics, he openly had affairs.
Dr Worthen says: “Castro, just like all tyrants, was an extreme narcissist.“ Prof Kaplan adds: “He epitomised the macho male, in that he liked having lots of mistresses. They were good trophies. They were beautiful.”
He particularly liked to dominate Western women. Prof. Moghaddam says of claims he slept with 35,000 women: “It’s mathematically possible. Genghis Khan really did sleep with tens of thousands of women!” Fidel Castro handed over the reins of power to his brother Raúl in 2008 – dying eight years later, aged 90.
The true extent of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s sexual deviance was discovered when cameras were finally allowed into his inner sanctum after his regime was toppled in 2011. Beyond the garish fittings and kitsch furnishings, deeper underground were hidden dungeons, hiding gynaecological equipment – the playground of a sexual monster.
For two decades Gaddafi had ordered the abduction and forced imprisonment of countless young women, girls and boys. Dr Meredith G. F. Worthen, Professor of Sociology and Sexualities at the University of Oklahoma, says of the paedophile: “He did horrific things to women, to children. He actually had a torture chamber that was hidden away in a basement and in this location he would torture women, he would force them to watch him torture other people.”
Born in the early 1940s, on the outskirts of a rural town called Sirte, living a nomadic life as the only son in a Bedouin family, Gaddafi was the first in his family to receive a formal education. And, at the University of Libya, in Benghazi, he vowed to become leader of his people.
In 1969 – the year he married school teacher Fatiha al-Nu – he got his wish when he staged a bloodless coup, soon after appointing himself Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, alongside twelve of his closest friends. His wife fared less well. Divorced after a year, Fatiya was never seen again.
Meanwhile, portraying himself as a women’s libber, Gaddafi created the Green Book, Guide to the Libyan Arab Creed. Swimming in oil dollars, by the mid 1970s, he spoke of the emancipation of women. And in 1981 he opened one of the world’s first female only military academies. But in private, the women he enlisted to protect him were trapped in his secret cell of sexual violence.
Historian Kate Vigurs says: “Gaddafi surrounded himself with female bodyguards. These women were beautiful, heavily made up, coiffured but there is a darker side to this – that they were Gaddafi’s effectively sex slaves.” In the Tripoli residence he shared with his second wife, Safia Farkash and seven children, 30 young women, including girls from the age of 15, were imprisoned in a secret basement apartment.
Coerced to perform every sex act their leader could conceive of, they were forced to take drugs, submit themselves to be raped and urinated on, and they were also expected to facilitate the virgin rape of other young Libyan girls. Dr Worthen says: “Any kind of sexual relationship that he had really wasn’t sex at all, because none of it was consensual. He was a sexual sadist.” He also abused young boys, calling them his ‘Services Group’ – there to service his every need.
Prof Kaplan says of the dictator – killed by a mob after being dragged from a storm drain in October 2011, aged 69: “He was a paedophile. I don’t think there’s any better way of confirming his absolute sexual insecurity and ambiguity.”
Again taking power after a coup – which was supported by Western allies including the UK – on 25 January 1971, Uganda’s tyrannical ruler Major General Idi Amin Dada held poolside press conferences, adorned by women.
To satisfy his libido, Amin – who had multiple wives – began surrounding himself with beauty queens, dancers and teenage girls. But the dictator – responsible for expelling 50,000 Ugandan Asians and murdering around 300,000 people while in power, used sex and rape to control. Pain, discomfort and fear became the calling cards for Amin’s many wives and lovers.
Known for his brutality – chopping off heads, putting body parts in fridges and rumoured to be a cannibal, he also had a weird obsession with Britain’s Queen, according to historian Kate Vigurs. She says: “He wrote letters to Queen Elizabeth … not just once, but dozens of times declaring his undying love, offering to marry her.”
He even wanted to father her next baby. The chaotic ‘President for Life,’ who announced on national radio that he had divorced three of his five wives for holding a party without asking his permission, had between 40 and 60 children. Dr Worthen says he wanted to “spread his seed as far as it can go.” He was “creating sort of his own little personal army of people that ultimately he could control as well.”
The dictator announced his divorce from second wife, Kay Adroa, only for her dismembered body to be found in the trunk of a car, before he ordered it to be stitched back together and placed on the steps of a hospital. Without shedding a tear, Amin then took up with 19-year-old go-go dancer Sarah Kyolaba, who he married, with his new best pal Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as best man.
Eventually when, no longer supported by the West, his regime was overthrown by a combination of Tanzanian troops and Ugandan exiles in 1979, he had fled – first to Libya and then to Saudi Arabia, where he died in exile in 2003, aged 80.
Taking power on October 1, 1949, China’s Chairman Mao had 3,000 concubines – with a preference for virgins. Dr Meredith G. F. Worthen, Professor of Sociology and Sexualities at the University of Oklahoma, says: “He had a specially designed sloping bed that allowed him to engage in multiple sex acts with women at the same time, which he recruited through ballroom dances. He also had his men go out into the community and specially pick young peasant girls. He was most happy when he had multiple peasant girls in his bed at one time.”
By 1979, Saddam Hussein, The Butcher of Bagdhad, had progressed from Ba’athist hitman to President of the Republic of Iraq. Then a dad of five, when he wasn’t gratifying himself in the bedroom, he was ruthlessly cementing his grip on power and eliminating his enemies – often employing sexual terrorism. His victims ranged from political prisoners to the women in his own bedroom. Dr Worthen says: “A sexual sadist, he entwined his sexuality with violence.”
US troops described one of his palaces as his ‘love shack’, a labyrinth of mirrored walls, beanbag chairs, lamps shaped like women, bottles of cognac and a jacuzzi. The walls were adorned with seedy, semi-pornographic murals and in the bedroom they found photos of his many conquests. Dr Worthen adds: “He would use his power, control, over these women to sexually abuse them and to sexually torture them. It gave him pleasure to instil fear and terror into his victims.”
His mistress for 30 years, Parisoulas Lampsos, who he met in 1968, wrote in her memoirs that one of the dictator’s favourite past-times was donning a cowboy hat, sipping whisky and smoking Havana cigars, while watching torture, to the musical accompaniment of Frank Sinatra’s, Strangers in the Night.On December 30, 2006, age 69, Saddam Hussein was hanged, after being found guilty of crimes against humanity – dying as he had lived, violently and defiantly.
In public, Reich minister Joseph Goebbels was portrayed as the archetypical wholesome Nazi family man. Described as the ‘most prolific Casanova of the Nazi regime,’ in private he was a sexual predator. Dr Worthen says: “He would even grab and fondle women in public in front of his wife. He wrote in his journal about all of his sexual conquests – 30,000 pages!” According to Prof. Kaplan, sex for Goebbels was “a competition.” He says: “You describe what you’re doing, who you’re doing it with and you tick the box and then you move on to the next one.”
Goebbels, who had a club foot, believed to be due to childhood polio, relied on his sharp intellect, to gain power and impress, rather than his looks – which were in sharp contrast to the perfect Aryan appearance he and Hitler promoted for their master race.
And while he had six children with his wife, Magda, a popular figure with Hitler, he had a hyperactive libido and, as the years passed, he became brazenly lecherous in front of her. Dr Worthen says: “He would fondle a woman’s breast or grab a woman’s buttocks in public. People knew he was this kind of public creepster.”
Yet Goebbels’ public image meant he became the unofficial first family of the Third Reich. He also became Chancellor of the Reich for a day, following Hitler’s suicide. Having followed Hitler into the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery with Magda and their children, refusing to journey into oblivion alone, he told his wife he expected her and their children to go with him as a final act of loyalty.
Magda Goebbels tied white ribbons in her daughters’ hair before sedating all six children. She and Goebbels then forced them to drink a lethal dose of cyanide. On 1 May 1945, having murdered their children, the couple went upstairs and, with the help of the SS, committed suicide – a sadist to the very end.
*Secret Sex Lives of Tyrants starts Monday 16 March 10pm on Sky HISTORY and HISTORY Play
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