Her second album sounded like a bunch of Michelle Branch outtakes; syrupy, piano-driven ballads and acoustic guitar-powered soft rockers. That and she stopped wearing neckties with tank tops. 15 year old girls everywhere peeled Avril stickers off their iPods and math books.
It used to be considered (in the US at least) per se libel - there was no need to show financial harm to have a successful suit. I believe that has changed, but it can still be considered libel if you can show it is damaging to your pocket book. For example, falsely accusing a soldier of being gay, resulting in his termination, would, I think, still be a pretty good libel case.
And in the case of Liberace, being accurately called gay can result in a judgement against you, if you can’t prove it. But its possible he wasn’t gay back in the 50’s when he sued, and only later in life become gay. 
Yes, but he’ll redeem himself with X-Files 2, right?
Right?!?
You mean the CD that was the third best selling CD of 2004? That CD that “alienated” a whole bunch of people?
I’m not afraid to admit I like Avril Lavigne, her second album included.
The Dixie Chicks, definately. Gary Glitter didn’t do himself any favors either.
Donna Summer was thought to have made anti-gay comments and alienated many of her fans.
This shouldn’t count, since Summer did not actually make the comments that were attributed to her. I think it was “New York” magazine that printed a story about her saying AIDS was divine retribution on sinful gays, but she successfully sued for libel, publically denied the story and did a lot of charity work for AIDS & gay related organizations.
All that you say may be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that Kaufman alienated his fans and went out of his way to do so. One of his jokes that hasn’t been mentioned was the phone poll to decide whether he should be banned for life from Saturday Night Live. He was sure that he’d win the poll but lost by a huge margin.
I suppose Sinead O’Connor ought to go on any list like this. She alienated a lot of people who at least claimed to be fans by tearing up that picture of the pope on SNL, then alienated more people by objecting to the playing of the US national anthem at a concert in New Jersey.
I think Anne Rice pissed a lot of her fans off when she became born again and all that. I never liked her writing anyway, so it’s no loss to me.
John Fahey was terminally cranky, and adored getting people angry at him. His swing from early acoustic guitar to machine-driven industrial-sounds music must have been calculated at least partially to alienate fans, and it probably worked to a certain degree, but it also earned him a new fan base of contrarians who idolized him for being such a diffcult and unpredictable SOB.
Sinead O’Connor
[Replying to my post about Andy Kaufman]
No way, what?
Are you denying that he didn’t irritate and even anger people who had been his fans? I agree he pushed the definition of comedy, and that’s how he did it. I had been a hardcore fan from his very first appearance on Saturday Night Live, and even I thought the wrestling thing went on too long. And I was hardly alone. But that was his intent, of course.
BTW, if you think the fans of pro wrestling were duped by Andy, you don’t understand wrestling. I’m sure the majority of them were fully aware that he was putting on an act, just like all the other wrestlers. They went along with his bit, hating him the way they hate all the other heavies. He was just a different style of heavy. In a sense, the wrestling world colluded with Andy to put one over on everyone who had been a fan of Andy’s before he started the wrestling thing.
At the intersection of disco and fundamental Christianity, where Donna resides, there’s bound to be some kind of clash over that. 
Wrestling back then was way different- the idea that it was fake was not brought to light to the masses until the John Stossel report a few years later. I was at several of his matches and believe me, the avearge fan thought it was real- look at the tapes of his matches and they show the crowd and they really detest the guy and think whats going is legit, they aren’t just going along with a bit- these are late 70’s/early 80’s hillbilly Memphis rasslin’ fans, after all, not the across the boards cross section you see now
And he definitely alienated his comedy fans- they’d go to the shows and beg him to do Latka, and he’d read from a novel for two hours. Even if you “got” it, would you be entertained by that?
Garth Brooks is a big dumb asshole, but Tricia Yearwood is only like two years younger than him and his first wife.
As opposed to the first half of his career, before his “meteoric” rise to fame, when he did more-or-less the same thing? (Well, not the wrestling)
I apologize; I came off sounding more snarky than I felt, I think. And I actually preferred the second album to the first, which I didn’t care for at all. I was bemused, more than anything, about the idea of an 18 year old artist “alienating her fan base” with her second album.
To coin a phrase, Give me a break! John Stossel (speaking of fakers) didn’t break that story. I watched wrestling as a kid in the 1960s (anyone else remember Bruno Samartino and Haystacks Calhoun?) and I knew it was fake back then. From the 1950s on, everyone over the age 9 who has watched pro wrestling has known it’s fake.
If you watch any wrestling match, the fans hate all the bad guys as much as they hated Andy. As I said, he was just a different style of heavy. He might have fooled some of them early on, because he went way outside the standard wrestling script: he insulted the audience directly, making fun of their accents, saying how he was smarter than them because he was from Hollywood, and so on. But the longer it went on, the more the wrestling fans caught on, and the more “old Andy” fans got pissed off and fed up.
According to the Wiki article I linked to, Andy played in comedy clubs for a couple of years and made a few minor TV appearances before appearing on SNL’s very first show in 1975. That started the “meteoric” phase I referred to, and for the next few years, including his time on Taxi, his act was far more benign and audience-friendly than it later became. But dissatisfied with being the cute “foreign man” character, he started pushing the envelope, whence Tony Clifton, the incident on Fridays with Michael Richards, and the wrestling.
I’d characterize the first few years on SNL and Taxi as the first half of his career (after the “meteoric” rise) and the last four or five, where he was really working to piss people off, as the second half. Don’t forget: his mainstream career, from the first SNL show to his death, only lasted eight and a half years. Tragic.
Don’t get me wrong: I think he was a genius, wholly unlike any other comedian before or since. And I’ve always thought that, even when he was alienating me.
Ah, you might be right- I was ten at the time and since I thought it was real, maybe I assumed everyone else did.
And reminds of one of my favorite Homer moments:
Bart: [in the Simpsons’ living room, watching a wrestling match] \
If you ask me, this is going to be one helluva match.
Lisa: Oh, Bart, I hope you’re not taking this seriously.
Even a 5-year-old knows that this is as choreographed as any ballet!
Homer: [in Moe’s tavern] \
Eh, Rasputin’s got the reach, but on the other hand,
the Professor’s got his patented coma lock.
If you ask me, this is going to be one helluva match.