THE GLEE CURSE
How TV’S cheeriest show has been plagued by tragedy and scandal.
Glee was one of the cheeriest shows to ever grace television screens, but behind-the-scenes a murky curse has longprevailed among its troubled cast and crew. On Thursday, it was revealed that one of the show’s lead stars, Naya Rivera, who played Santana Lopez, was presumed dead after her son, four, was found alone in a pontoon boat on Lake Piru in California. The news comes among a string of heartbreaks and horrors surrounding the programme, including Cory Monteith’s accidental drug overdose in 2013, Naya’s ex-boyfriend Mark Salling’s conviction for possession of child pornography and subsequent suicide and recent rumours of unrest on-set. The programme ran for six seasons from 2009 to 2015 and throughout its time on air and the years following, trauma has reigned supreme - leading to claims of a ‘Glee Curse’.
CORY MONTEITH’S FATAL DRUG AND DRINK BATTLE
In what was the start of the show’s behind-the-scenes demise, on 13 July 2013, Cory Monteith, who played Finn Hudson, was found dead of a drug overdose aged 31 in his Vancouver hotel room, after taking a lethal combination of heroin and alcohol. Four months
before his death he had completed a stint in rehab.
Five years after his death, Cory’s mother Ann Mcgregor insisted her son had been on pain medication following dental work to cap his teeth in the weeks before his overdose and that he ‘never meant to die’.
She said he had battled his fair share of demons from a young age, drinking and smoking marijuana from 13, and with two stints in rehab by the time he was 19. While he managed to get clean for a time, he fell back into bad habits when he went to Hollywood.
Ann, who admitted her son began using drugs again in December 2012, seven months before his death, said: ‘He wasn’t ready for the Hollywood world. Drugs were his way of checking out’. After his death, she said: ‘I still can’t pick up the pieces. My world totally stopped. And I’m a different person than I was before.’
MARK SALLING’S CHILD PORN CONVICTION AND DEATH
The most horrific of the show’s woes was undoubtedly Mark Salling’s 2015 arrest and subsequent conviction in 2017 for possession of more than 50,000 images and 600 videos which showed girls, some of whom as young as three, being raped. It was described as ‘the worst pornography collection the nation has seen’.
Salling, who played Noah “Puck” Puckerman on the show, had tried to conceal them by masking his IP address and storing them on an encrypted hard drive. He was found dead from suicide on 30 January 2018 near his home in Sunland, Los Angeles.
Between 2013 and 2014, assistant director Jim Fuller passed away in his sleep, from heart failure. Then in 2014, was the death of the production assistant Nancy Motes 37, the sister of Julia Roberts who drowned in a bath