Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was once Hollywood royalty — a million-dollar-a-year star who rivalled Charlie Chaplin. But the silent-film giant died at the age of 46, penniless and, as friends put it, “a broken man,” after a scandal that shattered his career. Arbuckle’s fall from grace began on Labour Day weekend 1921 at San Francisco’s St Francis Hotel, where model-turned-actress Virginia Rappe fell fatally ill after a booze-soaked party. The comedian was arrested for murder, then tried three times amid a media frenzy that painted him as a monster before any evidence was heard.

He was ultimately cleared, with the third jury issuing a rare statement that said: “Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle… there was not the slightest proof adduced to connect him in any way with the commission of a crime.” By then, the damage was done.

Studio bosses yanked his films, theatres banned his name from their marquees, and, under pressure from moralists, industry “czar” Will H. Hays barred him from the screen. Even his estranged wife, actress Minta Durfee, was scathing, once describing Hays as “a rat dressed up in men’s clothing.”

The scandal ended a meteoric rise that began in Kansas in 1887. A natural performer with a powerful singing voice. Arbuckle worked his way from vaudeville to Mack Sennett’s Keystone, then to Paramount on a record $1million contract — the equivalent of more than £12million today.

He was adored by audiences yet wary of cheap gags about his size. As he said in 1917: “I refuse to try to make people laugh at my bulk.” Rappe’s death, ultimately recorded as a ruptured bladder with peritonitis, unleashed America’s first modern “cancel culture” pile-on.

While numerous witness stories conflicted with each other, headlines screamed of a booze-fuelled “orgy” involving the young actress who later died, branding Arbuckle a beast before the trial had even begun. Arbuckle told reporters of the toll: “I have suffered: All I ask… is that the world which once loved me now withhold its judgment.”

Acquitted in April 1922, he expected a comeback. Instead, bans spread and contracts vanished. Legal fees left him deep in debt; friends recalled a man “hopeless” and drinking too much. Buster Keaton quietly cut him into his own profits, and Roscoe slipped behind the camera, directing under the pseudonym William Goodrich.

But there were flickers of redemption. In 1932, Warner Bros hired him for a run of two-reel talkies. Crowds laughed again, and the studio opened the door to more. He was even said to be on the brink of a feature return when he died in his sleep at New York’s Park Central Hotel in June 1933, aged 46.

Just hours earlier, after signing the new deal and celebrating his first wedding anniversary with his third wife, Addie, he reportedly told friends: “This is the best day of my life.” One century on, biographer Greg Merritt’s Room 1219 argues the case against Arbuckle was built on gossip, contradictions, and bad reporting.

He claimed that the industry’s response birthed the Hays Code era of censorship, when Hollywood films were censored for sex, swearing, and anything deemed “immoral.” For Roscoe, the verdict came too late.

Cleared in court but convicted by public opinion, Hollywood’s original box-office titan slipped away with his fortune gone and his reputation in ruins — a giant of comedy crushed by scandal.