Scandal

These reactions are usually noisy and may be conflicting, and they often have negative effects on the status and credibility of the persons or organizations involved.

Society is scandalized when it becomes aware of breaches of moral norms or legal requirements, often when these have remained undiscovered or been concealed for some time.

Literary scandals result from some kind of fraud; either the authors are not who they say they are, or the facts have been misrepresented or they contain some defamation of another person.

For example, two books by Holocaust survivors, Angel at the Fence by Herman Rosenblat and A Memoir of the Holocaust Years by Misha Defonseca, were found to be based on false information,[4] while a prize won by novelist Helen Darville created a scandal in 1994 around the author's fraudulently claimed ancestry.

[5] In 2012, Michael Woodford who successfully steered Olympus, a Japanese company to fame, turned a whistleblower when even as a CEO of the firm, he exposed the financial scandal worth $1.7 billion and fled Japan fearing for his life.

Portraying a damaging status of corporate Japan, Woodford, in his memoirs has said: "I thought I was going to run a health-care and consumer electronics company, but found I had walked into a John Grisham novel.

In October 1958, a New York grand jury was instituted by prosecutor Joseph Stone and the matter was examined with recording of closed-door testimony.

A desire for success and financial gain or the abuse of power in sport have also created many scandals both at an individual and the organisational level.

[16] One of the biggest individual scandals flowed from revelations that former American road cycling champion Lance Armstrong had achieved success by consistent, long-term cheating.