I’ve seen people talk about actors and artists that had a terrible time.
My own would be Anne Rice. She wrote Interview with the Vampire after her young daughter died of Leukemia. Then her husband suddenly died of a brain hemorrhage. I suspect her Christian, anti-fanfic phase was a result of mental illness and manipulation from the publishers, although I don’t think she ever apologized.
She started falling apart before she got sucked down the transphobia rabbit hole. Don’t forget that just before it dropped she’d blown up for her weird tweets about the Harry Potter universe about wizards publicly shitting themselves and had her attempts at writing other things repeatedly flop. She clearly liked both being a beloved writer and being a twitter personality, and I think her insecurities over both of those things left her open to being drawn into the terf cult.
This article from a while back by Scalzi about the surprisingly common phenomenon of SF/Fantasy authors losing their minds always comes to mind when I think about how Rowling wound up where she is now.
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2017/05/03/the-brain-eater/
? The Strike series are very successful.
So the thing is they only got anywhere after someone leaked that they were written by her while “wearing manface”, to use terf-adjacent terminology. The first book she wrote for adults under her own name had a resoundingly mixed reception. It seems to me that she was trying to do a Steven King and prove to herself that she wasn’t just coasting on her own name, and failed pretty miserably at it.
Yep, that she did. I’ve read her other books and they’re shite.