7 Most Shocking Real Life Famous Family Incest Stories in History 

Quick Facts

Unless you don’t scratch the back of history, you will find many things that are rather disturbing to the core. Among these are famous family incest stories that have been happening through ages across different parts of the world.

Of course, while there are many things considered by some cultures and even individuals as taboos, there are others who see them as just the normal ways of life. Here are some of the cases of real-life incest stories.

Most Shocking Real-Life Famous Family Incest Stories

 1. Agrippina the Younger

Contrary to what one would easily believe, the Romans were against incest and they saw it as something against the divine law. But then, some of the most famous family incest stories come from there. One such is that of Julia Agrippina who was known to have slept with both her brother and her son. More so, she got married to her uncle.

Her brother Caligula who was emperor was also known to have had sexual relations with all his 3 sisters. Following his death, it was his uncle Claudius that wore the crown. Claudius had his wife executed for adultery and treason and in her replacement, he changed the law of Rome, making it possible for him to marry Agrippina, the daughter of his own brother.

The two became the parents of the famed Emperor Nero, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. Like those before him, Nero was also known to have had a continuous sexual relationship with his mother until he later murdered her.

2. Barbara Daly Baekeland

More like fiction than real life, Barbara Daly Baekeland was a face that was known on the pages of famous magazines including Vogue. She was a model who had wanted making a name for herself in Hollywood but after failing to make it, decided to marry Brooks Baekeland.

Her marriage to Leo Baekeland’s grandson produced a son, Anthony, who Barbara later found out was gay. She believed sex with a woman was all that her son needed to be cured of his “sickness” and so she tried using prostitutes to help her son. That failed and so she decided to take it upon herself to do the therapy. Barbara lured her son whose mental health was already on the decline into having sex with her.

Tony would later kill his mother and later attempt killing her mother, before finally ending his life.

3. Monomotapa of Zimbabwe

This Zimbabwean monarchical family was known for family incest. Inasmuch as their kings were allowed, like most other kings in the past to have many wives as they can handle and concubines to top it all, those most cherished by some of the kings were their own sisters and, if one can believe, daughters.

How did it all start? A chief of Karanga had an affair with Princess Dzugundini which resulted in a child that became a chief. He would go on to follow the footsteps of his father-cum-grandfather by sleeping with his sisters and daughters “as instructed” in order to revive the dynasty.

4. Albert Einstein

Einstein was a genius by all standards, but maybe not so much in terms of relationships and marriage. Finding his tale among the famous family incest stories, he was first married to Mileva Marić for many years before he finally ended the marriage in 1919. In the same year, the famous physicist would get married to Elsa Einstein, a woman who would always remain by his side and who seemed to understand him in most ways.

While on the surface, their relationship seemed normal, Elsa was actually his first cousin who was once married to Max Löwenthal from 1896 to 1908 when they walked their ways in divorce.

5. King Tut

This king who would long after his death be famed for his good looks died when he was only 19, not without a shocking family incest story to tell. When the mummified body of Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun was recovered, his body showed that in life he suffered many health challenges that couldn’t have allowed him to live long.

Further analysis showed that he was a product of incest, something that ran deep in his family, contributing to the weakness of his body and leaving him with problems including Kohler’s disease and epilepsy. Before his death as a teenager, the Pharaoh got married to Ankhesenamun, his half-sister and together, they had two daughters.

 6. Nahienaena

Born in 1815, Nahienaena was a princess of Hawaii, and it was her father, Kamehameha I that united the Hawaiian island system. Raised as an only child at a time when the Christian converts were making it into the island, she was later forced to marry her half-brother, Prince Kauikeaouli because according to the culture of the Hawaiians at the time, only royalty was allowed to marry royalty.

This would get her expelled from her Christian community and her people who also converted to Christianity would also shun her. Although she ended the marriage and got married to someone else, she found out she was pregnant for her brother. The child she had, a daughter, died as an infant and not long afterward, the princess also died.

 7. Maria I of Portugal

Before the invasion of Portugal by Napoleon, incest was a thing practiced by the Portuguese royal family just as it was in most European royal families. The Case of Maria I was only a little different. A woman of sheer beauty and intelligence, she once considered becoming a nun, but when it was time for her to select a husband, the 25-year-old princess settled for her uncle Pedro despite the fact that he was 43 and her father’s brother.

The two had a son, Joseph who maintained the incestuous practice of the family by marrying his mother’s sister, a woman of 30 when he was only 15. The union, however, did not produce any child.

Also Read: Top 10 Richest People in the world with full biography and details.