What happened to those named in the payola scandal?
What happened to those named in the payola scandal?Answer: Alan Freed is the name most often associated with the payola scandal of the Fifties, and that’s because he was the only major figure indicted in it — on December 10, 1962, he plad guilty to two counts of “commercial bribery” and was fined $300. But by then, the damage had been done: Freed’s initial refusal to testify “on principle,” claiming that he never played a record he didn’t actually consider worthwhile, no matter what was given him, led to the DJ being blackballed by the industry. By the time the scandal came to a quiet end, Freed was persona non grata in the world of entertainment. Aged beyond his years, alcoholic, penniless, brokenhearted, and suffering from both uremia and cirrhosis, Alan Freed died on Lyndon Johnson’s inauguration day, January 20, 1965. The other DJs were never punished for payola, because it wasn’t actually illegal, merely considered unethical (although it was made a misdemeanor on September 13, 19
