History Main / DestinationDefenestration

*** During the Cold Open of "[[Recap/CSINYS05E21 The Past, The Present and Murder]]," a man is seen crashing through the large window of newspaper magnate Robert Dunbrook's high-rise office. He lands on a subway grate on the sidewall below.
*** In "[[Recap/CSINYS09E01 Reignited]]," arsonist Leonard Brooks jumps through the closed window of his upstairs apartment when he discovers it has been rigged it to explode when the light-switch is turned on. His would-be-killer is thrown through it as well, but is burned to death and her body lands near him on the street below.

* The French cop show ''Series/SyndromeE'' [[DynamicEntry opens with this trope]], as Commissioner Sharko goes about the window along with the serial killer he's fighting. He spends the rest of the season with visible injuries.

* ''Film/EndOfDays'': Jericho (Arnie) flings ''[[BigBad Satan]]'' of all people out of a window after rejecting his WeCanRuleTogether deal.

* This happens now and again to Film/CommandCody or [[Film/KingOfTheRocketMen Rocket Man]], who of course is always wearing his JetPack that he activates JustInTime to zoom to safety. The occasional mook isn't so lucky.

* In ''WesternAnimation/{{Amphibia}}'':

* In one episode of the 1960s ''[[WesternAnimation/SpiderMan1967 Spider-Man]]'' series, Doctor Octopus throws the hero out a window and rather optimistically proclaims that he's gone for good. Spidey immediately returns through the same window.

** "The Metallikats": Mac and Molly drop Callie out of a window for denying their parole. [[spoiler:Fortunately for Callie, the SWAT Kats show up just in time for one of their BigDamnHeroes moments.]]
** "Destructive Nature": Dr. Viper, annoyed that one of his Plantimals [[YouHaveFailedMe let Callie get away]], knocks it across the room towards a window with his tail. In a subversion, it just splats against the glass, which doesn't break.
** "The Ci-Kat-A": Razor fires a missile through the window of the Megakat Tower penthouse. It hits BrainwashedAndCrazy scientist Dr. Street in the face, sending him flying through the air and ''out the other window'' at the opposite side of the room.
** "The Origin of Dr. Viper": The SWAT Kats knock Viper out the lab window at the end of the episode. [[ForegoneConclusion He survives]] and escapes into the sewer.
* ''WesternAnimation/TheVentureBrothers'':
** A flash back to Doc and Brock's college days ends with a rampaging Brock throwing someone through a window. He also does this to a random thug in the pilot episode.

* ''Film/TheCrow'' has Eric Draven getting blown out a window by the four guys who attacked his apartment and his girlfriend. He returns the favor to one of the four guys in question, [[spoiler:Skank]], whom he throws right out another window to his death.

* Marine from ''WebAnimation/{{hololive}}'' posted [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeSEiI4iXFA a video]] where someone opened a door only to show her proudly declaring [[ShamelessFanserviceGirl that she's horny]], only to get thrown out the window of the Hololive office.

* Marine from ''WebAnimation/Hololive'' posted [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeSEiI4iXFA a video]] where someone opened a door only to show her proudly declaring [[ShamelessFanserviceGirl that she's horny]], only to get thrown out the window of the Hololive office.

* Toronto lawyer Gary Hoy apparently had a fondness for throwing himself against skyscraper windows to demonstrate their strength, which worked out just fine until July 9, 1993. His faith in the strength of the glass was justified; the window didn't break but instead ''[[MyopicArchitecture popped out of its frame]]'' and Hoy fell 24 stories to his death in an act of self-defenestration.

** In a later episode, Rusty leaps through the window of a skyscraper. He's not committing suicide, he wants to show off a device that lets him hover. Unfortuntly for him, he didn't take into account the glass shards and a huge one punctures his leg, causing him to black out.

* During the [[RedChina Cultural Revolution]], Deng Xiaoping's son Deng Pufang was tortured by the Red Guards before being thrown out of a third-floor window at the Beijing University; he survived, but was left a paraplegic. While neither openly denounced the revolutionaries, nor [[UsefulNotes/MaoZedong Mao]] for that matter, there are rumors that Deng Xiaoping always held a grudge towards Mao over the incident.

* Toronto lawyer Gary Hoy apparently had a fondness for throwing himself against skyscraper windows to demonstrate their strength, which worked out just fine until July 9, 1993. His faith in the strength of the glass was justified; the window didn't break but instead ''popped out of its frame'' and Hoy fell 24 stories to his death in an act of self-defenestration.

* In Usefulnotes/SouthAfrica in UsefulNotes/TheApartheidEra, [[StateSec The Bureau Of State Security]] adamnatly insisted black activist Steve Biko was interrogated robustly but within the legal guidelines, and they were so solicitous of his welfare that they even opened a window to air the twelth-floor interrogation room. Ag, jislaaik, man, we couldn't be blamed for a communist fanatic choosing to throw himself to his death rather than crack under interrogation, and he was an ANC terrorist anyway, so what's the big deal?

* Similarly, when the ex-US Secretary of Defence James Forrestal was found dead under the window of his room in the Naval Medical Center, where he was interned for depression treatment, the theories of foul play were more than abundant. However, presiding over a controversial winding down and acrimonious reorganizing of a US post-war military, Forrestal ''was'' under a lot of stress, especially when differing political ideas brought him up against his former close ally, the President, and Truman fired him in the end after learning of his surreptitious contacts with his archrival Dewey. It's entirely possible (and generally believed most probable) that Forrestal ''did'' become suicidal, even after his state of mind seemed to improve, knowledge of clinical depression being rather slim in the late Forties. The oft-told legend that he threw himself from the window, shouting "The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!", is still a legend, though. While Forrestal ''did'' believe that the confrontation with the Soviet Union was inevitable, nobody had seen him (or other people) defenestrating himself, and if any suicide note was written by him, it was an excerpt from the Sophocles tragedy ''Ajax''.
* The death of the Serbian Nazi collaborator [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milan_Nedic Milan Nedic]] in 1946 involved him falling out of the window of a hospital in Belgrade. It's still not fully clear whether he willingly threw himself off to avert being tried and surely executed, or he was thrown out by others.

* In the ''WesternAnimation/TurningRed'' fic ''Fanfic/TurningRedSecretsOfThePanda'', Jason Vaugn smashes through a broken window in the observation deck of the CN Tower while trying to charge at Xia and Mei.

* There have been least three notable [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestrations_of_Prague Defenestrations in Prague in the past 600 years,]] the third of which is the TropeNamer since the word "defenestration" was first coined to describe the event. (That particular defenestration, of some Catholic officials from UsefulNotes/{{Prague}} City Hall by Protestant burghers, started the UsefulNotes/ThirtyYearsWar; unlike the other defenestrations, the defenestrees survived.[[note]]Catholic propaganda held that they survived on account of divine intervention, with angels gently lowering them down or some such; Protestant propagandists responded by claiming that they survived the fall because they landed on a dung heap. More charitable Protestants say that they survived because they landed on the city haystack. Modern historians generally think they survived because the window they were thrown out of wasn't particularly high up, without discounting the possibility that something (more likely to be hay than dung) might have cushioned theirs fall.[[/note]]) The earlier ones (1419, 1483) were associated with the proto-Protestant Hussite heresy and general rebellion in Greater Bohemia and Moravia. The fourth and last happened in 1948, the victim being Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk; DirtyCommunists were implicated in that.[[note]]The evidence is inconclusive that Masaryk's fall was a murder; the official line at the time of Masaryk's death was that his death was a suicide. While most of the circumstantial evidence points to him being pushed, the suicide story is at least plausible: unlike the other defenestrations, there are no third-party eyewitnesses. That being said, if Masaryk was suicidal, the Communists were probably to blame for that, too: he was the last non-Communist in Czechoslovakia's government, and he knew that whatever the Communists running the show had planned for him, it wasn't pleasant. On the other other hand, Masaryk was a singularly odd candidate for suicide; he was informally engaged to be married to the American writer Marcia Davenport, and was coordinating with her to meet in London to be married ASAP. However, she arrived in England literally days after his death. Also, Masaryk himself was American on his mother's side; even though he wasn't a U.S. citizen (under the law at the time American women married to foreign men could not pass citizenship to their children born abroad), he was familiar enough with the Americans that the Truman Adminstration would have been accommodating to any attempt by Masaryk to take refuge with the American embassy in Prague if he felt his life or freedom was in danger, and so suicide seems like a deeply odd way out.[[/note]] Though there wasn't such a thing as a [[UsefulNotes/{{Czechia}} Czech]] 'nation' at the time, people of the present day nation-state of Czechia often consider Defenestration their nation's National Sport. Apparently, Czechs just don't feel it's a proper revolution until somebody gets thrown out a window. Political protests have been known to feature their targets being defenestrated in effigy.

* There have been least three notable [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestrations_of_Prague Defenestrations in Prague in the past 600 years,]] the third of which is the TropeNamer since the word "defenestration" was first coined to describe the event. (That particular defenestration, of some Catholic officials from UsefulNotes/{{Prague}} City Hall by Protestant burghers, started the UsefulNotes/ThirtyYearsWar; unlike the other defenestrations, the defenestrees survived.[[note]]Catholic propaganda held that they survived on account of divine intervention, with angels gently lowering them down or some such; Protestant propagandists responded by claiming that they survived the fall because they landed on a dung heap. More charitable Protestants say that they survived because they landed on the city haystack. Modern historians generally think they survived because the window they were thrown out of wasn't particularly high up.[[/note]]) The earlier ones (1419, 1483) were associated with the proto-Protestant Hussite heresy and general rebellion in Greater Bohemia and Moravia. The fourth and last happened in 1948, the victim being Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk; DirtyCommunists were implicated in that.[[note]]The evidence is inconclusive that Masaryk's fall was a murder; the official line at the time of Masaryk's death was that his death was a suicide. While most of the circumstantial evidence points to him being pushed, the suicide story is at least plausible: unlike the other defenestrations, there are no third-party eyewitnesses. That being said, if Masaryk was suicidal, the Communists were probably to blame for that, too: he was the last non-Communist in Czechoslovakia's government, and he knew that whatever the Communists running the show had planned for him, it wasn't pleasant. On the other other hand, Masaryk was a singularly odd candidate for suicide; he was informally engaged to be married to the American writer Marcia Davenport, and was coordinating with her to meet in London to be married ASAP. However, she arrived in England literally days after his death. Also, Masaryk himself was American on his mother's side; even though he wasn't a U.S. citizen (under the law at the time American women married to foreign men could not pass citizenship to their children born abroad), he was familiar enough with the Americans that the Truman Adminstration would have been accommodating to any attempt by Masaryk to take refuge with the American embassy in Prague if he felt his life or freedom was in danger, and so suicide seems like a deeply odd way out.[[/note]] Though there wasn't such a thing as a [[UsefulNotes/{{Czechia}} Czech]] 'nation' at the time, people of the present day nation-state of Czechia often consider Defenestration their nation's National Sport. Apparently, Czechs just don't feel it's a proper revolution until somebody gets thrown out a window. Political protests have been known to feature their targets being defenestrated in effigy.

* ComicStrip/{{Garfield}} was [[https://www.gocomics.com/garfield/1981/03/29 once]] on the receiving end of this when he gave a particularly insulting "assessment" on one of Jon's trademark tacky outfits.

* In ''Film/{{Sunset}}'', Tom Mix punches the Australian houseman through the closed French windows of Victoria's house. Being on the ground floor, this is not as fatal as this trope often is.

* Creator/ArthurCClarke's short story "The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch". Collected in ''Literature/TalesFromTheWhiteHart'', which are [[FramingDevice framed]] as tales heard but-not-quite-believed by an {{Expy}} of Clarke himself and told by the irascible and enigmatic Harry Purvis at The White Hart, a fictional [[BritishPub pub]] near Fleet Street at which scientists, engineers, science writers, and science-fiction writers would congregate. "The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch" is the story of a couple in 1950s Britain, in which the husband, Osbert, accuses his wife Ermintrude of talking too much -- specifically 100 times as much as he does. Being a sound engineer for the BBC, Osbert sets up a word-counter, which works at first, but [[spoiler:his wife figures out a way to make it so that ''Osbert'' has the higher count, which infuriates him, particularly after he figures out that she'd surreptitiously recorded his speech and had him playing on a loop while he was not at home. Ermintrude falls out a window shortly afterward, although it isn't clear if she's pushed. Shortly after the tale wraps up, a woman comes into the pub and chews Harry Purvis out -- to which he replies meekly, "Yes, Ermintrude."]]

** In the fourth ''Science of Discworld'' book this happens to some [[KnightTemplar Omnian fanatics]]. Who are then ''re''fenestrated back into the courtroom.

* ''Literature/TheDresdenFiles'': In book 8, ''Literature/ProvenGuilty'', Harry gets an apprentice in the form of [[spoiler:Molly Carpenter]], and her mother informs Harry that if the girl ends up coming to harm under his care, she'll come round to his office and throw him out the window. Harry replies "Death by defenestration. Got it."

* In Max Barry's ''Literature/MachineMan'', this happens to [[spoiler:Better Future's CorruptCorporateExecutive Manager]] when he jokes about Lola's [[spoiler:{{EMP}} HeartTrauma]].

* Archer is introduced this way in ''{{Literature/Parellity}}''. Not giving, nor receiving, but ''both''.
* In the second book of ''Literature/RangersApprentice'', Alyss and Halt go on a diplomatic mission at a local baron's castle -- who turns out to be an arrogant, sexist pig. When the baron in question makes the massive folly of insulting Alyss by ripping up her credentials and further insults her mentor Lady Pauline (a woman who Halt is in love with, by the way), Halt throws him out the window into the moat. A pair of workers emptying privies into the moat [[UnusuallyUninterestingSight don't even flinch.]]
** [[BrickJoke This is not the first time Halt has thrown a recalcitrant noble into the moat, either.]]
* In ''See You in November'' a Rhodesian special forces operative ponders an assassination method where you knock on someone's hotel room door, club them on the head when they answer, drag the body to the window and throw them out. The [[TheCoronerDothProtestTooMuch coroner invariably concludes]] the death was "suicide while the balance of their mind was disturbed." Later a member of the Rhodesian negotiating team falls out the window while in England, and after the coroner gives this verdict despite no apparent signs of depression, he wonders if this trope was in play.