Cut Himself Shaving / Real Life

• Italian painter Caravaggio made many enemies in his short and tempestuous life. Once when laid up in bed with slash wounds on his throat and left ear, he told a clerk of the Roman courts that he had wounded himself with his own sword while falling down the stairs, rather than name his attacker(s) and face further retribution.
• Dr. Richard Feynman - top theoretical physicist, safe cracker and bongo player - loved to frequent nightclubs in the rougher end of town. One night, he had an altercation with a drunk in the toilets at one such club and gained a black eye in the encounter. The next day his colleagues asked how he got it. "I had a fight in a nightclub washroom," he replied, to which they laughed and said "Oh Feynman, you're such a kidder..." (Apparently he started his first lecture by glaring up one-eyed at the students, and snarling "Any questions...?")
• People who like BDSM (or just rough sex) run into difficulties with this; it's hard to explain away ("say, these look like whip marks"), and the truth can be very embarrassing. Families and friends can end up conflicted as well. Many professional tops advertise their ability to leave marks or not, as the customer prefers, for just this reason.
• Supposedly, legendary manager Casey Stengel, when running one of the horrid New York Mets teams from the early 1960s, saw one of his pitchers in spring training with a bandage on his thumb. When he asked the pitcher what happened, the player responded that he had cut himself shaving. Stengel released the player from the team because he couldn't figure out why on earth he'd be shaving his thumb.
• NFL wide receiver Brandon Marshall, who seriously injured his hand when he slipped on a McDonald's bag and put his hand through a glass TV stand while wrestling with his family. Due to his checkered legal history, many commentators were skeptical of this story, but it ultimately turned out to be true.
• Infielder Clint Barmes broke his collarbone during his rookie year with the Colorado Rockies carrying a package of deer meat (it was a gift from teammate Todd Helton) up the stairs to his apartment. In order to avoid embarrassing Helton, Bames claimed he fell while "carrying groceries".
• Black Metal musician Varg Vikernes, after he murdered his bandmate Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth, claimed that he stabbed Aarseth in self-defense and Aarseth's TWENTY-THREE stab wounds were from Aarseth falling on broken glass during the struggle. It is more plausible when you know that Aarseth was only wearing underwear at the time.
• In a subversion/possible straight example, Soccer player David Seaman apparently broke a bone reaching for a remote.
• Former MLB pitcher Kyle Denney was once shot in the leg while riding the team bus, while dressed as a USC (University of Southern California) cheerleader as part of a rookie hazing ritual. Thanks to the incredulity needed to hear that with a straight face, as well as the fact that Denney was struggling as a pitcher, some people think that the Cleveland Indians made it up as an excuse to put him on the DL.
• If one were to believe Shane Douglas, this is why Shawn Michaels never dropped the Intercontinental Title to him after Shawn was jumped by a pair of Marines. While no one disputes that Michaels was assaulted, Douglas believes that Shawn was healthy enough to go, and played up being injured (even applying makeup to make his black eye more convincing).
• Although today best known for the line of hair products bearing his name, hairstylist Vidal Sassoon was, in fact, a total Badass Normal who fought with a Jewish resistance group called the 43 Group. In post-World War II London, there were a fairly large number of fascist and anti-Semitic groups who would heckle and harass Jews and vandalize Jewish-owned shops and businesses; the 43 Group fought back, often with violent brawls resulting. One day, after a particularly bad fight, Vidal showed up to work with a badly bruised face. A client said "My God, Vidal, you look terrible! What happened?" Sassoon replied "I tripped on a hairpin."
• American Comedian Louis CK had a bit about how his daughter got a black eye due to walking into a door, and he coincidentally took her out for ice cream afterward. The other people in the ice cream place gave him dirty looks, assuming he abused his daughter. He exclaimed how offended he was that they thought a black eye was all she would have if he had hit her.
• According to his book Growing Up Brady, Barry Williams sustained a nasty facial cut in a car accident during the later seasons of The Brady Bunch. When he reported to the set the next day, the producer slapped a Band-Aid on the cut and decided that Greg Brady had "cut himself shaving." Barry thought, "What does Greg shave with, a lawnmower?"
• In NASCAR, Carl Edwards once managed to break/damage something (either his leg, arm, or hand) while playing Frisbee. His friends asked him why in the world he'd be honest about the origin of his injury, pointing out he could have claimed he was rock-climbing or, y'know, almost anything other than playing a game that children are able to participate in without receiving a scratch.
• "Riding a motorcycle in the shower" and "fell off his tennis racquet" have become popular euphemisms in Formula One racing to explain why a driver has missed a race due to injuries outside of racing, especially so after a mysterious extra-curricular injury sidelined Juan Pablo Montoya.
• Self-harmers often use similar excuses - scratches from their cat or dog seem to be a popular excuse. Because of this, people whose wounds really do come from their pets may be suspected of self-harm.
• People in the Society for Creative Anachronism engage in sport fights; they wear armor and use sticks rather than metal weapons, but it's quite possible to get bruises and broken bones. So: if you're a female SCA fighter and your doctor asks where you got the marks, do not offhandedly say, "Oh, my husband and I were fighting..." Even sport fencers get this sort of thing all the time. Foil and epeé leave strange little round bruises, saber cuts can look like whip marks, cuts can last for weeks, and sometimes it's possible to draw blood despite the protective equipment.
• Falling from your bike (either in dirt cycling, mountain biking, BMXing, or even when riding on rough ground in some parts of town) can give weird injuries despite protective equipment, like a stab wound in the thigh from falling over a dead tree branch or bruises on the torso (which look like bruises from a beating) from falling over a rock or stump.
• Sufferers of CIPA injure themselves in all sorts of ways, especially when they're too young to know better because the disease prevents them from feeling pain. Early on, it leads to false accusations of abuse. Later, shaving is one of the many activities in which they have to take extreme care. Similarly, children with osteogenesis imperfecta have been wrongly believed to be abuse victims due to their frequent broken bones.
  • Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is another disorder that can cause this, particularly depending on which of the three types it is . People with this disorder bruise easily and vividly as well as being prone to joint dislocations, which means they can end up with injuries that, without the context of the disorder, would seem suspicious. Exacerbating the issue, Ehlers-Danlos can also cause difficulties with balance and spatial accuity, so the true explanations of their injuries can end up coming off as excuses (so,for instance, a person with Ehlers-Danlos is more likely than the general population to actually walk into a door, and have bruises to show for it).
• Martial artists, due to the very nature of their sport, are quite likely to get injuries during sparring even if they wear protective clothing. Younger martial artists who haven't learned proper control yet are especially likely to walk away from a training session with bruises from their peers, and it can look like they got a serious beating from an abuser.
  • Some martial arts with focuses on holds and escaping from holds can result in bruises to the wrists or, in some cases, bruises around the throat. These can look rather nasty.
  • This gets even more awkward if a young martial artist is training alongside a parent who accidentally injures them. It can lead to one of those rare situations where saying "Dad punched me in the face last night" is both true and not a reason to call child services.
• Can sometimes happen to professional chefs and restaurant staff. Lots of opportunities to get cuts or burns on your hands and forearms.
• Some chronic eye conditions result in the patient's vision being narrowed progressively. They cannot see objects placed even slightly to their left or right. So, yes, they do run into doors all the time.
• When San Francisco Giants second baseman Jeff Kent broke his wrist during spring training in 2002, he claimed he landed on it badly when he fell off his truck while washing it. It turned out he hurt it performing wheelies and other tricks on his motorcycle (in direct violation of his contract); this probably contributed to his leaving the team at the end of the season even after making it to the World Series. This is a fairly common sort of thing among professional athletes who injure themselves doing something forbidden by their contract (generally skiing or motorcycle riding). Other notable examples include a stab wound to the stomach while opening a DVD case and a cut hand requiring 40 stitches received while cleaning bagpipes.
• A woman wrote to Dear Prudence citing her coworkers' concern over the bruises that she often had on her arms and legs. They were clearly not believing her vague excuses and thinking that her boyfriend was beating her when in truth, they were engaging in consensual S&M play.
• In surprising frequency doctors are confronted with a patient, of either gender, who in act of self-pleasuring or some rather kinky consensual sex have managed to jam something in one of their orifices. The excuses for how that particular object got there range, the most common being, "I tripped and fell on it" (naked for some reason...) to ridiculously elaborate stories worthy of a teen comedy film. In fact, the excuses are often more amusing that the injury itself. The kicker is that whilst a doctor will indeed write the patient's account of events, they will also note what they believe actually happened. The general advice to anyone in that unfortunate situation is basically: Just come clean and promise you'll not do it again. They've seen it all before.
• One of the notorious West German terrorists, the Baader-Meinhoff Group, was found dead in his cell. The official explanation was that a gun had been smuggled in and he had committed suicide. Despite the fact that to do so he would have had to have shot himself in the base of the neck so that the bullet exited through his forehead at an angle virtually impossible for someone to have done to themselves.
  • In the Tom Clancy book The Sum of All Fears, the imprisoned terrorist was said to have shot himself in the head... three times.
    "He had a real death grip on the gun."
• This newspaper clipping, where a man who tried to steal a laptop, then stabbed a marine who was at a Toys for Tots collection, was taken to the hospital later for a dozen severe injuries sustained, according to the police report, when he tripped on the curb.
• This sort of thing appears in the US Military quite a bit, particularly in training camps. Reasons vary, but one can expect that if there's someone in the camp that is making life difficult for the rest of the troops in the unit, those troops will find ways to take their anger out on the individual. And they will make it very obvious to said trooper that if they tell the instructors the truth, worse will happen. As a result, this excuse comes up when the instructors ask about the injuries. While the instructors know the truth already, at that stage there is nothing that they can legally do about it unless the trooper in question makes a case of it.

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