Fall Guy

"What I like best about you Neal, is that you trust me."

— Flavor text from the Fall Guy card in Netrunner

Sometimes, the police simply are not going to stop investigating a crime until they find someone to arrest. In this case, even if you've pulled off The Perfect Crime, the only way to be certain of getting away with it is by setting up some other sap to take the fall for you.

Sometimes the Fall Guy is an accomplice who takes on this scapegoat role willingly. Other times, when you have drawn up plans with the brilliant clockwork evil of The Chessmaster, you might choose a Fall Guy — whether an accomplice of yours, or someone completely innocent — by tricking this Unwitting Pawn into taking the blame, or outright framing them up.

Maybe you choose the guy no one's going to believe. Better yet, you choose a well-meaning sap whose fears and goals you've been able to manipulate via Flaw Exploitation. Alternately, you could pull off a Deceased Fall-Guy Gambit, since a dead man can't defend himself. Another tactic is for a Villain with Good Publicity to try to paint someone who worked for them and committed a crime as an Overzealous Underling who acted alone and without the knowledge of the boss.

Closely related to The Scapegoat and, on a bigger scale, Karmic Misfire.

Not to be confused with a television series or video game.

Spoilers abound!

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: The villains find a fall guy willing to go to prison as the Laughing Man, apparently motivated by the fame and notoriety of becoming the famous hacker. Unfortunately, the villains think that having him dead will serve their plans even better. As his killer says before shooting him, "Don't worry, you'll be more famous this way."
• In One Piece, this is how Captain Kuro faked his death. After almost wiping out a ship full of Marines, he had Django hypnotize one of his subordinates into thinking that he was Captain Kuro, while also hypnotizing the sole surviving Marine, Axe-Hand Morgan, into thinking that he'd captured Kuro. As a result, the fake Captain Kuro was executed, Axe-Hand Morgan received a promotion he didn't earn, and Kuro adopted the identity of Klahadore, as part of his plan to kill Kaya and inherit her fortune.

Comic Books

• The Good Asian:
  • When main character Edison Hark was a boy, his mother was killed, and Mason Carroway, the wealthy and influential man she worked for, demanded results from the police. Eventually, having no evidence or solid leads, the local police instead grabbed a local known criminal, pinned it on him to appease Mason, and let the schmuck get the death penalty. Years later when he became a cop himself, Edison looks at the case file and recognizes it as an obvious case of the police framing the guy.
  • Eventually, this fate befalls Edison himself; a racist detective spots Edison at the worst possible time, and subsequently, Edison is officially blamed for the Chinatown killings, even though they began weeks before he first arrived in San Francisco.
• In Persepolis, in order to avoid being arrested by the Guardians of the Revolution for wearing makeup in public, Marjane focuses their attention elsewhere by accusing a man who happened to be nearby of saying "something indecent" to her. (Later, Marjane's grandmother calls her out on this.)
• In Sin City, Marv, Dwight, and Hartigan take the fall for Goldie's murder, Damien Lord's murder, and Roark Junior's attempted molestation of Nancy respectively. Marv was an ideal fall guy because he was a well-known violent thug. Dwight actually did commit the murder, but was manipulated into doing it by Ava Lord, and Hartigan accepted his fate in order to protect the victim. Marv ended up successfully framed, tried, and executed while Dwight faked his own death to sidestep the issue entirely. Hartigan killed himself as a final sacrifice.
• Superman:
  • In Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen (Volume 1) #3: "The Man Who Collected Excitement", a thief frames Jimmy Olsen by slipping him anonymous tips, ensuring he'll always be one of the first at the scene of the crime. However, Jimmy turns the tables by finding the real crook.
  • In Who is Superwoman?, the titular villain murders Agent Liberty and attacks Inspector Henderson, and intends to take advantage of two facts (the police knowing Liberty's murderer is a super-powerful woman wearing a S-shield, and Supergirl had been seen talking to Henderson just before the attempt on his life) to frame the Girl of Steel for her crimes.
• Transformers:
  • Drift from The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye turns out to be a fall guy of the willing variety. The plan in this case isn't exactly a crime, but could have deadly consequences if it goes wrong. Long story short, it does, and it does, and Drift takes full responsibility because he feels one of the other people involved needs to stay in his current position to prevent a later disaster, and because he claims he was brought into the plan as a fall guy in the first place.
  • The Transformers (IDW): Daniel Klonowski from the Bumblebee miniseries. The Autobots are controlled by a rogue group of Skywatch agents under Colonel Gordon Horiuchi. After the whole operation fails due to Autobot ingenuity and Decepticon interference, Klonowski steps in to save Bumblebee and one of their scientists. Afterwards, he mentions that he took the fall for all the staff who went rogue and was dishonorably discharged. He's perfectly happy with this, though, as Horiuchi and the other unidentified commanders were quite grateful and he was suitably compensated.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes: In one "Tracer Bullet" story, Calvin's mom drags Calvin into the living room and tells him to explain how the end table got knocked over. Calvin re-imagines the events as his Hardboiled Detective alter ego, Tracer Bullet, getting hired to unwittingly serve as the fall guy for this particular crime.
  Tracer Bullet: The dame had set me up! She didn't want me to solve the case at all! She just wanted a patsy to pin the crime on!

Fan Works

• An Apple Sleep Experiment ends with Applejack being jailed for murder. The reason she went on her murder spree was that Twilight gave her a faulty sleeping potion which made her unable to sleep. After a few days, she went insane and began acting violent. Twilight refuses to reveal the true reason behind Applejack's behavior as it would make her, a newly crowned princess, look bad. She's more important than Applejack, so she lets Applejack take all the blame.
• In The Night Unfurls, Sanakan deduces that Grishom is set up as the fall guy by Mandeville for the rebellion at Ken. Kyril confirms this, believing that Mandeville is doing that in order to secretly secure routes from Ken to the Black Fortress, where Vault is residing.
• Where Talent Goes to Die:
  • Miura becomes this in the first trial, when Kurogane is murdered. Since Miura had humiliated Kurogane, the Ultimate Shogi Player, by defeating him in a match, Kurogane had been constantly hostile toward Miura, which the killer hoped would be seen as her motive for killing him. The killer also wrote "Miura" in the victim's blood, and used a hammer for the murder, since Monokuma had given everyone murder weapons, and Miura had received a hammer.
  • In the second chapter, Mizuhara is fatally poisoned at dinner, and Sugiura, the Ultimate Waitress and the person who cooked the dinner, is used as the fall guy, since the killer knows that Sugiura is also the Ultimate Poisoner, and so tried to frame her for killing Mizuhara, the only other person who knows that.

Film — Animated

• In Channel Chasers, Timmy is grounded from watching TV after destroying the city from a stunt he learned from the show Maho Mushi; as he uses a magic remote to travel through television and has Cosmo disguised as him in case Vicky comes, he accidentally reveals he's watching TV when he shouldn't; Vicky decides to take advantage of his misery by causing various disasters through the house (destroying the family photo, blowtorching the piano, and writing "MY PARENTS STINK" and "DINKLEBERG RULES" on the living room wall) and claiming Timmy did it, resulting in the remote being given to Vicky and Timmy punished even more. Fortunately, Tootie managed to see everything and, under the alias of "Deep Toot", tells the truth to Mom and Dad thus proving Timmy is innocent.
• The Lion King (1994): Scar, jealous of Mufasa, yearns to be king in his place, so he plots with the hyenas to kill Mufasa and Simba by starting a wildebeest stampede in a gorge. After Mufasa is killed, Scar then tricks Simba into believing he was responsible for the stampede (as from his perspective, it makes it appear his roaring frightened the wildebeests into the gorge) and to never return; this lasts until Scar reveals the truth during the battle at Pride Rock.
• My Little Pony: Equestria Girls: Sunset Shimmer trashes the Fall Formal decor in the gym and uses altered pictures to make it look like Twilight did it, which threatens her ballot for Fall Formal Princess and the chance to retrieve her crown (which happens to be the Element of Magic) being used for the tiara. Fortunately, Flash Sentry manages to find pictures of Twilight taken during the one-on-one soccer game against Rainbow, which Sunset used to make the fake pictures, thus proving her innocence.

Film — Live Action

• The Black Demon: Paul, an oil rig inspector, realizes that his employer, Nixon Oil has set up the rig to explode and kill him so that he takes the fall for ignoring hazardous work conditions.
• Blood Red Sky: Farid and Mohammed are forced to read statements that will make them seem to be Middle Eastern Terrorists, setting them up to take the fall for the plane's hijacking. They both have flight training and were lured onto the flight to attend a fake conference set up by the hijackers. There's also a German passenger who is a former associate of Egyptian radicals; his name is on a suspect watchlist even though he says he no longer has anything to do with them.
• Following: Cobb knows he's the prime suspect in the murder of an elderly woman, so he sets up the unnamed protagonist to take the fall for it. Or does he?
• At the center of Gang Related is a fall guy scheme that goes horribly wrong. Two crooked LA cops murder and rob a drug dealer who turns out to be an undercover DEA agent, and to avoid their crimes from being exposed they try to pin it on various petty criminals, all of whom turn out to have solid alibis. They eventually settle on a random homeless guy they picked up off the streets and get a prostitute who was working with them to identify him in a line-up. At first the subterfuge seems to work, as the man thinks he really did commit the murder and wants to take responsibility for his "actions". However, he is later revealed to be the missing member of a very wealthy family who used to personally provide medical aid in Africa as part of Doctors Without Borders, but had fallen into alcoholism and depression after the untimely death of his wife and daughter. As Tupac's character put it, they picked a saint to pin a murder on (a rich one too, as his family immediately provides very good lawyers, which doesn't help them). It all ends up blowing up in their face, with the prostitute cracking on the witness stand and identifying her two accomplices after she's charged with perjury, the fall guy being released when the DA drops the charges, the instigators turning on each other, and both of the two corrupt cops ending up dead for different reasons of their own doing.
• In Hangmen Also Die!, Czaka, The Mole inside La Résistance, becomes their fall guy for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.
• In The Last Witch Hunter, Belial sets Ellic up to be arrested for 36th Dolan's murder to throw Kaulder off his tracks.
• In the finale of The Maltese Falcon (1941), as Sam Spade is negotiating the terms for handing over the Falcon, one of his conditions is that someone needs to take the fall for the murder of his partner (since the police suspected Spade himself of having done the deed).
• Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country:
  • Kirk is framed for the assassination of Klingon Chancellor Gorkon.
  • In a lesser pulled off one the assassins tried to frame someone else for their crime by hiding their gravity boots in the locker of another crewman. This guy, named Dax however is an alien with huge webbed feet that are too big to actually wear any kind of footwear so it's immediately obvious he was framed and the crew don't buy it. Shortly afterwards the actual assassins are found executed by another conspirator so they clearly were punished for bungling the frame job so badly.
• In The Strawberry Blonde, Hugo hires Biff for a well-paying but do-nothing job in which all Biff does is sign contracts he doesn't understand. It turns out that Biff is Hugo's fall guy in case the authorities ever catch on to Hugo's fraud and graft. They do, and Biff goes to jail.
• In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the titular rabbit was accused of murdering a guy who was playing patty cake with his wife, and was forced to go on the run with the help of a detective to clear his name, otherwise a Hanging Judge would have him 'Dipped'. It turns out that the judge knew he was innocent because he was the guy who committed the crime, with Roger being used as his patsy in his grand scheme to eradicate Toontown to make way for a freeway.

Literature

• In The ABC Murders, there's a Serial Killer who nicknames themselves A.B.C. There's also a suspicious character named Alexander Bonaparte Cust who not only has A.B.C. as their initials, but has been at the murder locations during the time of the murder. However, he is just a scapegoat used by the actual killer to cover their tracks. The murderer even manages to trick Cust himself into believing that he is guilty.
• In Mario Puzo's original novel The Godfather, Felix Bocchicchio takes the heat for Michael's murders of "The Turk" and his pet NYPD Captain. Since Mr. Bocchicchio is already on Death Row for three premeditated and pretty much deserved murders, he's more than happy to admit guilt as long as Don Corleone provides financially for his soon-to-be widow and their three kids. (The movie omits this, leaving it wide open as to how the Don gets Michael off the hook.)
• John Rain: In Hard Rain, the CIA station chief in Tokyo is running an operation that's been shut down under orders from Washington, and using his subordinate Kanezaki as the fall guy by arranging to frame him as the Rogue Agent. Kanezaki only discovers this when he gets curious about some missing communication logs, which include the order cancelling the operation the chief has assigned to him.
• The Little Golden Calf features "sitz-chairman^note from German "chair" Funt" — a professional figurehead for phony companies. He is 90 and claims to have been doing that all his life. He charges a clerk's wage for sitting in the office looking important and double that for the time he spends in jail "because of job hazards". The Villain Protagonist hires Funt to get blackmail material about one of his former employers.
• In Renegades, when Smug Super Frostbite and her team torture and murder a villain, they decide to pin the blame on the vigilante Sentinel, who was trying to stop them, as they know he can't turn himself in to prove his innocence.

Live-Action TV

• During season two of Breaking Bad, Saul introduces Walt and Jesse to "Jimmy In-'N-Out", a professional fall guy who's spent so much time in prison he can't function outside it. He now gets paid to take the rap for other people.
• Burn Notice: A shadow government organization made a bunch of files on the handiwork of one of their own operatives look like Michael had done it. This prompted the CIA to burn him, whereupon the organization quickly stepped in to try and recruit him.
• In Gotham, petty criminal Mario Pepper was framed for the murder of Bruce Wayne's parents since the case was too high-profile to be left unsolved. With Pepper taking the fall, the police look like heroes, the mayor is seen as having a handle on the rising crime, and the mob doesn't have to deal with the extra police attention. It helps that Pepper is someone that no one, perhaps not even his own family, would miss.
• In the last season of How I Met Your Mother, it's revealed that Barney's job is to be this for the company he works for: he signs his name to a bunch of documents so that, if legal charges are brought against the company, Barney will take all the blame. Subverted when it turns out Barney's been a government informant the entire time, and is one of the few people at the company not in legal trouble.
• Limitless: In exchange for money for her family, Hawkins claims that she's a Right-Wing Militia Fanatic who tried to kill Morra. Interestingly, she isn't acting as a fall guy for the real culprit, but for the intended victim (who doesn't want an investigation into his affairs).
• Sidney Glass (formerly the Magic Mirror) does this for Regina in Once Upon a Time, admitting to kidnapping Katherine and going to jail. The town sheriff realizes it's total bull, but the true culprit is virtually untouchable.
• Person of Interest: The introduction of Root involved her framing the Victim of the Week for a political assassination. Team Machine clears his name, but this only makes Root determined to find out not only who Team Machine are, but more importantly how they even knew a Frame-Up had occurred in the first place.

Music Videos

• Common's "Testify" is about a man who is on trial for killing two men. He gets sent to jail, but the ending reveals he didn't commit the crime. The actual murderer was his wife. She's a drug king pin who framed her own husband by giving an anonymous tip, while at the trial she played the role of a sobbing wife.

Podcasts

• In The Adventure Zone: Dust, Sheriff Connors intends for Liam to take the fall for the murder of Jeremiah Blackwell. Because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, Dylan almost becomes this.

Tabletop Games

• In Paranoia, a major part of many end-games is arranging for one or more of your Troubleshooter teammates to take the blame when the mission of the day inevitably goes sideways and you all have to report back to Friend Computer. If they're already dead, so much the better!

Video Games

• Played for Laughs in Alpha Protocol should you stay on good terms with Steven Heck (never Steve) in Taipei; he'll tip off authorities that his assistant, Wen, was the one to kill the Prime Minister.
• The Zap Dramatic game Ambition has Yale, who ends up in prison for the murder of a woman he didn't do (though he was a suspect, as he was cheating on his wife with the murdered lady) in episode 10. This was supposed to lead into a sequel series, but the game has become orphaned since then.
• Pinning your crimes on other people is a vital skill in Social Deduction Games like Among Us and Goose Goose Duck. While tricking people into thinking you're trustworthy is certainly advantageous, that's only part of the battle; winning becomes a lot easier when you can convincingly point the finger at someone else, or, better yet, lead other players to do so of their own accord. Why not insinuate that the person who reported the corpse was the responsible party, self-reporting as a cover-up? After all, it's so much easier to eliminate all the other players if they take care of each other for you...
• In Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, when King Desmond of Bern contracts the Black Fang to kill his son Zephiel, Evil Matriarch Sonia orders her minion Jaffar to kill her daughter Nino afterwards so that Desmond has a fall guy to blame for it and prevent chaos from erupting. Nino ultimately refuses to go through with the assassination, Jaffar pulls a Heel–Face Turn to save her, and all three are rescued by Eliwood and co.

Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney has this happen quite often, to the point at which it's easier to list the cases in which the killer didn't intentionally try to frame the defendant: Turnabout Samurai (the victim framed the defendant), Turnabout Big Top (the framing was an accident), Farewell, My Turnabout (the killer got framed by another party), Bridge to the Turnabout (accomplice accidentally implicated herself), The Cosmic Turnabout (the killer tried to frame someone who wasn't the defendant), Turnabout for Tomorrow (the defendant framed himself to stop suspicion from falling on Athena), The Foreign Turnabout (Divination Seance made the defendant look guilty, but no one framed him), Rite of Turnabout (one of the victims framed someone for his own death and that of the other victim, because the true killer was his pregnant wife. Said pregnant wife wasn't in on the framing plan.), Turnabout Storyteller (killer framed a guy who in turn framed the defendant).
  • A multi-layered example happens in "Rise from the Ashes". Damon Gant kills Neil Marshall and makes it look like Ema Skye did it in order to blackmail her older sister Lana into doing his bidding, starting with framing the serial murder suspect Joe Darke for the crime. Two years later, Gant kills Bruce Goodman to prevent him from looking into Neil Marshall's killing, then tricks Edgeworth into driving Goodman's body to the prosecutor's office. Gant then calls Lana and has her stab Goodman's body with a knife, presumably intending to frame Edgeworth, but Angel Starr catches Lana in the act, resulting in Lana being arrested (presumably not what Gant wanted, but it was preferable to him being caught).
  • The killer of "Reunion, and Turnabout" works with Morgan Fey, who specifically wants to frame Maya for the murder so that Pearl Fey, Maya's cousin and Morgan's daughter, will become Master of the Fey Clan.
  • In Trials and Tribulations, the Big Bad uses both Phoenix Wright and Terry Fawles, both former boyfriends of hers, as fall guys. Phoenix is too smitten with her to properly defend himself (and thinks she's her much nicer twin sister), and Terry has a childlike mentality combined with his infatuation that makes it easy for the Big Bad to implicate him and lead him to suicide to cover her tracks.
  • In case 3-2, Luke Atmey used Ron DeLite as a fall guy for the murder of Kane Bullard, via making himself the fall guy for grand larceny. It's complicated. The murder and theft supposedly occurred at the same time, so being occupied doing one meant he wasn't doing the other. Ron DeLite was actually the thief, but Luke Atmey directed suspicion at himself (and, to be fair, he was the one planning out Ron's heists) so that he wouldn't be suspected of murder.
  • In "Turnabout Academy", this becomes a plot point late in the trial. The killer claims that the defendant actually did the murder and convinced her to help get her off, but Athena points out that the killer was the one responsible for submitting evidence to the police, thus resulting in the defendant's arrest.
• Danganronpa:
  • Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc:
    • Makoto ends up as this during the first trial, unintentionally. Leon didn't know that his murder of Sayaka had happened in Makoto's room, and ended up just going along with it when this came to light and everyone began to suspect him. However, if she hadn't died by her intended victim's hand, Sayaka would have committed a murder and used the room swap to pin her crime on Makoto.
    • During the third trial, Celeste tries to set up a complicated series of events that let her get away with killing Yamada while pointing all the blame toward Yasuhiro, but the exacts of the case make it impossible for him to be the culprit^note such as the robot costume he supposedly committed the crimes in being unable to bend at the knees, preventing him from moving the bodies around via cart like the students had established early on in the investigation.
    • Toko is implicated in the fourth murder case by a message left in the victim's blood. Hiro left it after he had attacked Sakura, thinking he'd killed her but his attack — and Toko's attack immediately after — was non-fatal. Sakura committed suicide.
    • The fifth murder case happens specifically to do this to Kyoko, who was coming too close to solving the mystery. The Mastermind takes a corpse they had murdered early in the game (Mukuro, who had been disguised as Junko), presents it as if it had just been murdered, uses a knife only Makoto had access to, and then destroys the face with a bomb to mask the body's identity. The entire thing is so convoluted that the fifth trial ends with either Kyoko or Makoto taking the blame (the former results in the bad ending), and it's not until the sixth trial that the whole thing is laid to rest.
  • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair: Hiyoko becomes this in the second trial. The killer tricks her into coming to the beach house before the victim, knocks her out and leaves her at the scene of the crime, while also planting a gummy to serve as proof she was there. Interestingly enough, the true killer, Peko, was actually planning on making herself the fall guy for the killer, believing that if she was convicted and Monokuma concluded she was acting on Fuyuhiko's orders, Fuyuhiko would graduate. Meanwhile, Fuyuhiko, the one who most vigorously argued in favor of Hiyoko's guilt, presumably did so hoping that Peko would graduate.
  • Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony
    • Himiko becomes this in the second trial, when, during her magic show, Ryoma is seemingly eaten alive by the piranhas that were dropped into the tank after the timer for her to escape ran out. In reality, he'd been killed the previous night.
    • Kaito serves as this in Chapter 4. Miu's original plan was to frame Kaito for killing Kokichi, so she programmed the cell phone in the Virtual World to log out Kaito if anyone said his name (other people could only log out themselves), to make it seem as though he'd logged out to murder the victim in the real world. While Miu ultimately ends up as the murder victim, Kaito is the initial suspect for her murder.
    • At the end of the game, Kaede turns out to have been this in a previous case. While she believed that she had killed Rantaro with the trap she designed to take out the mastermind, Tsumugi (the mastermind) was the one who killed him, hid evidence of Kaede's innocence, then let her be executed after being declared guilty.
• Higurashi: When They Cry: In two different arcs, Shion pretends to be her identical twin Mion and kills several people (her sister included).
• In Metro PD: Close to You, Hanai relates to the protagonist how, prior to the events of the VN, he arrested a man for a series of murders only to become convinced that he was innocent and had been set up to take the fall for someone else. He was not able to prove it or find the real culprit, and as of Hanai's epilogue the scapegoat is still in prison.

Web Videos

• Critical Role: Ashton from Campaign 3 became this when, during a robbery gone wrong, he got thrown out of a 5th story window and cracked his skull and about half of his body open on the pavement. His crew, the Nobodies, stuck around just long enough to get them to safety before they all fled town. Ashton survived, but Jiana Hexum — the woman they'd attempted to rob — found out about him and blackmailed him into working for her, on the condition that she wouldn't try to hunt down the rest of the Nobodies. Ashton himself has repeatedly stated that he doesn't fault the Nobodies for leaving and that they would have done the same, but clearly still harbors some level of resentment about being abandoned.

Western Animation

• Ivanhoe: The King's Knight: Prince John uses Front-de-Boeuf as one, to the latter's surprise, to prevent others from knowing he arranged his own kidnapping in "The Four Black Knights".
• The Legend of Korra sees Detective Mako arrested for crimes committed by Varrick, the Corrupt Corporate Executive he was investigating.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Rainbow Dash becomes this in "Rarity Investigates!" when she becomes responsible for sending Spitfire away by sending a fake letter that her mother Stormy Flare was sick when she was perfectly fine. Rarity seemed to be distracted when trying to help her clear her name, but as it turns out, she was gathering clues which wound up pointing toward the real culprit — retired Wonderbolt legend Wind Rider, who tried to get Dash banned from the Wonderbolts in fear she could break his flying record.
• The Simpsons: Exaggerated in "Bart the Murderer". When Principal Skinner disappears and is assumed to have been murdered by the Springfield Mafia, the Mafia not only put the blame on Bart Simpson (who is currently working for them as a bartender) but they also provide false proof in court that Bart (who is ten years old, by the way) is their capo di tutti capi (the leader of the entire organization◊), making him the fall guy for every crime the Mafia has ever done.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Patty Caper", SpongeBob almost became this when he ran out of suspects who stole the Krusty Krab secret ingredient, and Mr. Krabs assumes SpongeBob did it, which almost results in the poor sponge nearly fired and arrested. It was then revealed Mr. Krabs himself stole the secret ingredient (he accidentally showed the bottle when the police appeared) to avoid payment, and not only is he arrested for such, but also for attempting to let his only fry cook take the fall for it.
• Star Wars Resistance: In "Descent", although not actually the case, Commander Pyre insinuates to Tam when she's captured that her friends abandoned her to take the blame.
• Superman: The Animated Series: In "Fun and Games", Toyman kidnaps Bruno Manheim, leader of Inter-Gang, and Lois Lane after she wrote a scathing article calling Toyman a Psychopathic Manchild. While Toyman forces Lois to conduct an interview with him, Jimmy Olsen and Clark Kent conduct research on the connection between Manheim and Toyman, and it's revealed that Manheim tricked a toymaker named Winslow Schott into opening a toy factory so that it could be used for one of Manheim's criminal schemes. When the authorities busted the factory, Manheim was investigated but cleared of any wrongdoing, Schott on the other hand was found guilty of all charges and sentenced to prison where he died a few months before he made parole. His son, Winslow Schott Jr. was shuffled through numerous foster homes, and eventually adopted the alias Toyman and swore revenge against Manheim.

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