Charles Manson Tribute Doughnut Goes Over Poorly

Following the death of Charles Manson on Sunday, Portland-based cult doughnut chain Voodoo Doughnut decided to honor the memory of this man—who, let's be clear, was the architect of a murderous cult—with a doughnut.

There he was: the visage of a murderer on a freakin’ pastry, his brown hair in utter disarray and lovingly rendered in buttercream, complete with a disturbed gaze and an “x” in place of the swastika he’d tattooed on his forehead.

Voodoo tends to commemorate the dearly departed with pastries pretty frequently. Still, its choice of subjects is usually mildly more defensible: Fred Cole; Fats Domino; Harry Dean Stanton; Tom Petty; Gary Weir, the man who played Bozo the Clown. Et cetera.

But a doughnut bearing the countenance of a deceased killer like Manson didn’t go over too well after being posted, and promptly deleted, on Twitter Sunday night; users perceived the doughnut to be lionizing a murderer. After some serious blowback, the chain decided to double down. “Not celebrating. Villains die too,” the chain insisted in a follow-up tweet that, too, was later deleted.

Yeesh.

"Voodoo Doughnut creates obituary doughnuts for famous and infamous people," Sara Heise, a spokesperson for the chain, explained to MUNCHIES over email on Tuesday. "We use our platform for posting obituaries and do not sell or profit off of these centerpieces."

Fair enough. Heise declined to answer why the tweets showing the cupcakes were deleted. Either way, they’ve been screengrabbed for posterity by a few observant Twitter users. The internet never forgets, I'm afraid—although it's doubtful whether anyone will forget Charles Manson.