“Skeletons in the closet” are secrets from someone’s past that they want to keep hidden, especially politicians. This can also refer to family secrets, which can be harmful due to secrecy. Eventually, secrets tend to emerge, and some people prefer to disclose themselves before the fallout. Investigative journalists can be useful in uncovering these secrets.
The skeletons in the closet are facts and events from someone’s past that that person would rather keep hidden. If revealed, such skeletons could have negative consequences, especially for people with very important public profiles, such as politicians. The term “skeletons in the closet” is also sometimes used in the same way, especially in British English-speaking regions of the world.
In addition to being used to refer to individual secrets, this phrase can also refer to family secrets more generally. Many families have a few skeletons in the closet, which can range in scope from Nazis in the family tree to illegitimate children. Older family members may wish to keep these facts hidden from the younger generation, out of a sense of shame or a desire for family harmony. In some cases, a family works together to hide those secrets, out of a desire for privacy and to keep the past from being retrieved.
By their very nature, skeletons in the closet tend to be harmful, due to the secrecy involved. There are certainly instances where secrets shouldn’t be disclosed to the general public, but sometimes people might find it easier to be open about sordid past events before those events can be used against them. For example, some politicians have openly stated that they experimented with drugs in their youth, in an attempt to counter later attempts to discredit them with examples of drug use.
As a general rule, the skeletons in the closet do eventually emerge, as will the truth, even after several generations of skillful concealment. Hopefully, of course, people only have figurative skeletons in their closet, rather than real ones. When it becomes apparent that a secret is about to be revealed, some people prefer to disclose themselves, in hopes of reducing the associated fallout. A determined effort to hide such a secret can sometimes only draw attention to it, turning the unveiling into an even bigger production.
Some people excel at unearthing skeletons in the family past; investigative journalists are a well-known example of this. This skill can be extremely useful in situations such as political campaigns, as investigators can be used to dig to the other side and to see how candidate skeletons are buried.
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