More than 120 years ago, Oscar Wilde (above, left) was one of the most famous men on the planet. Known for his incredible literary talent, his sense of style and design, and his quick, razor-sharp wit, Wilde was one of the original celebrities in the modern sense of the word. Wilde survived plenty of tragedy in his life, from the loss of his beloved sister Isola when he was just 12 years old, according to the Through the Eye of a Pegasus blog, and the loss of his first love, Florence Balcombe, to rival author Bram Stoker (“Dracula“) (per The Paris Review).

But something really changed for Wilde when he met Lord Alfred Douglas (above, right), known as “Bosie,” in 1891. Bosie and Wilde quickly became lovers, and Bosie introduced Wilde to a world of gay prostitutes and nonstop parties. Bosie’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, was a deeply conservative and extremely angry man who came to blame and despise Wilde for the rumors swirling about his son. When he publicly accused Wilde of being a homosexual — illegal at that time in England — Wilde chose to fight the charges instead of fleeing to friendlier France, reports History.com.

The trial and his conviction for “gross indecency” ruined Wilde’s life both personally and professionally. He was sent to prison from 1895 to 1897, and emerged a broken man. He never recovered and died a few years later, alone and in poverty. And it was all because of Lord Alfred Douglas: The man who destroyed Oscar Wilde.

He ruined Oscar Wilde

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He betrayed Wilde — twice

George C. Beresford/Getty Images

He was a huge racist

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Lord Alfred Douglas was an extremely good-looking man when he was young, but his physical beauty hid a pretty terrible person. As the Irish Times notes, he’s widely considered “incapable of redemption,” a self-obsessed man who fought with just about everyone in his life, alienating his own family.

Worse, he spent most of his life after Oscar Wilde’s death attacking Wilde and trying to ruin Wilde’s reputation, apparently in revenge for his portrayal in Wilde’s final masterwork, the searing letter to and about Douglas, “De Profundis” (posted at Project Gutenberg). Simply put, Douglas was a petty and selfish man.

He was also a virulent racist. As The Dabbler reports, he spent much of his adult life accusing Jews of various conspiracies. When he was editor of a magazine called Plain English, he filled it with anti-Jewish diatribes. When he linked Winston Churchill to a truly bizarre conspiracy theory involving Jewish speculators gaming the stock market, he was convicted of libel and sent to prison. There he seemed to finally realize how awful he was; The Guardian reports that he softened his attitude towards Wilde and even admitted some responsibility. It was too little, too late, however.

He wasted his talents

Library of Congress

Wilde wasn’t attracted to Douglas solely because he was a fine-looking man; Douglas was also a writer and poet of some renown. As The Critic Magazine notes, his work is almost completely forgotten today, although at one point his poetry was fairly well regarded.

As The Irish Times tells us, however, Douglas insisted on working in a peculiar and obscure form of poetry called Petrarchan Sonnets, which reflected his almost violent opposition to any hint of modernism. Working in such a narrow form while disdaining anything new happening in the literary world more or less doomed Douglas’ work to obscurity. Another factor may have been the early success he enjoyed. As The Critic Magazine notes, his work was praised and warmly received when he was a young student, and enjoyed immediate celebrity and success. Even Douglas himself later lamented that he would have been better off if he’d been able to keep working on his writing instead of being thrust into a world of celebrity and privilege.

The Guardian says that he spent much of his later life wasting his writing talent on revenge, using poems and his role as editor for various magazines to attack anyone he saw as an enemy and to further his racist ideas about Jews and other ethnicities. Douglas was so dislikable, when he died in 1945, only two people attended his funeral.