00:01:11.000Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure to be on.
00:01:13.180So this is a really fascinating and deeply empathetic book.
00:01:18.220You take these people seriously as characters, as moral actors, as historical agents.
00:01:25.860And it's also a book that I want to let our readers know contains lots of grappling with rape, with domestic violence, with the disbelief and dismissal of victims, with the public humiliation of victims, and with the impunity and indifference that perpetrators are met with, which for a long time allows them to go on committing more violence, right?
00:01:49.740So I'm going to be real with you folks who are listening.
00:01:53.160This was one of the tougher ones for me to prepare for.
00:01:56.220And I think it might be a little tough for some of you too, which is saying something,
00:02:00.880since you're all the people who are following us through 1933, right?
00:02:04.680So please, everybody take care while you're listening.
00:02:07.480Just know that this is where we're going today.
00:02:10.260Yeah, so maybe, Sarah, to start us off, can you introduce our listeners to your book,
00:02:14.980which, like so much of what you write, both deals with the way we talk about crime and with feminist social history.
00:02:23.040Can you introduce us to John and Gloria Rideout and tell us how you came to want to write about them?
00:02:28.480Well, I first learned about the case that's at the center of Without Consent, which is known as Oregon vs. Rideout.
00:02:36.940But as we'll get into, there are actually several Oregon vs. Rideouts.
00:02:40.000But the original one happened in Salem, Oregon, in December 1978.
00:02:44.980And two months prior to the trial, on and around October 10th, Greta Rideout, who was 23, or just about to turn 23, alleged that she was raped by her husband, John, who was 21, and the father of their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter.
00:03:03.360And so according to her, they were having a fight, and they'd been married for a little while, but it was a very tumultuous marriage that I think bore all of the hallmarks of what we would now call intimate partner violence.
00:03:16.320He would be abusive, he would yell a lot, he would demand sex, he would say no.
00:03:21.460At one point, she had a brief dalliance with somebody else, got pregnant, had an abortion, but they got back together.
00:03:28.400They grew up separately in very impoverished circumstances.
00:03:33.500They didn't have a lot of family support.
00:03:36.040They just didn't have a lot of resources.
00:03:37.900And so in keeping with the cycle, it became easier to reunite than to try to make it on their own because there just wasn't enough money to go around.
00:03:47.360I mean, if you have to keep the lights on and you have to support a kid, for someone like Greta, who didn't have a lot of family nearby and didn't have a lot of friends, she just didn't have access to a lot of things.
00:04:00.640Although by the time the alleged rape happened in October 1978, she had known about the Women's Crisis Center in Salem.
00:04:11.940She had visited it because of a prior incident of alleged abuse by John.
00:04:17.440And at the time, she learned that the year before, Oregon had finally passed a law that criminalized marital rape.
00:04:26.420And at the time, they were only the fourth state that made spousal rape a crime. So if you go back to 1974, marital rape was not a crime anywhere in the United States, anywhere in Canada, and in, frankly, most of the world.
00:04:42.740So this was still a fairly new concept.
00:04:45.780So for Greta to learn that there was a law that could allow her to press charges against her husband,
00:04:51.860when this incident happened, she went about doing so.
00:04:55.620And in the process, this trial happened that became such a national conversation.
00:05:00.380It sparked eventually so many terrible op-eds, which I know we're going to be talking about.
00:05:05.600And more to the point, it introduced people to the concept that, yes, if you commit a sexual assault,
00:05:12.100upon your spouse. This is a crime, even though for centuries prior, common law had it that
00:05:19.960once a woman got married, she was essentially her husband's perpetual property.
00:05:25.520So all of these things were kind of marinating when I first read about the case in, I think it
00:05:30.540was 2017, and it was in a book called Virgin or Vamp, How the Press Covers Sex Crimes by a novelist
00:05:37.500an investigative reporter named Helen Benedict, and she talked about various rape trials and other
00:05:43.320cases involving women who had been assaulted in some way where it became kind of a public
00:05:49.440spectacle. And Oregon v. Rideout was the first case that she covered. I had never heard of it,
00:05:55.520and I thought, why isn't this a book? And the more research that I did, I thought,
00:05:59.100why is this such a massively undercover topic? And so then I went about writing what became
00:06:05.180without consent. Yeah, I love your coverage of how the passage of this law was reported on in
00:06:11.720the news as sort of like a novel curiosity in Oregon. Like, look, now they're saying that
00:06:17.760it can be prosecuted as rape if a man forces sex on his wife. And Gloria Wright out consumed that1.00
00:06:25.760news, right? She was already in contact with some services for abused women before the assault took
00:06:34.080place because, as you mentioned, she was in this abusive relationship with her husband, John.
00:06:39.620And one of her first calls after she fled the rape was to the women's crisis worker she had
00:06:45.960already been in touch with. That's right. So when she had initially made contact, Greta had talked
00:06:51.640to a woman named Helen Bibbelheimer, who at the time she was a really interesting person. I wish
00:06:56.820I had been able to include a bit more about her. But at the time, she was a co-owner of this kind
00:07:03.160new-agey bookstore. She had several children, and she was volunteering at the center.
00:07:08.240And her initial contact with Greta meant that when the alleged rape happened,
00:07:12.560when she got back in touch with the crisis center, she talked to some other people,
00:07:16.320but was immediately put back in touch with Helen, who really became her advocate. And when the trial
00:07:20.420happened, Greta and her daughter Jenny stayed with the Bibbelheimers throughout the entire trial.0.99
00:07:26.280Once it ended, she had to figure out how to live on her own again. But Helen was extraordinarily1.00
00:07:32.380helpful. And I suspect that it was ultimately, you know, kind of an issue because she also had
00:07:40.840to go back and raise her family. But I do know that hosting Greta and Jenny and being involved
00:07:48.040in this case was a very pivotal part of her life. So I have a question about the passage of these
00:07:55.380marital rape laws in the early to mid 70s. Oregon, you said, is the third state, is that right? And
00:08:03.440So South Dakota was the first in 1975.
00:08:07.200And it was at a very interesting time in the state's history when there was a Democratic legislature and women who were agitating to reform the rape laws.0.56
00:08:27.060And South Dakota wouldn't criminalize spousal rape again until 1990.
00:08:30.880So by the time Oregon came around, I believe the other three states were Delaware, Iowa and Michigan. New Jersey was about to. Their spousal rape law, the marital rape exemption would be repealed as of I think January 1st, 1979. And then California launched its own campaign that year. And that eventually became the springboard for other states to kind of get on board and criminalize spousal rape.
00:08:58.860But yes, by the time Oregon came around, there were only four states.
00:09:02.300But John and Greta, their case was the first trial.
00:09:05.760This had not been a concept that had been tested in a court before, even though it had been passed legislatively in a handful of these states.
00:09:13.780Yeah, and just to be clear, it was the first trial involving marital rape of spouses who were still living with each other.
00:09:22.220And I think it's important to just really hone in on that because there had been prior cases where married couples who were separated or maybe hadn't started on the divorce proceedings, there had been cases involving spousal rape.
00:09:39.820And some of them in various states would lead to overturned convictions and some of them would stay the course.
00:09:46.800But John and Greta were still living together when the alleged rape happened.
00:09:51.160And so this became important because at the time that it happened, only the local press in Salem really reported on it. There were a couple of wire reports, but it really wasn't until early December of 1978 when a Los Angeles Times feature reporter named Betty Liddick decided to go to Salem and report things out.
00:10:10.080She talked to Greta. She talked to John. She talked to John's mother. She talked to people at the Salem Women's Crisis Center. And it was the first piece that really identified the stakes. The local reporters kind of knew because something like this had just never happened in their recollection. But Liddick really identified that this was a major trial and it would essentially shape conversations thereafter. And indeed, that's what happened.
00:10:39.260I'm glad you make this point about this being a case in which the perpetrator and the victim were still living together because it gets at something that I really wanted to tease out that was so elegantly shown in your book.
00:10:50.940I think from the standpoint of listeners in 2025, it can feel a little disorienting to realize that marital rape was not always illegal, right?
00:11:01.140It reflects a very different view of rape and of marriage, I think, than a lot of people are coming to this podcast with in our own era.
00:11:10.100And for a lot of people, basically all they know about rape law, if they know anything, is the consent standard, right?
00:11:15.760But I find that if you write about rape law or if you spend a lot of time writing about B2 or about like rape trials, what you often discover is that the legal question in rape and particularly in a trial itself is actually less about whether a woman said yes than about whether she had a legitimate right to say no.
00:11:37.840Right. And the sort of regulation of the no and of women's right to deny sexual access to their bodies is a lot of what the law actually does in a lot of rape cases.
00:11:49.500And so I think this marital rape question is really much more about like trying to expand women's rights to say no, which had previously been like very, very circumscribed.
00:12:01.620right? So could you tell us a little bit more about how the law and the culture thought about
00:12:07.880sexual force in marriage before the write-outs, before 1978? What was like sort of the status
00:12:13.200quo ante that this marital rape criminalization movement was responding to? So, I mean,
00:12:19.380let's first start with the early 70s and various rape reform laws, because particularly some of
00:12:26.160the early scholarship on these laws, I'm thinking particularly of Diana Russell's The Politics of
00:12:32.580Rape, which was the book that she wrote before she would write the really landmark book,
00:12:37.200Rape and Marriage, in 1982 and then revised in 1990. But in her first book, she describes going
00:12:43.540to a rape trial in San Francisco in the early 70s and just being absolutely appalled at the
00:12:50.800sexual history of the victim, and the fact that nothing pertaining to that with the alleged
00:12:57.140offender ever made it through, that there was so much victim blaming, and that the jury instructions
00:13:02.960essentially told jurors, you have to make sure, I'm paraphrasing wildly, of course,
00:13:09.540you have to make sure that you take into account that a woman could be lying, that
00:13:14.680you shouldn't necessarily believe her from the jump.
00:13:17.440Yeah, you're talking about cautionary jury instructions, which were a feature of
00:13:20.740rape trials, sometimes called Hale instructions. Well, and we're going to get into our good buddy
00:13:25.660Matthew Hale. Our buddy. Yeah, this was a feature of rape trials nationwide for a long time. States
00:13:33.580began getting rid of them in the 1970s, where in rape trials and only in sexual violence trials,
00:13:39.320juries were actually instructed, formally instructed, to treat the complaining woman
00:13:45.840as less credible than they would another witness.0.97
00:13:48.500Right. And that ties in very much so to attitudes about the concept of marital rape.
00:13:54.900So this is a good time to talk about Sir Matthew Hale.
00:13:57.960Dun, dun, dun. Sorry, I fucking hate this guy.1.00
00:14:01.200Like Sir Matthew Hale, if you study like women's rights law,1.00
00:14:05.260he will come up all the fucking time.0.99
00:14:10.920Remember when he like married his maid and he was like,1.00
00:14:13.220Like, oh, he said some, like, 16th century equivalent of, like, I'm smart, but my dick isn't because he, like, sexually harassed his employee.0.95
00:14:23.300I have to admit there was only so much that I could research about Hale because I just kept getting mad all the time and I had to stop.0.90
00:14:29.200We should probably, like, tell our listeners.
00:14:31.580This guy's a 16th century English jurist.
00:14:49.600So he was a 17th century jurist in England. I believe he became essentially like chief justice close to the end of his life.
00:14:56.440And some of the things that he did included, you know, condemning people to be executed because they were alleged witches.
00:15:04.980He talked about how once a woman got married, that she was essentially a man's perpetual property and she had no, you know, autonomous right to consent. And, you know, he wrote just a lot of horrible shit. And what became, and I'm not going to say it in Latin because I don't feel like using Latin today, the history of the pleas of the crown.1.00
00:15:27.480It's, you just read it, and it's just page after page of terrible misogyny and ridiculous sexism.0.66
00:15:39.100And I think what's also important to highlight, and I do highlight it in the book, is that he never officially wanted this to be published.
00:15:48.120He wrote it, and then stuff was happening with the monarchy, and he thought that, you know, maybe he had backed the wrong horse.
00:15:54.460So he was trying to make sure, no, no, this should not be published. Definitely not during my lifetime and maybe never. And then a bunch of other guys got a hold of it after he died and said, no, no, this is really important. It's in the public interest. We must make sure that the history of the pleas of the crown should be published.
00:16:11.460It took 60 years because, you know, there was no internet. But the point being is that 60 years after his death in 1736, that's when history of the pleas of the crown is finally revealed to the world with a preface by a guy named Solemn Emlyn, who was a lawyer, who just said, yeah, well, I know that Sir Hale didn't want us to publish this, but it was more important to have this out in the world.
00:16:33.680So, I mean, as I say in the book, even if Sir Hale had not written all of this down, somebody else would have. Because that's just the level of misogyny that was baked into British culture and society that would then transmit across the Atlantic and be baked into legal history in America for decades and centuries thereafter. So he was bad, but also all the other men were bad, too.
00:17:02.540Fair. And I mean, it's maybe worth saying, right? Like, it also means that this stuff sort of persists in common law rather than, right? Like, the question of constitutionality, for instance, doesn't come up yet, right? Like, between Sir Matthew Hale and Oregon in the late 1970s stands, obviously, a whole new legal regimen in the United States. But when it came to marital law, it was kind of common law all the way down, right?
00:17:24.220Pretty much. And even though there would be some court decisions that tried to address it, some obliquely, some more directly, it was always just baked in of, oh, yeah, of course there's an exemption that, you know, we could have rape laws, but if you're married, it doesn't apply.
00:17:43.400And it just sort of persisted almost as if, well, this is how it's always done, so we're just going to keep doing it. It wasn't until various activists in the second wave feminist movement started really loudly asking these questions that people were like, huh, maybe we should change these laws. Maybe this is really stupid. Maybe this is actually causing a great deal of harm to women. Maybe we should do something about it.1.00
00:18:07.040So that's why I keep saying, like, it's not that ancient history. 1975 is 50 years ago, which isn't that long ago. It was just a few years before I was born. And obviously, I know lots of people who are not only alive, but I would talk to people who remembered the write-out case. So this is maybe not fresh, but it's also not a musty relic of the ancient past.
00:18:32.700I mean, the last state to criminalize marital rape was North Carolina in 1993. Right. That's right. Probably a lot of our listeners were alive then. If you weren't, please don't tell us. I don't want to know.
00:18:45.940we're all a bunch of olds it's true but you know this is matthew hale writes into the english
00:18:55.700common law tradition that marriage for a woman and not for a man is perpetual sexual consent
00:19:02.440right and that a wife does not have the right that is recognized by the law to refuse sexual access
00:19:11.300to her body to her husband right so this notion that if you're married he just gets to do what
00:19:18.140he wants is the law of the land and also it's kind of like received cultural wisdom this is also you
00:19:25.180know a moment before the articulation of what we now describe as like acquaintance rape or date0.87
00:19:33.100rape right these are things that are happening that a lot of women are experiencing as violations
00:19:37.720but which are not being broadly talked about using the word rape, using the word sexual assault.0.99
00:19:44.060Right. And just the fact that there is this sort of cultural reframing that's very slow and very painful to take into account that, yes, if you know the person, they are just as likely, if not more, to sexually assault you.
00:20:01.020And that this could happen not just in a one-time deal where it's a stranger going after you, and then, you know, you're supposed to go through all of these tropes of maybe fighting back or not or whatever.
00:20:14.080But if you're living with someone and they're constantly raping you, I mean, that's just basically an unending horror show.
00:20:21.840Like, you can't escape this because this person is in your bed.
00:20:26.280This person may be the parent of your child or children.
00:20:30.080This person may be baked into your community.
00:20:33.140As horrific as stranger sexual assault is, I think that marital rape is in some ways a, I mean, I don't want to quantify different horrors, but it's just like such a level of horror that is just so awful.
00:20:49.700It includes entrapment and inescapability in the domestic sphere.
00:20:56.500You know, these are people with whom victims have often shared a lot of intimacy and affection over the course of their relationship, who then enforce this violence on them and treat them as instruments or, you know, inferiors to be dominated through this backstabbing of sexual violence.
00:21:14.860Right. A number of these relationships would start and all would seem well. It's a long-term relationship. They're living together. They're married. All of a sudden, something shifts. And that shift is truly a level of betrayal that in the vast majority of cases, a woman is not prepared for that shift to happen. And then they may be stuck.
00:21:34.260socioeconomic issues can come into play, especially if they can't afford to leave,
00:21:39.060or they have no place else to go, or they have children, or they're, you know, denied access to
00:21:45.340a car or any transportation, if they're cut off from their entire family and community,
00:21:51.940you know, the levels of isolation and the levels of siloing out someone so that they're just
00:21:58.640experiencing perpetual assault. Yeah, it's just awful.
00:22:04.240And while we're sort of marking disjunkers from our own time, even though I'm sure we're going
00:22:08.060to get to the continuities, it's also worth pointing out, of course, that this is happening
00:22:11.900in the 70s. Until 1974, with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, wives were extremely dependent1.00
00:22:18.640on their husbands for finances well beyond what's true still today. Like literally legally,
00:22:25.020They couldn't often procure a new apartment or sign for a car, et cetera, et cetera.
00:22:31.080And so there is this element of dependency that gets sort of naturalized and almost sort
00:22:40.120I mean, so much was happening, obviously, between the mid-60s through the mid-70s.
00:22:45.420And, you know, we can go through some of them.
00:22:47.340Griswold v. Connecticut with birth control.
00:22:50.020Roe v. Wade, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.0.94
00:22:53.240So women were starting to gain long overdue autonomy. And into this existing framework that was shifting, activists who were essentially agitating for the criminalization of spousal rape came along.0.56
00:23:08.000So I'm wondering about the way in which marital rape brings to the forefront the fact that this can be about repeated or even habitual instances, and it kind of makes heterosexuality itself a little bit suspect, right?
00:23:22.000I'm drawing here on Estelle Friedman's wonderful book, Redefining Rape, where she points out that the defense part of it, in the 19th century, you had to show evidence that you tried to defend yourself against the assault.
00:23:32.320That, of course, is something that's impossible to do if this is a habitual, right, if you're living with this person.
00:23:38.180Eventually, this is just, you can't prove that in every instance.
00:23:41.300Is this also a struggle about, like, whether or not rape is an extraordinary thing or if it's just an ordinary overflow of what we today would call toxic masculinity and, you know, toxic heterosexuality?
00:23:52.980I think that's very much a part of it, because there was this idea central to culture that rape was something that happened between strangers. You know, it's this idea of like someone's leaping out of the bushes to assault someone. And thinking through what that meant, if it was somebody you knew, if it was your husband, your partner, someone you were dating, an acquaintance, there just wasn't the framework to discuss it in the same terms.
00:24:22.220What's interesting is that in working on this book and even afterwards, and I just published a piece in the Globe and Mail where I interviewed a researcher who had a really intriguing thesis that she did for her doctoral dissertation, which she posited that we're essentially thinking through this framework all wrong.
00:24:40.680That instead of focusing all of our attention on sort of the acute problem of stranger rape, what if we reframed it to think about the chronic condition of intimate partner rape? And how would the legal system change as a result of centering repeated assaults by someone you know, and then stranger rape can be folded into that framework?
00:25:06.520So I totally get why it was in reverse, because obviously common law had it that as soon as you got married, you were your husband's property and he had perpetual consent to do whatever he wanted.
00:25:19.860But since we know different and sexual assault within marriages happens, that changing this framework is really important.
00:25:29.380So we have these shifting understandings of what sexual violence really is and what women's entitlements are, both in culture and now sort of belatedly in the law, that are coming to a head in Salem, Oregon, in the latter half of 1978, when John and Greta Rideout go to trial.
00:25:54.080How does the community in Salem feel about this case? How are they depicted in the media? You know, how is the notion that forced sex in marriage could be punished by the state handled? And how do these characters feel about it? You know, suddenly you have a prosecutor and a judge and a defense attorney and these jurors all sort of forced to give it like thumbs up, thumbs down on this question that a lot of them probably hadn't really given much thought to before.
00:26:21.280No, and I think it's fair to say that Salem as a town and as a community really did not know what hit them and that collectively they were just weighing over their head. I mean, imagine that you're this government town and I've been to Salem. I would qualify it as kind of a purple state type place.
00:26:42.900In 1978, it was much more socially conservative, even compared to more recent years. So the fact that all this media was descending upon this government town to chronicle a rape trial in circumstances that the vast majority of them would either have never considered or just were like, is this rape or what?
00:27:04.520And looking at John and Greta in particular, that this couple struck so many people as being, quote, unimpressive. You know, I think one later report had essentially classified them as almost being like, you know, losers at a table that no one was really expecting them to be at.
00:27:23.700And so there was a lot of dismissiveness, both within media coverage, but also, I think, within the town. So as a result, there was this sense of, okay, is there going to be a fair trial? Yes. Are people going to show up and watch the spectacle unfold? Absolutely.
00:27:43.340But I think the vast majority of people really just wanted this to go away.
00:27:47.340And certainly after the verdict, there was this sense of, well, maybe we never have to hear about John and Greta Rideout again, which turned out not to be true.
00:27:55.360But it meant that there wasn't an appetite to grapple with what was actually going on, that this trial was not just about sparking a conversation about whether it was legally possible to rape your wife,
00:28:10.220But to talk about more thorny things relating to intimate partner violence and things that I think we understand quite well, although we can always understand it better now, was really alien back in December of 78.
00:28:26.980Yeah, one of the impressions I came away with from your description of the trial itself was like, oh, what a lost opportunity.
00:28:34.320You know, there's a lot of people who are varying degrees of well-intentioned.
00:28:41.800But like kind of uniformly ill-equipped to talk about and understand what they were being presented with.
00:28:48.940I mean, I think we have to start with the prosecutor, Gary Gortmaker, because here he was prosecuting this case. And I just do not believe his heart was ever in it. I don't think that he outright rigged it. I don't think he was frankly smart enough to do that. But I do think that, you know, just based on his comments, like on the day of the verdict, he was saying, oh, I don't think John should go to prison, even if he's convicted.
00:29:14.300So it's like, why is he constantly undercutting the case?
00:29:17.440And the case that he put on was actually quite thorough.
00:29:20.120There were 27 witnesses, including Greta.
00:29:22.760And reading through what I could find of the trial,
00:29:43.540piecing things together, but based on what I could find, what people testified to, to my mind,
00:29:49.740made a very strong case that John Rideout sexually assaulted his wife. But because it was December
00:29:57.0801978 in Salem, Oregon, and because the judge had allowed in her sexual history at a pre-trial
00:30:03.540hearing a few weeks prior, that meant that the jury could consider to think about whether the
00:30:11.720fact that she had had a couple of abortions, that she had separated from John and had technically
00:30:20.000an extramarital relationship, that she joked about having lesbian tendencies, which she said
00:30:26.280was a way to kind of essentially troll John into talking about whatever latent homosexuality he0.73
00:30:32.320may or may not have had. I mean, clearly there was a lot of sniping and going back and forth,
00:30:39.560And these were wildly imperfect people.
00:30:42.840Was there a rape shield law in place in Oregon at the time?
00:30:46.240Or was that something that was still being added?
00:30:48.300Because I know those were sort of added piecemeal to various jurisdictions.
00:30:51.960Rape shield laws being laws that prevent defense attorneys in sexual assault cases
00:30:57.440from using the victim's sexual history to try and smear her0.90
00:31:02.320or make the trial be about, like, her own sexual ethics.
00:31:05.980My understanding is that there was no explicit rape shield law. I think it was supposed to be more implicit, but that after the write-out case, I think things progressed accordingly because of what had happened.
00:31:20.380So she was really subjected to a pretty gross sexual humiliation in this trial.
00:31:25.360And multiple times over, because it wasn't just from the defense lawyer, Charles Burt. During the pretrial hearing, she also had to be grilled by prosecutors to prepare her. And as she would later say, that affected her more in a way than getting grilled by the defense lawyer, because that you sort of psychologically hype yourself up to do, perhaps. But when it's coming from your own team, and they were doing so in a way that I think perhaps was well-intentioned, but also perhaps wasn't.
00:31:51.860I will say in testimony prep, lawyers who are quote unquote on your side, who are trying to prepare you to be crossed, will be especially mean. And then they tell themselves and tell you, I'm doing this for your own good. So you know how bad it's going to be up there. And it's like, well, it's kind of bad in here.
00:32:09.820And am I right in remembering, Sarah, that even though Greta's sexual history was permitted as evidence, John's previous instances of abuse were not? Is that correct?
00:32:23.040That's absolutely correct. And that would also come into play in some of the other cases that I wrote about where the woman's sexual history would be permitted. But depending on the state, the man's sexual history or the offender's sexual history was never allowed in.
00:32:40.720So, yeah, I mean, nobody really knew on the jury about John's prior instances of intimate partner violence. They might not have known how he behaved towards women before he met Greta. That was all ruled inadmissible. But because of this pretrial hearing by Judge Barber, Greta's history was allowed in.
00:33:06.040What about John's attorney? You said the prosecutor was sort of lukewarm on the case. He didn't really seem to believe that marital rape was particularly serious. What about the defense attorney?
00:33:19.280I mean, his entire defense was, if there was sex between Greta and John, it was consensual, and also marital rape's not a crime. So initially, when the case went forward, that was the argument, not by Charles Burt yet, because he didn't come in until right before the trial, but Rideout's initial lawyer, Phil Kelly, his legal argument was, well, this law is so new, it hasn't been tested, we should just throw out the law. And the judge is like, no.
00:33:46.980Yeah. Statutory nullification. Judges love that.
00:33:50.600And the judge is like, nah, we're not doing that.
00:33:54.440And then it got kicked to a judge who then mysteriously got removed.
00:34:01.000Even John's defense lawyer really didn't know why John had an objection.
00:34:05.440And then Richard Barber became the judge.
00:34:08.420So, gratis sexual history is allowed in, and then the trial happens.
00:34:13.100And Burt is pretty unanimously considered by the press as having done a much better job. So that even though his argument essentially was, it was consensual, there shouldn't be a marital rape law. Look at this nice young boy. He's all cleaned up now. He's getting acne shots. He's dressing better. And, you know, his story should take precedence over whatever Greta, you know, that Howardan might be saying.
00:34:42.060Gortmaker was very tall, had a booming voice,
00:34:44.840and he really tried to kind of overpower people and speak just really loudly.
00:35:13.680You know, the way I think about it is it's like that Warner Brothers cartoon involving Ralph and Sam, like the sheepdog and the wolf, and they clock in, and then they fight each other all day, and then they clock out, and then they go hang out.
00:35:25.920Like, these guys would have beers and spend holidays together and go hunting. And so it felt very much like this trial was a way to kind of perpetuate the kind of social theater of the Salem legal community. And in doing so, kind of forgot that there were actual real people, particularly a real woman, who was pressing charges against her husband for raping her.
00:35:53.060So in late December, they break for Christmas and they come back and John is acquitted. Do you know how the jury came to that conclusion?
00:36:03.660It took a few hours for them to deliberate. I think the first vote was 6-6, and then eventually other jurors who were on the fence got persuaded to acquit. And ultimately, they felt that Greta was not credible. Whatever they thought of John, they didn't think that he should spend 20 years in prison for first-degree rape.
00:36:24.620And some of that also had to do with the fact that there were no alternate verdicts that they could consider. So by the time the jury got to deliberate, they could only consider first-degree rape. It was essentially an all-or-nothing deal that Gortmaker made. He had dropped all the assault and battery charges. He didn't have second-degree sexual assault. And that was it.
00:36:49.920So it was essentially, do you sentence a man to 20 years in prison for this crime that we're not even sure is a crime, or do we just let him walk? So they let him walk. And he eventually gives a press conference, and it looks like he's a deer in the headlights. And it seems for a short time that he and Greta will not communicate.
00:37:11.100I mean, they're going to have to because they do have a daughter and this eventually has to be figured out. And in the process, that is the catalyst for why they will eventually reunite. And their reunification, it's Greta who gets the lion's share of the vitriol and not John.
00:37:29.180Yeah, so he is acquitted at the end of December 78, and then they get back together very briefly, what, like a month later or something?
00:38:08.900And when the sun comes up the next morning, they're back together. Because it's like, well, what are her options? And that's the hell of it. That's the true hell of this kind of cycle of intimate partner violence is that even after something so public and so humiliating and so seismic as this rape trial, there just didn't seem to be any other option for Greta.
00:38:31.980Their reunification is really short-lived, but it sort of cements this impression in the public's mind of the write-outs, and really Greta specifically, as kind of like silly, stupid, trashy people, right?1.00
00:38:45.740Right. Like they're called the fun couple. It's almost like they become a joke. It's this idea of, I never want to hear about the write-outs again. Why are they constantly in the news?0.99
00:38:54.980There's a lot of like equivalents, like they deserve each other kind of sentiment, like plague on both of their houses. There's a great line in your piece where one of the witnesses to the trial, I think maybe it was somebody who's reporting on it, says that John and Greta seem so much smaller than the questions they've unleashed, right?
00:39:13.060I think that was from Cynthia Gourney's piece in The Washington Post, which was one of the better post-trial pieces written. Again, I think like Lydic, she really understood the stakes and that there was a lot of nuance happening and wasn't out to sensationalize unduly, unlike a lot of the people who would go on the op-ed circuit.
00:39:34.480Or, I mean, I will never forget, I watched an episode of The Tonight Show hosted by Johnny Carson, and he made a really terrible write-out joke. And I just thought, this was just in the air at the time. You could just toss off these horrendously sexist comments, and nobody batted an eye.
00:39:55.540People forget about this stuff. I was like, I mean, this is tangential, but I was talking recently to a straight person who I like a lot who is like shocked to discover that I had stories of experiencing homophobia in high school.
00:40:10.380And I'm like, do you not remember what the 2000s were? Like this was not that long ago. And it was ubiquitous and it was everywhere. And this like casual cruelty in the culture towards the social other, be that women, be that gay people, be that racialized people, like whatever it is, is actually like something that you don't really notice until a social change makes it strange to you.
00:40:33.680But it's just kind of like water a lot of the time.
00:40:36.780So something that really struck me when I was reading your book and what I think you depict so well is just like the ordinariness of these people, particularly how very, very young they were.
00:40:49.440I mean, I'm sort of always struck by how young and how unformed and how ill-equipped they were for the world that was unleashing itself upon them.
00:42:02.720And then, of course, the reunion lasted maybe two months, if that. And by the end of April of 1979, Greta and John were divorced. It was finalized. And by early 1980, he would serve a grand total of 40 days in prison because he had tried to break into Greta's apartment.
00:42:25.940and at one point he ran into her on the street
00:42:49.720Yeah, the TV movie seems to have loomed really large
00:42:53.100in John's own understanding of his life.
00:42:55.800Oh, my God. I mean, when he and I corresponded, he brought up Mickey Rourke unprompted. And he would do this later on in other trials. I think that young Mickey Rourke playing him in this TV movie was the greatest thing that ever happened to John Rideout. And he was dining out on it. And he was talking about it all the time. And it's like he didn't really connect the dots of, yeah, he's playing you because you were on trial for raping your wife.
00:43:25.800It's almost like that didn't fully register as to why this was important. But yes, there was this TV movie. And again, your point about good intentions kind of having unintended consequences was also a factor in this movie.
00:43:41.460The two women who produced it, Blue Andre and Vanessa Green, they had never produced a film before. They were dealing with all sorts of sexism in Hollywood and trying to essentially outgun the boys who wanted to do their own project.0.76
00:44:01.140But they managed to convince Greta and John because they approached them during the reunion process to come on board.
00:44:08.480And the thing with the movie is that it's like if you watch TV movies from that time, late 70s, early 80s, like it's very treacly, but it's better than it has a right to be.
00:44:20.520And I think it's because the screenwriter, Hesper Anderson, was able to rely on the trial transcript. And even though I have real criticisms of the movie, namely that it uses essentially a romance scaffolding for a story that's clearly about intimate partner violence, at least Greta's kind of portrayed in a much more sympathetic light than media coverage post-acquittal but pre-movie had really portrayed her as.
00:44:50.520You know, I'm interested in how much, you know, despite the gravity of the material, you really clearly had a lot of fun in the archives, right?
00:45:01.420Like, well, your book has these little bizarre details that always indicate to me that somebody, like, really got lost in the story and then these people.
00:45:09.500Like, one thing I keep coming back to is this bizarre incident in which Audrey, John Brightout's mother, like, loses a finger during the trial at the courthouse, and, like, nobody tries to put it back on?
00:45:23.880Yeah, I mean, she was going through the door and the finger sheared off. And I actually had much more of that in the book. And my editor's like, okay, I see why you need to have this detail in there, but maybe just incorporate it in such a way that it's not like a standalone section and just mention it when she's on the stand. I was like, okay, fine. I get it.
00:45:42.120So there wasn't like, initially you had like part three, the finger.
00:45:46.640It wasn't quite that detailed, but it definitely was about a page long.
00:45:50.020I mean, part of what is kind of uncanny about history, I think we think about this a lot in our 1933 series, is that like while these monumental changes are happening, often the mundane is also happening, right? The profound and the mundane are like simultaneous or just the strange and the profound are simultaneous.
00:46:07.180I mean, that's, I think, every moment that either we live in currently or people have lived in in the past. You can't live your life as if everything is the highest of stakes possible. Like, sometimes you just really do have to cook dinner and do the laundry, even as fascism is rising. Like, that's just a given.
00:46:28.220So I do think that, you know, looking at telling details, Audrey Fenimore's finger being lost, or before she got back together with John one of the earlier times, this robbery that happened where Greta's wedding dress got taken and then mysteriously was put back in the front door.
00:46:52.640I don't know, because all I have are newspaper articles to rely on, and no one else was going to be telling me what the real story might have been.
00:47:01.380So you take these details and you spin them into narrative and hope that something coherent happens.
00:47:07.640So something that I loved about your formal choices in the book was your use of footnotes.
00:47:12.640So often when a man is involved as like a lawyer or a judge with the acquittal of a racist husband or involved with like writing like anti-marital rape criminalization op-ed as we go through the story, you will put a footnote directing readers to further information about that man, like revelations that came out later.
00:47:36.120So Adrian actually gave a really excellent talk at Stanford yesterday where he had this great line that you said you had to cut from your book, Adrian, which is if somebody seems really concerned about cancel culture, there's a good chance that there are credible allegations against them.
00:47:50.820And I had to like – I immediately thought of Sarah's book because you make such insidious use of the footnotes.
00:48:01.420But this comes up over and over again.
00:48:03.500And it's like, oh, yeah, this guy, by the way, went to jail later.
00:48:06.300I was kind of dizzied by the number of men who had either like explicit sexual assault histories or like just kind of general corruption who were involved with like the resistance to the marital rape criminalization effort.
00:48:23.120Yeah. Every time I would read a shitty op-ed, it turns out that the person writing it0.95
00:48:27.800would either do shitty things later in life or had done shitty things that people just didn't0.98
00:48:33.460know about yet. And I think it's a little easy to fall back on well projection, but I don't know,
00:48:40.120maybe it's because we're living in such a stupid time where everything is text that that influenced0.91
00:48:46.300how I was reading all these op-eds as well. I mean, the ones that I felt really were the most0.99
00:48:51.940egregious were the two Chicago guys, Bob Green and Mike Royko. Bob Green's in particular was
00:48:57.820just really bad, like claiming that he called up Ms. Magazine to get their opinion about Greta and
00:49:03.800marital rape. I question whether this actually even happened. It just feels like garbage fiction.
00:49:10.240It's definitely one of those cancel culture piece anecdotes where I'm like,0.61
00:49:14.100didn't happen. Like, give me one right to this phone call actually being made.
00:49:17.440I mean, it's interesting, right? This is a trial that shines a spotlight on something that people very much thought should be beyond the ken of the state, where society sort of didn't get to really look that carefully.
00:49:31.400On the one hand, people can have that position for ideological or religious reasons.
00:49:36.000On the other hand, I'm sure there's an opinion that is far more fervently held by those who would really be worried if society were to look very, very carefully.
00:49:44.940It doesn't mean that everyone is, but it makes perfect sense to me.
00:49:47.880I mean, like, this is the kind of case where no one looks at it and doesn't briefly flash to their own relationship one way or the other, right?
00:49:54.600Like, either I have no idea how this could happen in a marriage or, oh, I have an idea of how this could happen in a marriage, right?
00:50:00.360I mean, this also reminds me of another egregious op-ed that I found by Richard Cohen, who, of course, would later get written up for alleged sexual harassment.
00:50:08.720And I mean, he essentially writes about, well, this woman is parading around and now I can't look and what's going on here?
00:50:17.700And it's just reading this going, what are you even doing?
00:50:36.720And the amount of parading is just pretty limited, I have to say.
00:50:41.240You're just not the beneficiary, Adrian.
00:50:43.240And yet in the conservative imagination, there's just so much parading around.
00:50:48.260This actually is maybe a good moment to drill down on the kind of central legal philosophical question of marital rape criminalization and its opponents, which is this sense that there are realms of privacy into which the law does not intrude, right?
00:51:02.720There's kind of like no law within a marriage would be the anti-marital rape criminalization position.
00:51:09.360And then I think the liberal feminist position would be like, well, where there's no law, then the strong rule.
00:51:14.660And when there is no law that can intrude into relations between married people, that means that the weaker married person is subject to violence, abuse, exploitation in ways that we shouldn't tolerate in a nominally like liberal democratic society.
00:51:32.720And that might bring us to this character I really wanted us to get to talk about before we let you go, just because, you know, like a lot of the liberal feminist movement of the second wave and sort of post-second wave era, this marital rape criminalization effort that had its inaugural debut in the write-out case.
00:51:52.700It was really like this long, arduous, like unsexy state by state lobbying and litigation effort aimed at changing the governing laws of each successive jurisdiction so that women could get better outcomes that like ensure their safety and dignity.0.84
00:52:12.560Right. That's like the story of the liberal feminist second wave.1.00
00:52:15.260It's like a lot of like bureaucracy.1.00
00:52:18.600It's a slog, and people don't want to acknowledge the slog level of it, but that's how you get stuff done.
00:52:24.780But the boring slog, in this case, was led by a really not boring person.
00:52:30.660Can you tell us a little bit about Laura X, this insane character you discovered?
00:52:35.540I want to be clear, I have so much empathy for Laura, because it does require difficult people to get difficult stuff done.
00:52:43.860And I think that even if a lot of her life is unexamined by herself for reasons that I can only speculate on, but she was born into privilege, big-time privilege.
00:52:57.600I mean, if you go to St. Louis, the names of her mother and her father are all over various buildings.
00:57:17.740And by 1993, that happened. Were there a lot of loopholes? Absolutely. In fact, in the state of California, the last remaining loophole related to disabled and incapacitated individuals only got removed this year, which is wild.
00:57:35.640So the first law that California had was in 1979, and it went through various iterations.
00:57:41.780But now there are genuinely no more loopholes.
00:57:44.280And there are still so many states that have loopholes.
00:57:48.140I mean, I think of South Carolina, where if you are a victim of spousal rape, you have to, quote, show excessive force for there to be a case.
00:57:57.140If you're a child bride in so many states, it doesn't matter.
00:58:01.120You're not considered to have been raped by your spouse.0.98
00:58:04.480If you're in Virginia and you are raped by your spouse, if the guy gets therapy, the charges can be reduced.
00:58:11.620Like, it's not a small thing to get rid of these loopholes, and yet they persist.
00:58:18.220So Laura X is this, like, very intense, charismatic figure who takes on this state-by-state campaign, and she's willing to appear on television.
00:58:34.060You know, she becomes really like the face of this issue on a nationwide scale and really just kind of like does it with her fingernails through this long campaign.1.00
00:58:44.700I also like that she lightly defrauded the University of California.
00:58:47.900I think this is like a minor sinfulness, but this is a person who's just sort of like never, like a lot of our civil rights icons just like didn't actually wind up with a big source of financial support.
00:59:00.640And so she like lightly scams on a work study program.
00:59:14.760It basically was, but I do know that this became very contentious to report out.
00:59:21.360And when I brought it up to her, she refused to go on the record about it.
00:59:26.120But I could just tell that it still deeply, deeply, deeply affected her.
00:59:30.460And, you know, I don't want to go so far as to say, yeah, that rules.
00:59:35.640But I also completely understand why this would have happened at that time and why it would have affected her so much because she was trying to do this greater good.
00:59:46.680And something coming out about this that would affect her ability to be the activist that she was meant to be.
00:59:56.760I mean, this would have been absolutely devastating.
00:59:59.500To just be targeted that way. And frankly, it's like, why did this get attention when probably lots of other people at UC Berkeley were doing this and they were not getting written up in the papers?
01:00:12.540To be clear, what Laura X is alleged to have done is to have her interns who are being sort of supplied to her through a work-study program at the University of California, Berkeley, sort of forge their timesheets a little so she could get money from the UC system for a time they had not, in fact, actually worked.
01:00:30.520Wait, is that a crime now? I mean, what?
01:00:32.540You know what? It's a scammer princess. She's like the Anna Delvey of her time. But Anna Delvey didn't criminalize marital rape and get women's dignity.1.00
01:00:39.420I mean, if I'm going to have to choose between Laura X and Anna Delvey, I'm choosing Laura X every single time.0.99
01:01:15.620So Greta takes Jenny back to the Midwest, to Minnesota, which is where she was raised.
01:01:22.520And basically, Greta lives her life out in complete obscurity, which I think is the best possible outcome for someone who had been so vilified and so ridiculed and so held up to national.
01:01:37.480national and maybe global media scrutiny, that she could just live her life out on her own terms,
01:01:42.340whatever those terms were, that her daughter could have a family. And that was that.
01:01:50.060For John, it was a little different. He bounced around between Salem and Northern California.
01:01:57.320He had several children with women, almost none of whom he had, like, any serious relationship with.
01:02:04.220And it wasn't until he reconnected with a girl he had known in high school named Teresa Hearn that would eventually catalyze what later happened. So they started communicating on Facebook. She went out to visit him. They became a couple. And then the cycle of intimate partner violence was happening.
01:02:25.320he eventually left Northern California for good and went to stay on his mother's property outside
01:02:32.520of Salem and he started going to a church and he met a woman named Sheila Moxley who was a member
01:02:41.220of the church as well and she'd had a very very tough life just a lot of abuse and another case
01:02:48.120of the people who were closest to her really let her down but she managed to forge a life and she
01:02:53.180got married she had kids and she was you know trying to build something for herself and the
01:02:59.600church recommended that john he was going by joe at this point he had some carpentry skills and she
01:03:05.460needed something built so he came over it's like quasi charitable right because john's kind of a
01:03:11.360drifter she goes to church she's like i need some work done is this guy cool could i help him out by
01:03:16.820throwing him some work exactly yeah yeah so he comes over he's clearly inebriated and she goes
01:03:25.460to bed and he's supposed to be staying on the couch he definitely is not and she would eventually
01:03:31.020allege that he had raped her she didn't report it at first this was 2013 but she did get the
01:03:37.420church elders involved and they basically kicked him out of the church then he you know he has an
01:03:43.260on-again, off-again thing with Teresa. There's a fire. She loses her home. She loses some
01:03:48.140animals. And she has no place to go. So she gets back with John. And then another alleged incident
01:03:55.660of rape happens. It takes her a while, but she does decide to report. And because she decides
01:04:02.640to report, he then leaves a voicemail on Sheila's answering machine. And she's very, very freaked
01:04:08.660out and all the old horror comes back and she is then convinced to report coincidentally or you
01:04:15.540know maybe not coincidentally because really it was john rideout who was driving this so by the
01:04:21.180summer of 2016 he is back in the news because he's been charged with sexually assaulting
01:04:27.220sheila and theresa so this is like what 30 years 40 years 38 years yes so i think you know these
01:04:37.900are two more women who report, three women total report him. I think it stands to reason
01:04:42.540that over the intervening years, it's not unreasonable to think this guy was probably
01:04:47.060assaulting other people who chose not to report, or at least it's something you can assume about
01:04:53.660the habitual behaviors that this guy was engaging in. I mean, I think the, what I would land on is
01:04:59.420that there was a pretty infamous phrase uttered by a congressman in California about, well, if you0.99
01:05:05.900can't rape your wife who can you rape and to me the point of this book is if you can rape your0.95
01:05:10.120wife who else can you rape right so i don't know specifically who or if there were any other0.77
01:05:17.260victims of john ride out because i was not able to find out for myself but when this book comes
01:05:25.680out and if women come forward or i learn more that's something i'm definitely interested in
01:05:32.000obviously. I think what you're saying is that, like, if he didn't, it's just by happenstance.
01:05:36.700The justice system for 40 years sort of suggested that this was okay, right? You know, whether or
01:05:42.960not that led to only the things that he then got prosecuted for or other things, the point is he
01:05:48.240can or he could. Right. And the fact that he essentially got away with the alleged rape of
01:05:53.880Greta meant that he may have felt that he could get away with so much more. Was he convicted of