Episode 106 -- Spousal Rape and the Rideout Case

Speaker 1 You 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.

Speaker 1 I mean, if I'm going to have to choose between Laura X and Anna Delvey, I'm choosing Laura X every single time. Yeah, yeah, there we go.
I like my scammer feminists.

Speaker 2 But you get to stay in better hotels with Anna Delvey.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 who is to say who's better?

Speaker 1 The outputs are incredible.

Speaker 1 Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb. And I'm Moira Donnegan.

Speaker 2 Whether we like it or not, we are in bed with the right.

Speaker 1 So, Adrian, today we're talking about a really fascinating story and also a really sad one.

Speaker 1 The story of John and Greta Rideout of Oregon and how marital rape, which was long considered legal, became a crime in the United States.

Speaker 1 And we're joined by somebody really special, the brilliant crime writer and my own dear friend, Sarah Weinman, the crime lady, whose book, Without Consent, A Landmark Trial and the Decades-Long Struggle to Make Spousal Rape a Crime, is out on Tuesday, November 11th.

Speaker 1 Sarah, thank you so much for coming. Thank you so much for having me.
It's such a pleasure to be on.

Speaker 1 So this is a really fascinating and deeply empathetic book. You take these people seriously as characters, as moral actors, as historical agents.

Speaker 1 And 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?

Speaker 1 So gonna be real with you folks who are listening, this was one of the tougher ones for me to prepare for.

Speaker 1 And I think it might be a little tough for some of you too, which is saying something, since you're all the people who are following us through 1933, right? Wow.

Speaker 1 So please, everybody, take care while you're listening. Just know that this is where we're going today.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So maybe, Sarah, to start us off, can you introduce our listeners to your book, which, like so much of what you write, both deals with the way we talk about crime and with feminist social history?

Speaker 2 Can you introduce us to John and Gloria Writeout and tell us how you came to want to write about them?

Speaker 1 Well, I first learned learned about the case that's at the center of Without Consent, which is known as Oregon versus Writeout, but as we'll get into, there are actually several Oregon versus Writeouts.

Speaker 1 But the original one happened in Salem, Oregon in December 1978.

Speaker 1 And two months prior to the trial, on and around October 10th, Greta Wrightout, 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.

Speaker 1 And 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.

Speaker 1 He would be abusive, he would yell a lot, he would demand sex, she would say no, they split up.

Speaker 1 At one point, she had a brief dalliance with somebody else, got pregnant, had an abortion, but they got back together. They grew up separately in very impoverished circumstances.

Speaker 1 They didn't have a lot of family support. They just didn't have a lot of resources.

Speaker 1 And 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.

Speaker 1 I 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,

Speaker 1 she just didn't have access to a lot of things. Although by the time the alleged rape happened in October of 1978, she had known

Speaker 1 about the Women's Crisis Center in Salem. She had visited it because of a prior incident of alleged abuse by John.

Speaker 1 And at the time, she learned that the year before, Oregon had finally passed a law that criminalized marital rape. And at the time, they were only the fourth state that made made spousal rape a crime.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So this was still a fairly new concept. So for Greta to learn that there was a law that could allow her to press charges against her husband, when this incident happened, She went about doing so.

Speaker 1 And in the process, this trial happened that became such a national conversation. It sparked eventually so many terrible op-eds, which I know we're going to be talking about.

Speaker 1 And more to the point, it introduced people to the concept that, yes, if you commit a sexual assault upon your spouse, this is a crime.

Speaker 1 Even though for centuries prior, common law had it that once a woman got married, she was essentially her husband's perpetual property.

Speaker 1 So, all of these things were kind of marinating when I first read about the case in, I think it was 2017.

Speaker 1 And it was in a book called Virgin or Vamp, How the Press Covers Sex Crimes by a novelist and an investigative reporter named Helen Benedict.

Speaker 1 And she talked about various rape trials and other cases involving women who had been assaulted in some way where it became kind of a public spectacle. And Oregon v.

Speaker 1 Writeout was the first case that she covered. I had never heard of it.
And I thought, why isn't this a book? And the more research that I did, I thought, why is this such a massively undercover topic?

Speaker 1 And so then I went about writing What Became Without Consent.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I love your coverage of how the passage of this law was reported on in the news as sort of like a novel curiosity in Oregon. Like, look, now they're saying that

Speaker 1 it can be prosecuted as rape if a man forces sex on his wife. And Gloria Wrightout consumed that news, right?

Speaker 1 She was already in contact with some services for abused women before the assault took place, because as you mentioned, she was in this abusive relationship with her husband, John.

Speaker 1 And one of her first calls after she fled the rape was to the women's crisis worker she had already been in touch with. That's right.

Speaker 1 So when she had initially made contact, Greta had talked to a woman named Helen Bibbelheimer, who at the time she was a really interesting person.

Speaker 1 I wish I had been able to include a bit more about her. But at the time, she was a co-owner of this kind of new agey bookstore.
She had several children and she was volunteering at the center.

Speaker 1 And her initial contact with Greta meant that when the alleged rape happened, when she got back in touch with the crisis center, she talked to some other people, but was immediately put back in touch with Helen, who really became her advocate.

Speaker 1 And when the trial happened, Greta and her daughter Jenny stayed with the Bibbleheimers throughout the entire trial. Once it ended, she had to figure out how to live on her own again.

Speaker 1 But Helen was extraordinarily helpful. And I suspect that it was

Speaker 1 ultimately, you know, kind of an issue because she also had to go back and raise her family.

Speaker 1 But I do know that hosting Greta and Jenny and being involved in this case was a very pivotal part of her life.

Speaker 2 So I have a question about the passage of these marital rape laws in the early to mid-70s. Oregon, you said, is the third state, is that right? And it's the Dakotas before that?

Speaker 1 So South Dakota was the first in 1975. And 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.

Speaker 1 And they were successful. But it lasted maybe 18 months because a new legislature came in.
The Republicans were like, this is... garbage.
We're going to repeal everything. And so they did.

Speaker 1 And South Dakota wouldn't criminalize spousal rape again until 1990. Oh, wow.
So by the time Oregon came around, I believe the other three states were Delaware, Iowa, and Michigan.

Speaker 1 New Jersey was about to,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that eventually became the springboard for other states to kind of get on board and criminalize spousal rape. But yes, by the time Oregon came around, there were only four states.

Speaker 1 But John and Greta were, their case was the first trial. This had not been

Speaker 1 a concept that had been tested in a court before, even though it had been passed legislatively in a handful of these states.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and just to be clear, it was the first trial involving marital rape of spouses who were still living with each other. And I think it's important to just

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 there had been cases involving spousal rape. And some of them in various states would lead to overturned convictions and some of them would stay the course.

Speaker 1 But John and Greta were still living together when the alleged rape happened. And so this became important because at the time that it happened, only the local press in Salem really reported on it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 She talked to Greta.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The local reporters kind of knew.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And indeed, that's what happened.

Speaker 1 I'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.

Speaker 1 I think from the standpoint of listeners in 2025, it can feel a little disorienting to realize that marital rape was not always illegal, right?

Speaker 1 It 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.

Speaker 1 And for a lot of people, basically all they know about rape law, if they know anything, is the consent standard, right?

Speaker 1 But I find that if you write about rape law or if you spend a lot of time writing about B2

Speaker 1 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, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so I think this marital rape question is really much more about like trying to expand women's right to say no, which had previously been like very, very circumscribed, right?

Speaker 1 So could you tell us a little bit more about how the law and the culture thought about sexual force in marriage before the write-outs, before 1978?

Speaker 1 What was like sort of the status quo ante that this rape criminal, marital rape criminalization movement was responding to?

Speaker 1 So, I mean, let's first start with the early 70s and various rape reform laws, because particularly some of the early scholarship on these laws, I'm thinking particularly of Diana Russell's The Politics of Rape, which was the book that she wrote before she would write the really landmark book, Rape and Marriage, in 1982 and then revised in 1990.

Speaker 1 But in her first book, she describes going to a rape trial in San Francisco in the early 70s and just being absolutely appalled at the sexual history of the victim and the fact that nothing pertaining to that with the alleged offender ever made it through, that there was so much victim blaming, and that the jury instructions essentially told jurors, you have to make sure, I'm paraphrasing wildly, of course, you have to make sure that you take into account that a woman could be lying, that you shouldn't necessarily believe her from the jump.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you're talking about cautionary jury instructions, which were a feature of rape trials, sometimes called hail instructions. Well, and we're going to get into our good buddy Matthew Hale.

Speaker 1 Our buddy. Yeah, this was a feature of rape trials nationwide for a long time.

Speaker 1 States began getting rid of them in the 1970s, where in rape trials and only in sexual violence trials, juries were actually instructed, formally instructed, to treat the complaining woman as less credible than they would another witness.

Speaker 1 Right. And that ties in very much so to attitudes about.
the concept of marital rape. So this is a good time to talk about Sir Matthew Hale.
Dun dun dun. Sorry, I fucking hate hate this guy.

Speaker 1 Like Sir Matthew Hale, if you study like women's rights law, he will come up all the fucking time. No, he's the worst.
He's just the worst fucking dude.

Speaker 1 Remember when he like married his maid and he was like, oh, he said some like 16th century equivalent of like, I'm smart, but my dick isn't.

Speaker 1 Because he like sexually harassed his employee. I 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.

Speaker 1 We should probably like tell our listeners. This guy's a 16th century English jurist.
Yes. 17th.
17th century, I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 1609 to 12.

Speaker 1 He died in 1676. Do you know his dates up by heart or did you just pull this up? No, no, I guess I know it by heart.
I told you.

Speaker 1 I know it by heart.

Speaker 1 So he was a 17th century jurist in England. I believe he became essentially like Chief Justice close to the end of his life.

Speaker 1 And some of the things that he did included, you know, condemning people to be executed because they were alleged witches.

Speaker 1 He 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's, you just read it and it's just

Speaker 1 page after page of terrible misogyny and ridiculous sexism. It just goes on and on and on and on.

Speaker 1 And 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. Like he, he hid it.
He wrote it.

Speaker 1 And then stuff was happening with the monarchy and he thought that, you know, maybe he had backed the wrong horse. So he was trying to make sure, no, no, this should not be published.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 We must make sure that the History of the Pleas of the Crown should be published. It took 60 years because, you know,

Speaker 1 there was no internet.

Speaker 1 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 Emlin, 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.

Speaker 1 So, 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.

Speaker 1 So, he was bad, but also all the other men were bad too.

Speaker 2 Fair. 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?

Speaker 2 Like the question of constitutionality, for instance, doesn't come up yet, right?

Speaker 2 Like between Sir Matthew Hale and Oregon in the late 1970s stands obviously a whole new legal regimen in the United States.

Speaker 2 But when it came to marital law, it was kind of common law all the way down, right?

Speaker 1 Pretty much.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 you know, we could have rape laws, but if you're married, it doesn't apply. And 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.

Speaker 1 It wasn't until various activists in the second wave feminist movement started really loudly asking these questions that people are like, huh, maybe we should change these laws.

Speaker 1 Maybe this is really stupid. Maybe this is actually causing a great deal of harm to women.
Maybe we should do something about it. So that's why I keep saying, like, it's not that ancient history.

Speaker 1 1975 is 50 years ago, which isn't that long ago. It was just a few years before I was born.

Speaker 1 And obviously, I know lots of people who are not only alive, but I would talk to people who remembered the write-out case.

Speaker 1 So this is maybe not fresh, but it's also not a musty relic of the ancient past. I mean, the last state to criminalize marital rape was North Carolina in 1993, right? That's right.

Speaker 1 Probably a lot of our listeners were alive then.

Speaker 1 If you weren't, please don't tell us. I don't want to know how you got there.

Speaker 1 We're all a bunch of olds, it's true. But, you know, this is Matthew Hale.

Speaker 1 writes into the English common law tradition that marriage for a woman and not for a a man is perpetual sexual consent, right?

Speaker 1 And that a wife does not have the right that is recognized by the law to refuse sexual access to her body, to her husband, right?

Speaker 1 So, this notion that if you're married, he just gets to do what he wants is the law of the land and also is kind of like received cultural wisdom.

Speaker 1 This is also, you know, a moment before the articulation of what we now describe as like acquaintance rape or date rape, right?

Speaker 1 These are things that are happening that a lot of women are experiencing as violations, but which are not being broadly talked about using, you know, the word rape, using the word sexual assault.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that this could happen not just in a one-time deal where it's a stranger going after you.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, you're supposed to go through all of these tropes of maybe fighting back or not or whatever.

Speaker 1 But if you're living with someone and they're constantly raping you, I mean, that's just basically an unending horror show. Like, you can't escape this because this person is in your bed.

Speaker 1 You're going to wake up with them. This person may be the parent of your child or children.
This person may be baked into your community. As horrific as

Speaker 1 stranger sexual assault is,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It includes entrapment and inescapability in the domestic sphere. Yeah.
And coercive control. And also betrayal.

Speaker 1 You 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.

Speaker 1 Right. 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then they may be stuck. Socioeconomic issues can come into play, especially if they can't afford to leave or they have no place else to go or they have children.

Speaker 1 or they're denied access to a car or any transportation, if they're cut off from their entire family and community.

Speaker 1 The levels of isolation and the levels of siloing out someone so that they're just experiencing perpetual assault.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's just awful.

Speaker 2 And while we're sort of marking disjunctures from our own time, even though I'm sure we're going to get to the continuities, it's also worth pointing out, of course, that this is happening in the 70s.

Speaker 2 Until 1974 with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, wives were extremely dependent on their husbands for finances well beyond what's true still today.

Speaker 2 Like literally, legally, they couldn't often procure a new apartment or sign for a a car, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 2 And so there is this element of dependency that gets sort of naturalized and almost sort of whisked out of view by these laws.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. I mean, so much was happening, obviously, between the mid-60s through the mid-70s.
And, you know, we can go through some of them. Griswold v.
Connecticut with birth control. Roe v.

Speaker 1 Wade, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. So women were starting to gain long overdue autonomy.

Speaker 1 And into this existing framework that was shifting, activists who were essentially agitating for the criminalization of spousal rape came along.

Speaker 2 Aaron Ross Powell, so 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.

Speaker 2 And it kind of makes heterosexuality itself a little bit suspect, right?

Speaker 2 I'm drawing here on Estelle Friedman's wonderful book, Redefining Rape, where she points out that the defense part of it, that in the 19th century, you have to show evidence that you try to defend yourself against the assault.

Speaker 2 And that, of course, is something that's impossible to do if this is a habitual, right? If you're living with this person, eventually this is just, you can't prove that in every instance.

Speaker 2 Is 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 toxic heterosexuality?

Speaker 1 I 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.

Speaker 1 You know, it's this idea of like someone's leaping out of the bushes to assault someone and

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 What'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.

Speaker 1 That 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?

Speaker 1 And how would the legal system change as a result of centering repeated assaults by someone you know,

Speaker 1 and then stranger rape can be folded into that framework.

Speaker 1 So 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.

Speaker 1 But since we know different

Speaker 1 and sexual assault within marriages happens,

Speaker 1 that changing this framework is really important.

Speaker 1 So, 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.

Speaker 1 How 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 and marriage could be punished by the state handled?

Speaker 1 And how do these characters feel about it?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 No, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 In 1978, it was much more socially conservative, even compared to more recent years.

Speaker 1 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 of them would either have never have considered or just were like, is this rape or what?

Speaker 1 And looking at John and Greta in particular,

Speaker 1 that this couple struck so many people as being, quote, unimpressive.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And 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.

Speaker 1 Are people going to show up and watch the spectacle unfold? Absolutely. But I think the vast majority of people really just wanted this to go away.

Speaker 1 And certainly after the verdict, there was this sense of, well, maybe we never have to hear about John and Greta Wrightout again, which turned out not to be true.

Speaker 1 But 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, but to talk about more thorny things relating to intimate partner violence and things that I think we

Speaker 1 understand

Speaker 1 quite well, although we can always understand it better now, was really alien back in December of 78.

Speaker 1 Yeah, one of the impressions I came away with from your description of the trial itself was like, oh, what a lost opportunity. You know, there's a lot of people who were

Speaker 1 varying degrees of well-intentioned.

Speaker 1 I think that's fair to say. But like kind of uniformly ill-equipped to talk about and understand what they were being presented with.

Speaker 1 I 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.

Speaker 1 I don't think that he outright rigged it. I don't think he was frankly smart enough to do that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So it's like, why is he constantly undercutting the case? And the case that he put on was actually quite thorough. There were 27 witnesses, including Greta.

Speaker 1 And reading through what I could find of the trial, and I also want to be clear, the local media coverage in particular was quite good, but the actual transcript, much as I knocked on doors and banged my head against the wall to obtain one, I was never able to obtain it in full.

Speaker 1 So it did require a lot of like piecing things together. But based on what I could find,

Speaker 1 what people testified to, to my mind, made a very strong case that John Rideout sexually assaulted his wife.

Speaker 1 But because it was December 1978 in Salem, Oregon, and because the judge had allowed in her sexual history at a pretrial hearing a few weeks prior, that meant that the jury could consider

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 1 think about whether the fact that she had had a couple of abortions,

Speaker 1 that she had separated from John and had technically an extramarital relationship, that she joked about having lesbian tendencies, which she said was a way to kind of essentially troll John into talking about whatever latent homosexuality he may or may not have had.

Speaker 1 I mean, clearly there was a lot of sniping and

Speaker 1 going back and forth, and these were wildly imperfect people.

Speaker 1 Was there a rape shield law in place in Oregon at the time? Or was that something that was still being added?

Speaker 1 Because I know those were sort of added piecemeal to various jurisdictions, rape shield laws being laws that prevent defense attorneys in sexual assault cases from using the victim sexual history to try and smear her or make the trial be about like her own sexual ethics.

Speaker 1 My understanding is that there was no explicit rape shield law.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So she was really subjected to a pretty gross sexual humiliation in this trial. And multiple times over, because it wasn't just from the defense lawyer, Charles Burt.

Speaker 1 During the pre-trial hearing, she also had to be grilled by prosecutors to prepare her.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I 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.

Speaker 1 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, you know?

Speaker 1 And 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? That's absolutely correct.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But depending on the state, the man's sexual history or the offender's sexual history was never allowed in.

Speaker 1 So, 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.

Speaker 1 That was all ruled inadmissible. But because of this pretrial hearing by Judge Barber,

Speaker 1 Greta's history was allowed in. Great.
Love it. So robustly equal.

Speaker 1 Ever thus.

Speaker 1 What 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?

Speaker 1 I mean, his entire defense was

Speaker 1 if there was sex between Greta and John, it was consensual. And also, marital rape's not a crime.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 We should just throw out the law. And the judge is like, No.
Yes, statutory nullification. Judge,

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 1 And the judge is like, No, we're not doing that.

Speaker 1 And then it got kicked to a judge who then mysteriously got removed. Even John's defense lawyer really didn't know why John had an objection.
And then Richard Barber became the judge.

Speaker 1 So Greta's sexual history is allowed in, and then the trial happens. And Burt is pretty unanimously considered by the press as having done a much better job.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 He's dressing better.

Speaker 1 And, you know, his story should take precedence over whatever Greta, you know, that Harridan might be saying.

Speaker 1 Gortmaker was very tall, had a booming voice, and he really tried to kind of overpower people and speak just really loudly. Bert was of a different temperament.
He was much more soft-spoken.

Speaker 1 He was shorter.

Speaker 1 He had had a bout with polio that reduced his height significantly in high school, but he managed to deal with the disability and eventually got a law degree and became a pretty celebrated trial lawyer in Salem.

Speaker 1 And he and Gortmaker were friends.

Speaker 1 You 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.

Speaker 1 Like these guys would have beers and spend holidays together and go hunting.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So 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? It took a few hours for them to deliberate.

Speaker 1 I think the first vote was 6-6.

Speaker 1 And then eventually other jurors who were on the fence got persuaded to acquit. And ultimately, they felt that Greta was not credible.

Speaker 1 Whatever they thought of John, they didn't think that he should spend 20 years in prison for first-degree rape.

Speaker 1 And 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So 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.

Speaker 1 And he eventually gives a press conference and it looks like he's in the deer in the headlights. And it seems for a short time that he and Greta will not communicate.

Speaker 1 I mean, they're going to have to because they do have a daughter and they have to, this eventually has to be figured out. And in the process, that is the catalyst for why they will eventually reunite.

Speaker 1 And their reunification, it's Greta who gets the lion's share of the vitriol and not John. Yeah, so he is acquitted at the end of December 78, and then they get back together very briefly.

Speaker 1 What, like a month later or something? Like quite a bit of time. I think like less than two, like about two weeks later.
Oh, wow. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It was early January.
And it was just, from Greta's standpoint, she's no longer living, staying at the Bibbleheimers.

Speaker 1 She has her daughter. She can't get a job.
She has to pay the rent.

Speaker 1 And she's at her wit's end. And so she calls John about custody arrangements relating to Jenny.
And then they start talking and then they drive to Portland and then they talk some more.

Speaker 1 And 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Their 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?

Speaker 1 Right. 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? Right.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of like equivalence, like they deserve each other kind of sentiment, like plague on both of their houses.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 I think that was from Cynthia Gourney's piece in The Washington Post, which was one of the better post-trial pieces written.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Or, 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.

Speaker 1 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.
Yeah. It just became a joke.

Speaker 1 People forget about this stuff. I was like, I mean, this is tension show, but I was talking recently

Speaker 1 to a straight person who I like a lot who was like

Speaker 1 shocked to discover that I had stories of experiencing homophobia in high school. And I'm like, do you not remember what the 2000s were? Like, this was not that long ago.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's actually like something that you don't really notice until a social change makes it strange to you, but it's just kind of like water a lot of the time. So

Speaker 1 something that really struck me when I was reading your, 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.

Speaker 1 They were so young. They were kids.
I 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.

Speaker 1 And the desperation of their poverty. These people are living absolutely hand to mouth.
Everybody they know is living hand to mouth. It's not like one of them has like a rich dad somewhere.

Speaker 1 You know, it's a. No, there are no trust funds in any part of this story.

Speaker 1 These are desperately poor people. So what was it like for them to be the center of so much media attention? What were their lives like after the trial?

Speaker 1 Well, obviously, during the reunion process, there was still a tremendous amount of media because it was this idea of how could they get back together when they've gone through this rape trial?

Speaker 1 What is going on here?

Speaker 1 Why was our time wasted? How could they do this to us? Like there was just this sense of grievance by

Speaker 1 the media of feeling like, oh, we put all of our energy and resources. And this was also true in the town of Salem.

Speaker 1 There were all these articles I read about how much money the trial cost and how dare taxpayers foot the bill for what was essentially a joke.

Speaker 1 And 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.

Speaker 1 And by early 1980, he would serve a grand total of 40 days in prison because

Speaker 1 He had tried to break into Greta's apartment. And at one point, he ran into her on the street and cursed her out and said things.

Speaker 1 Once he was finished serving time,

Speaker 1 apparently there was one last voicemail that Greta got that she never responded to, and then she never heard from him again. So really by 1980,

Speaker 1 the story would have died fully, but then there was a TV movie. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 The TV movie seems to have loomed really large in John's own understanding of his life. Oh my God.
I mean, when he and I corresponded, he brought up Mickey Rourke unprompted.

Speaker 1 And he would do this later on in other trials. Like, I think that young Mickey Work playing him in this TV movie was the greatest thing that ever happened to John Rideout.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's almost like that didn't fully register as to why this was important.

Speaker 1 But yes, there was this TV movie. And again, to your point about good intentions kind of having unintended consequences was also a factor in this movie.

Speaker 1 The two women who produced it, Blue Andre and Vanessa Green,

Speaker 1 they had never produced a film before.

Speaker 1 They were dealing with all sorts of sexism in Hollywood.

Speaker 1 and trying to essentially outgun the boys who wanted to do their own project, but they managed to convince Greta and John because they approached them during the reunion process to come on board.

Speaker 1 And the thing with the movie is that it's like, if you watch TV movies from that time, the late 70s, early 80s, like it's very treakly,

Speaker 1 but it's better than it has a right to be.

Speaker 1 And I think it's because the screenwriter Hesper Anderson was able to rely on the trial transcript.

Speaker 1 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 is kind of portrayed in a much more sympathetic light than media coverage post acquittal, but pre-movie had really portrayed her as.

Speaker 1 You know, I'm interested in how much

Speaker 1 you know, despite the gravity of the material, you really clearly had a lot of fun in the archives, right?

Speaker 1 Like you're, well, your book has these little bizarre details that always indicate to me that somebody like really got lost in this story.

Speaker 1 And then these people, like one thing I keep coming back to is this bizarre incident in which Audrey, John Wrightout's mother, like loses a finger during the trial at the courthouse.

Speaker 1 And like nobody tries to put it back on. Yeah, I mean, she was going through the door and the finger sheared off.
And I actually had much more of that in in the book.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I was like, okay, fine, I get it.

Speaker 2 So there wasn't like initially you had like part three, the finger.

Speaker 1 It wasn't quite that detailed, but it definitely was about a page long.

Speaker 1 I 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?

Speaker 1 The profound and the mundane are like simultaneous, or just the strange and the profound are simultaneous.

Speaker 1 I 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So, I do think that,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That's what I think about too. It's like, what happened there? I don't know.

Speaker 1 Cause 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.

Speaker 1 So you take these details and you spin them into narrative and hope that something coherent happens.

Speaker 1 So something that I loved about your formal choices in the book was your use of footnotes.

Speaker 1 So 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.

Speaker 1 Like, you know, revelations that came out later.

Speaker 1 So, 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.

Speaker 1 And I had to, like, I immediately thought of Sarah's book. Oh, my God, so true, though.
Insidious use of the footnotes. I see like what I said.
You said what you said. Okay, fair.

Speaker 1 But this comes up over and over again. It's like, oh, yeah, this guy, by the way, went to jail later.

Speaker 1 And I was like, I 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Every time I would read a shitty op-ed, it turns out that the person writing it would either do shitty things later in life or had done shitty things that people just didn't know about yet.

Speaker 1 And I think it's a little easy to fall back on, well, projection, but I don't know.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's because we're living in such a stupid time where everything is text that that influenced how I was reading all these op-eds as well.

Speaker 1 I mean, the ones that I felt really were the most egregious were the two Chicago guys, Bob Green and Mike Royko.

Speaker 1 Bob Greens, in particular, was just really bad, like claiming that he called up Ms. Magazine to get their opinion about Greta and marital rape.
I question whether this actually even happened.

Speaker 1 It just feels like garbage fiction. It's definitely one of those cancel culture piece anecdotes where I'm like, didn't happen.
Like, give me one right to this phone call actually being made.

Speaker 2 It means it's interesting, right?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 On the one hand, like people can have that position for ideological or religious reasons.

Speaker 2 On the other hand, I'm sure the opinion that is far more fervently held by those who would really be worried if society were to look very, very carefully.

Speaker 2 It doesn't mean that everyone is, but it makes perfect sense to me.

Speaker 2 I 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?

Speaker 2 Like, 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? right?

Speaker 1 I 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. And I mean, he essentially writes about,

Speaker 1 well, this woman is parading around and now I can't look. And what's going on here? And it's just, it's just reading this, going, what are you even doing? Why is this an op-ed?

Speaker 1 Why did the post print this? And I would just find this over and over and over again, especially, it's almost as if the write-out case just made men go insane.

Speaker 2 I also love the phrase that women are parading around. I have never seen this.

Speaker 1 I'm around a fair number of them, and the amount of parading is just pretty limited, I have to say.

Speaker 1 You're just not the beneficiary, Adrian.

Speaker 2 And yet,

Speaker 2 in the conservative imagination, there's just so much parading around.

Speaker 1 This actually is maybe a good moment to drill down on the kind of central legal philosophical question.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 There's kind of like no law within a marriage would be the anti-marital rape criminalization position.

Speaker 1 And then I think the liberal feminist position would be like, well, where there's no law, then the strong rule.

Speaker 1 And 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.

Speaker 1 And that might bring us to this character I really wanted us to get to talk about before we let you go.

Speaker 1 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, it was really like this long, arduous, like unsexy

Speaker 1 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 ensured their safety and dignity, right?

Speaker 1 That's like the story of the liberal feminist second wave. It's like a lot of like bureaucracy.

Speaker 1 It's a slog and people don't want to acknowledge the slog level of it, but that's how you get stuff done. But the boring slog in this case was led by a really not boring person.
That is true.

Speaker 1 Can you tell us a little bit about Laura X, this insane character you discovered? I want to be clear.

Speaker 1 I have so much empathy for Laura because it does require difficult people to get difficult stuff done.

Speaker 1 And 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. I mean, if you go to St.

Speaker 1 Louis, the names of her mother and her father are all over various buildings. She was a veiled prophet queen.
Oh, yes. Like, what's her face? The girl on

Speaker 1 breakable. Yes, yeah.

Speaker 1 Also from St. Louis.
Yeah. Yeah.
Weird, like, white supremacist debutante thing that they do and have done that for a long time.

Speaker 1 Like, the more I would read about the veiled prophet queen stuff, the more I just felt like I was going insane.

Speaker 1 In total fairness to these girls, it sounds like normally their dads kind of make them do it. It's like a male fraternity situation.
And that's exactly what happened with Laura.

Speaker 1 So her mother had been a veiled prophet queen. She married Orthwine.

Speaker 1 And Laura, by the time she got to her teens, was like, this is all bullshit. I want to be a socialist.
I want to go to Vassar.

Speaker 1 And her dad, at least in Laura's telling, basically said, you have to come home and do this because I've paid significant amount of money for you to be veiled prophet queen now.

Speaker 1 So she came home and dropped out of Vassar for a while and did the veiled prophet queen stuff. And if you look at photos from the various St.
Louis papers at the time, this would have been 1959.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 she does not look happy except when she's around kids. Like, it's very clear that she just wants to get the hell out.
And eventually she does. She takes up with this much older anthropology professor.

Speaker 1 They have kind of a complicated relationship that lasts basically off and on until he dies. He goes off to Peru.
She goes off to New York. She's involved in organizing there.

Speaker 1 But she winds up in Berkeley, right? Yeah. And then she is part of the free speech movement and is befriending all those folks.

Speaker 1 And by 1968, she's still nominally a student, but really her main focus is on preserving history. And she is talking with this female professor about it.

Speaker 1 And a male professor goes up and is like, oh, women's history, why is that even important? And she gets mad. So that's how the Center for Women's History starts.
And it's a very noble idea.

Speaker 1 It's essentially an archive of everything related to women's history. What a great idea.
It's also really expensive. And there's only so much that Laura's Trust Fund can keep this going.

Speaker 1 So it's constantly on the brink. She brings in a lot of volunteers.
It goes through various times of being flush and then being fallow.

Speaker 1 And by the time she wakes up, she's at a friend's house and reads about the write-out case, she is just outraged enough to call everybody that she can

Speaker 1 and essentially out of whole cloth cloth, invent what becomes the National Clearinghouse for Marital and Date Rape. And it is through this organization that a lot of the subsequent activism happens.

Speaker 1 Like there are a lot of people who are involved at every state, at various legislative levels, to criminalize spousal rape. But Laura X is really the hub.

Speaker 1 And I should also say the reason why she's called Laura X, even though she was born Laura Rand Orthwine Jr.,

Speaker 1 is that she decided in the late 60s that she didn't want her father's name. She didn't want a husband's name.

Speaker 1 So she was going to do what Malcolm X did and essentially take on X as her surname without, again, thinking through the ramifications, which people would call her out on.

Speaker 1 Yeah, a lot of women did this in the second wave as this like gesture of rejecting, you know, patriarchal symbolism.

Speaker 1 So you'll hear about like Elena Dyke Woman or like Kathy Sarah Child and like all these like figures who, you know, changed their name from Johnson or whatever to something that they felt was more aligned with their values.

Speaker 1 But then, like, I don't know, every now and then, you'll just, I'm a, I'm a second wave apologist.

Speaker 1 This is like a big part of my intellectual career, but every now and then they do something that's just so

Speaker 1 it's just cringe, it's it's it lacks self-awareness. You know, there's a there's a gap between how she understands herself and how she appears to others in a way that's

Speaker 1 that's a little painful. But, you know, like stipulated that this is a person with some flaws who undertakes a, what I think we would agree is a righteous cause.
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 And I don't think anyone else could have undertaken this cause in the same way as Laura X did. And I just don't know that anybody else could have seen it through.

Speaker 1 I mean, she had a goal, which was to make sure that spousal rape was criminalized in every state. And by 1993, that happened.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So the first law that California had was in 1979 and it went through various iterations, but now there are genuinely no more loopholes. And there are still so many states that have loopholes.

Speaker 1 I 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.

Speaker 1 If you're a child bride in so many states, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 You're not considered to have been raped by your spouse. Wow.
If you're in Virginia and you are raped by your spouse, if the guy gets therapy, the charges can be reduced. Like

Speaker 1 it's not a small thing to get rid of these loopholes and yet they persist.

Speaker 1 So Laura X is this like very intense

Speaker 1 charismatic figure who takes on this state-by-state campaign and she's willing to appear on television. She's willing to write about it.

Speaker 1 She's kind of always like being put up against anti-feminists to debate. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 You 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.

Speaker 1 I also like that she lightly defrauded the University of California. I think this is like a

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so she like lightly scams on a work study program. I kind of, I don't know, I know this is like unethical, but I'm kind of rooting for her on this one.
I'm like, yeah, who cares?

Speaker 1 Like, you should be getting paid by somebody.

Speaker 2 Victimless crime.

Speaker 1 It basically was, but I do know that this became very contentious to report out. And when I brought it up to her, she refused to go on the record about it.

Speaker 1 But I could just tell that it still deeply, deeply, deeply affected her. And, you know, I don't want to go so far as to say,

Speaker 1 yeah, that rules, but I also, I completely understand

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And something coming out about this that would affect her ability to be the activist that she was meant to be. I mean, this would have been absolutely devastating to just be targeted that way.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 To 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.

Speaker 2 Wait, is that a crime now? I mean, what?

Speaker 1 You 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.

Speaker 1 I mean, if I'm going to have to choose between Laura X and Anna Delvey, I'm choosing Laura X every single time. Yeah, yeah, there we go.
I like my scammer feminists.

Speaker 2 But you get to stay in better hotels with Anna Delvey.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 who is to say who's better?

Speaker 1 So maybe like a little epilogue before we let you go. You know, we've got this couple who unleash this movement sort of that goes beyond them, right? Yeah.
What happens to John and Greta?

Speaker 1 They finally break up and stay broken up after 1979. They do.
What happens to them after?

Speaker 1 So Greta takes Jenny back to the Midwest, to Minnesota, which is where she was raised. And basically, Greta lives her life out in complete obscurity,

Speaker 1 which I think is the best possible outcome for someone who had been so vilified and so ridiculed and so held up to national and maybe global media scrutiny that she could just live her life out on her own terms, whatever those terms were, that her daughter could have a family.

Speaker 1 And that was that. For John, it was a little different.
He bounced around between Salem and Northern California.

Speaker 1 He had several children with women, almost none of whom he had like any serious relationship with.

Speaker 1 And 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.

Speaker 1 She went out to visit him. They became a couple.

Speaker 1 And then the cycle of intimate partner violence was happening. He eventually left Northern California for good and went to to stay on his mother's property outside of Salem.

Speaker 1 And he started going to a church and he met a woman named Sheila Moxley, who was a member of the church as well. And she had had a very, very tough life, just a lot of abuse.
And

Speaker 1 another case of the people who were closest to her really let her down. But she managed to forge a life and she got married.
She had kids. And she was, you know, trying to build something for herself.

Speaker 1 And the church recommended that John, he was going by Joe at this point.

Speaker 1 He had some carpentry skills and she needed something built. So he came over.
It's like quasi-charitable, right? Because John's kind of a drifter. She goes to church.

Speaker 1 She's like, I need some work done. Is this guy cool? Could I help him out by throwing in some work? Exactly.
Yeah. Yeah.
So he comes over. He's clearly inebriated.
And

Speaker 1 she goes to bed. And he's supposed to be staying on the couch.
He definitely is not. And she would eventually allege that he had raped her.

Speaker 1 She didn't report it at first. This was 2013, but she did get the church elders involved and they basically kicked him out of the church.

Speaker 1 Then he, you know, he has an on-again, off-again thing with Teresa. There's a fire.
She loses her home. She loses some animals

Speaker 1 and she has no place to go. So she gets back with John.
And then another alleged incident of rape happens.

Speaker 1 It takes her a while, but she does decide to report. And because she decides to report, he then leaves a voicemail on Sheila's answering machine.

Speaker 1 And she's very, very freaked out, and all the old horror comes back.

Speaker 1 And she is then convinced to report coincidentally, or, you know, maybe not coincidentally, because really it was John Rideout who was driving this.

Speaker 1 So by the summer of 2016, he is back in the news because he's been charged with sexually assaulting Sheila and Teresa. So this is like what, 30 years? 40 years?

Speaker 1 30? 38 years, yes.

Speaker 1 So I think, you know, these are two more women who report. Three women total report him.

Speaker 1 I think it stands to reason that over the intervening years, it's not unreasonable to think this guy was probably assaulting other people

Speaker 1 who chose not to report, or at least that's... Something you can assume about the habitual behaviors that this guy was engaging in.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think what I would land on is that that there was a pretty infamous phrase uttered by a congressman in California about, well, if you can't rape your wife, who can you rape?

Speaker 1 And to me, the point of this book is if you can rape your wife, who else can you rape? Right.

Speaker 1 So I don't know specifically who or if there were any other victims of John Wright out because I was not able to find out for myself.

Speaker 1 But when this book comes out and if women come forward

Speaker 2 or I learn more, that's something i'm definitely interested in obviously i think what you're saying is that like if if he didn't it's just by happenstance the justice system for 40 years sort of suggested that this was okay right you know whether or not that led to only the things that he then got prosecuted for or other things point as he can or he could right and the fact that he essentially got away with the alleged rape of greta meant that he may have felt that he could get away with so much more.

Speaker 1 Was he convicted of both of those assaults or just one?

Speaker 1 So there was a trial in March of 2017. He was acquitted of sodomy and rape, two separate charges.

Speaker 1 The sodomy charge would eventually be overturned, not because of anything really related to what he did, but because of a Supreme Court decision that said that non-unanimous jury verdicts are unconstitutional.

Speaker 1 So this was United States versus Ramos in Louisiana, but it also applied to Oregon.

Speaker 1 So, it meant that a number of sexual assault cases where there were non-unanimous jury verdicts, usually 11-1, which was the case with the sodomy charge for John, or 10-2,

Speaker 1 had to be done over. So, in 2022, I flew to Salem for the retrial of John Wrightout.
Wow.

Speaker 1 Sheila's case was not part of it, and it was not introduced into court because that would have been prejudicial, she did attend. But Teresa had to testify all over again.

Speaker 1 And the prosecutor was quite unsure until very close to the trial that she was even going to do it. But then she did, and at least based on what I saw, she was enormously credible.

Speaker 1 And he was very good, this prosecutor, Brendan Murphy, at framing what she could remember.

Speaker 1 what she couldn't and why, why medications that she was taking were really important in determining memory gaps, but also what, you know, what she could remember, essentially what pain broke through the medication haze.

Speaker 1 So she just described what she remembered. The cross-examination I felt was pretty weird and ineffective.
John's lawyer, which was a public defender, he didn't really, he didn't put on a defense.

Speaker 1 So John didn't testify, but neither did anyone else. And I wasn't sure how the verdict was going to go.
I thought, well, if they need a unanimous jury verdict, it might take a while.

Speaker 1 I had a flight to catch.

Speaker 1 It took like 40 minutes. Wow.
And I had to run back to the courthouse. And I thought, oh my God, I'm going to miss the verdict.
And then I saw that Teresa and her family were right ahead of me.

Speaker 1 He was found guilty. And he has been in prison ever since.
I think his prison sentence ends no earlier than 2041. Wow.

Speaker 1 So there's this kind of like slow, belated form of justice, but eventually the state said, no, we don't actually think that this is an acceptable way for you to treat women.

Speaker 1 And now the fucker's in jail, where I don't think anybody will miss him. Thank you, Sarah, for your time and for taking us through this journey.
Thank you. We definitely covered a lot today.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no kidding.

Speaker 1 Now imagine how it felt for me writing this book. I had to synthesize so much.

Speaker 2 Well, I do hope people check it out. It's coming out as this episode drops, essentially.

Speaker 2 So keep your AirPods in and just run to your local bookstore and get the book and find out more about this fascinating slice of gender history. Thank you so much, Sarah, for walking us through it.

Speaker 1 You're most welcome. And I should add one more minor plug, which is that for those who are moved to get the audiobook edition, I am the narrator.
Oh.

Speaker 1 Oh, that is nice.

Speaker 2 That is bold, too.

Speaker 1 I would never dare. Well, I felt that without consent, this was a book that listeners needed to hear from me.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. That's great.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much, Sarah Wyman, and thank you to your listeners. We'll see you next time.

Speaker 2 Embed with the Right is made possible by hundreds of listeners who support us via patreon.com. Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yoshizumi and Katie Lau.
Our title music is by Katie Lau.