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Maria explained that she was on her way downtown to Mrs. Johnson’s birthday party at the Tifft House. The Tifft House on Main Street was the city’s finest hotel, with two hundred spacious rooms and a first-class bar with a choice selection of wines and liquors. In the year 1873, in Buffalo, it was unrivaled for grandeur and handsome accommodations. The Tifft House was also like a second home to Cleveland. There he presided over the “seven bachelors’ table,” the corner power table that looked out over the entire dining room, surrounded by other prominent bachelors, including Powers Fillmore, the eccentric son of the former president.

Now, still chatting on the street, Cleveland invited Maria out to dinner. She could not possibly, Maria responded, saying that Mrs. Johnson and the other guests were waiting for her. Cleveland refused to take no for an answer and suggested that they head off to the Ocean Dining Hall & Oyster House, a popular restaurant that had opened the year before down the block at No. 11 West Swan Street. He was “persistent,” “urging” her to accompany him, and obviously persuasive. Maria decided to forget about Mrs. Johnson’s birthday party and go to dinner with Cleveland.

Their meal together must have been a pleasant one. The Ocean Dining Hall was popular with Buffalo’s business community and local politicos. It had an extensive wine list and offered an assortment of English ales and porter and domestic and imported cigars. The he-man menu was a pure Grover Cleveland bill of fare: green turtle soup, oysters in the shell for 20¢, little neck clams, scallops, and sirloin steak for 50¢. For greens, it was just the basics: radishes, lettuce, and green peas.

After dinner Maria and Cleveland walked back to Mrs. Randall’s rooming house. On past social occasions, Maria acknowledged, Cleveland had “frequently” escorted her to her apartment, so he was also aware that her son Freddie, now ten years old, “lived with me.”

What happened next, Maria said, came as a complete shock. Once they were alone in her apartment, Cleveland got on top of her and, she claimed, “by use of force and violence and without my consent” had intercourse with her.

“Up to that hour my life was as pure and spotless as that of any lady in the city of Buffalo,” Maria said. There was not the “slightest shadow of suspicion over me.”

Now, she said, she was a “ruined” woman.

When Cleveland was finished with her—in Maria’s arched words, “after he had accomplished his purpose”—she apparently threatened to report his crime to the police. Cleveland went into a rage.

“He told me that he was determined to ruin me if it cost him $10,000, if he was hanged by the neck for it. I then and there told him that I never wanted to see him again and would never see him and commanded him to leave my rooms, which he did.”

As a lawyer and former assistant district attorney, of all people, Cleveland would have appreciated how improbable it would be for him to ever face criminal charges. In the 19th century, a woman claiming rape faced extraordinary challenges in bringing her assailant to justice.

No case so vividly laid out the issues as the attempted rape of a woman outside Eureka, California, in 1874.

Julie Dow was riding a horse on a public road with her sister-in-law when they came upon a scoundrel named F. A. Brown. This lowlife started following them, and Mrs. Dow kicked the horse into a gallop. At some point, the animal, carrying the two women on its back, became exhausted, and Mrs. Dow had to climb off and walk beside it. Seizing the moment, Brown grabbed Mrs. Dow and wrestled her to the ground. There was a fierce struggle. Mrs. Dow’s sister-in-law came to her aid, “clobbering” Brown with a stick, to no avail. Brown pulled Mrs. Dow’s drawers down to her knees and forced her legs apart. Then he pulled out his private parts. When Mrs. Dow’s sister-in-law ran screaming for assistance to a nearby farmhouse, Brown finally climbed off the victim without having completed