A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [34]
A Humboldt County jury convicted Brown of assault with intent to rape. Justice seemed served, but on appeal, the California supreme court overturned the verdict. Mrs. Dow was a “large, young, vigorous woman,” the court found. There had been “no violent struggle.” Mrs. Dow had dismounted her horse voluntarily, and during the thirty-minute struggle, Brown said not a word to her and made “no threats of bodily harm.” Mrs. Dow failed to resist to the utmost of her ability, and consequently, she was inviting Brown to persist in his conquest of her. The court said that Brown did not commit attempted rape: “It was an act of “seduction.” And Mrs. Dow, by climbing off the horse and failing to resist Brown’s advances to the utmost of her ability, showed herself to be, in the words of Brown’s defense lawyer, a woman of “easy virtue.”
The presumption in the 19th century was that a woman who truly wanted to preserve her honor could repel any rape, unless it was a gang rape. She could use her hands or draw back her legs and physically thwart the insertion of a man’s penis into her body. If the act of sex was consummated during rape, it was because the woman “did not earnestly resist it.”
Another rape case that received attention illustrated the prevailing view in 1870s America. Twenty-year-old Orilla Vincent was employed as a maid in Vermont when a neighbor, John Hartigan, came to the door on a Sunday morning when the family Orilla worked for was at church. Hartigan forced Orilla into the pantry and got her on the floor. She testified she could not cry out because Hartigan was pressing his mouth against hers. She tried to fight him off, but he pinned down her arms and raped her. When he was finished, Hartigan told Orilla that if she would not speak a word about the rape, he would give her a silk wrap. Orilla refused the offer, and Hartigan tossed a 25¢ piece at her feet and ran off. When Orilla’s employer, Mrs. Rockwell, came home from church, she found clear evidence of a vicious assault: bruises all over her maid’s body and hand imprints on her arms where Hartigan had held her down. Orilla also turned over to Mrs. Rockwell the 25¢ Hartigan had thrown at her.
It seemed to be a straightforward case of rape. Yet Hartigan was not convicted of rape, but of the lesser charge of assault with intent to rape. The jury found that when Hartigan had taken hold of the maid by force, at first she had resisted; but then she “ultimately yielded” to having sexual intercourse with the defendant.
According to the customs of the time, it was fine for a man with normal biological urges to use a “certain degree of violence” when engaging in sex. As the law saw it, even if the woman put up a struggle, that was foreplay.
The circumstances surrounding Cleveland’s alleged assault on Maria made it highly unlikely that she would file charges against him.
For one thing, Maria had accepted Cleveland’s invitation to dinner—tendered on a city street as she was on her way to a birthday party. That would not have been deemed the conduct of a chaste woman. Then she had permitted Cleveland to escort her to her rooms, which certainly would have portrayed her as a woman of questionable morality whose purpose in doing so was to encourage his base desires. The legal doctrine of utmost resistance meant that to prove rape, Maria would have to show that she had tried to fend off her attacker to the “fullest extent of her abilities,” which would require more than her sworn testimony. There had to be physical evidence of a fierce struggle. As far as we know, Maria had no black eye, cuts, or bruises, or any other conspicuous evidence of having been violently assaulted. The law would have presumed that even if she had resisted Cleveland’s aggressive conduct, the consummation of sex was evidence that, in the end, she had willingly surrendered to her ravishment. And consent—even partial consent—meant that, under the law, she had not been raped.
There was another important factor for Maria to consider. As the former sheriff of Erie County, Cleveland would undoubtedly