was determined to press forward with
a rape and murder charge. At the pre-
liminary hearings, packed with con-
cerned members of the Women’s Vig-
ilant Committee, Al Semnacher, Rappe’s
friend, dropped a bombshell. The day
after the party, he testified, Arbuckle
told him that he had applied a piece
of ice to Rappe’s body. Pressed on where,
Semnacher was too embarrassed to say
out loud, so he whispered it to a court
reporter, who wrote it down on a slip
of paper. The word was “snatch.” News-
papers couldn’t print such a thing, so
they ran headlines like “WITNESS TES-
TIFIES ARBUCKLE CONFESSED HE TOR-
TURED ACTRESS.”
The defense undercut Semnacher by
suggesting that he had conspired to ex-
tort Arbuckle, and got him to hedge
over whether the ice was put “in” or “on”
Rappe’s genitalia. (Prevost remembered
Arbuckle putting ice on her “abdomi-
nal region,” to help revive her.) But the
story was too salacious to ignore, and it
morphed into the unkillable myth that
Arbuckle, possibly owing to impotence,
had violated Rappe with a bottle. The
judge, deeming the ice anecdote un-
seemly but irrelevant, ruled that Ar-
buckle be tried for the lesser charge of
manslaughter. Many of the spectators
cheered—apparently, there were fans
mixed in with the vigilantes. One teary
woman admitted, “I’ve only seen him
on the screen and I wanted to see him
in real life.”
The trial began on November 18th.
Arbuckle had hired a raft of star attor-
neys. His estranged wife, Minta Durfee,
sat behind the defendant with her
mother, and the press, playing to a rapt
female readership, ran daily reports
on her outfits. The state called a hotel
maid who claimed to have heard Rappe
screaming, “No, no! Oh, my God!” A
criminologist testified that both Arbuck-
le’s and Rappe’s fingerprints were found
on the door, suggesting that he had
pressed his hand against hers as she tried
to escape. The defense’s witnesses in-
cluded doctors who testified that a dis-
tended bladder could have ruptured
spontaneously, and people who had seen
Rappe tear at her clothes over the years,
especially when drunk. At one point, a
deputy coroner brought in a jar contain-
ing the ruptured bladder. A panel of
court-appointed medical experts found
that it showed evidence of cystitis. But
the main event was Arbuckle’s testimony,
in which he maintained that he had
found Rappe vomiting in his bathroom
and assisted her. As for the ice, he said
that Delmont had already put it on
Rappe’s body, and that he picked it up
out of curiosity.
In closing arguments, the defense
lawyer Gavin McNab painted Arbuckle
as a martyr who had “sweetened human
existence by the laughter of millions and
millions of innocent children.” The pros-
ecution countered by calling him a “mod-
ern Belshazzar” who would “never make
the world laugh again.” After two days
of deliberation, the jury came back dead-
locked, ten to two for acquittal. One of
the holdouts, Helen Hubbard, said that
the male jurists had berated her. “There
is no place for the woman on the jury,”
she warned. Much of the press echoed
the sentiment, arguing that women are
too frail or too biased to judge men ac-
cused of mistreating the fairer sex.
Abandoned by his studio and much
of his public, Arbuckle had plenty to
say about his state of affairs. “I have suf-fered,” he told reporters. “All I ask in re-
payment of the wrong done me is that
the world which once loved me now
withhold its judgment and give me a
chance to prove before another jury that
I am innocent.” The retrial began in
January, 1922, dragging the saga into its
fifth month. Zey Prevost backtracked
her previous recollection of Rappe’s say-
ing “He hurt me,” claiming that the
prosecution had intimidated her. Alice
Blake was also shakier her second time
on the stand. The defense was so con-
fident that it declined to make a clos-
ing argument—a major miscalculation.
The second jury was the inverse of the
first, deadlocked ten to two in favor of
conviction. Anticipating yet another
trial, the exhausted Prevost went into
hiding in New Orleans, temporarily
evading the police by climbing down a
rope from her hotel window.
At the third trial, the defense tried
to impeach Rappe’s character, deposing
a former midwife who claimed to have
“attended” to Rappe during multiple
pregnancies. (The woman was never
called to the stand, but during the trial