Word: rideout
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...four days, the jurors heard sordid and conflicting testimony about a stormy marriage marred by fights, infidelity and abortion. The wife, Greta Rideout, 23, testified that on Oct. 10, her husband John, 21, an unemployed cook, demanded that they have sex. When she refused, she said, he chased her in and outside of their apartment, threw her to the floor, struck her three times and choked her. "I decided to submit to him, to what he wanted." John Rideout admitted that they had been arguing, but he told a different story: "She hit me first. She slapped me. I grabbed...
...first, five of the jurors thought that John Rideout was probably guilty. But the more they discussed the evidence, the more confused they became. One of them recalled Judge Richard Barber's instructions about "proving beyond a reasonable doubt there was forcible compulsion." Finally, on the fourth vote, the jury agreed unanimously to acquit. Said Juror Pauline Speerstra: "We didn't know whom to trust. There were so many conflicting stories...
...verdict left almost everyone except the defendant dissatisfied. "Justice was not done," declared Greta Rideout, who is suing for divorce and for custody of their two-year-old daughter, and complained that the trial's airing of her sex life was more humiliating than the rape itself...
Today such an act could land a husband in jail. On Oct. 10, Greta Rideout of Salem, Ore., was allegedly raped by her husband John. She called the local Salem Women's Crisis Service, which advised her to call the police. That would have been unthinkable not only in Galsworthy's England but even in Oregon until last year. Common law and most U.S. statutes were clear: with the marriage vows came the assumption of sexual consent. But encouraged by women's rights advocates, the Oregon legislature changed the state's rape...
...from their husbands to charge rape, and women's groups elsewhere are becoming vocal on the subject. They resent what Nancy Burch, director of the Oregon women's center that Greta first contacted, calls the "archaic notion that a woman is her husband's property." The Rideout case is the first of its kind under the new laws to go on trial in the U.S., but at least one woman in Nebraska has already filed a rape charge against her husband. After the Rideout case, there are sure to be others...