The full story of this gift from my daughter can be found here.

To simply hear it:

Women in policing, in the twentieth century, meant for many (mostly men) Sgt. Pepper Anderson patrolling the streets of L.A. in “Police Woman.” Angie Dickinson’s only complaint about her groundbreaking role was that it seemed the phone always rang while she was taking a bath. Nearly fifty years since, in the twenty-first century, just how far have women come in our police forces? Emma Cunningham, a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of East London, tells us in her new book, “Women in Policing,” an excerpt from which she kindly shares here.

Cunningham has taught under- and post-graduate students for more than twenty years, and has lectured to local, national, and international police officers. She was also involved in the England-Africa Partnership between staff at the University of Teesside in northeastern England, the Kigali Institute of Education at the National University of Rwanda, and the Rwanda National Police, where was an external examiner in 2007-8. Just this year she was appointed an external examiner at the University of Hull, and just last month presented “Enabling Female Leaders To Succeed: Examining The Landscape Of Women In Policing” to the Women in Policing conference organized by Dods, in London. She is interested in Wollstonecraft (if you have to ask, you are seriously under-feministic; me too), feminism, domestic and sexual violence, citizenship, human rights, and women and policing, all of which inform her research.

She starts her excerpt here, where research always begins: with the data she found.

The data I found certainly contrasts with the ideas from Reece and Strange (2019), whose work Laverick had cited (2021), in relation to the initial fears that when women joined the police, they would form inappropriate relationships with policemen and suspects. This research illustrates, in contrast to this fear, that it is inappropriate relationships between policemen and vulnerable victims of crime, not policewomen, that can clearly be noted in the data. While these relations have been noted by the Independent Office For Police Conduct (IOPC, 2020), further longitudinal studies on police behaviours, ethics, and disciplines are required in a much larger study. I would suggest that a national review of police disciplinary behaviour in England and Wales be undertaken to see what the findings are across England and Wales. This is especially relevant given the examples of exposing the penis, relationships with junior staff, inappropriate comments, sexual harassment, database searches for personal use, and sexual relationships with victims of crime, as seen in the disciplinary data in the Australian case (Bucci, 2020). Differences could be seen in policemen’s and policewomen’s discipline records in relation to the use of force too. While Simpson and Croft’s (2020) findings suggest that women officers in uniform are perceived as being as aggressive as men, the findings about women officers and their actual disciplinary records illustrate a difference between perception of aggression and practice.

These findings show that toxic masculinity and misogyny can still be seen to inform the kinds of offences that male police officers are involved in. The Australian investigation and the recent real-world example of the news report about the reinstated officer in Victoria (Bucci, 2020) illustrate that there is a long way to go in terms of successfully dealing with these officers. Backlash against change alongside the continuance of the worst elements of ‘police culture’ can also be seen in policing in England and Wales in these findings. My findings were confirmed by those of Stinson, Todak, and Dodge (2013), who earlier found in their study in America that while policewomen’s offences fell into the ‘profit-related’ category on the whole, this was in contrast to policemen’s offences, which were seen to be more often in the ‘sex-related’ or ‘violence-related’ and sexual violence categories. This worrying trend seen in America, Australia, and England and Wales, as illustrated in findings in each of these areas, illustrates a problem with misogyny within police culture. Utilising an intersectional feminist lens allows this discussion about how these findings fit in patriarchal society alongside expectations about the nature of woman and man. Long after Wollstonecraft’s critique of inequality in the eighteenth century in England, these findings illustrate that misogyny still informs society in general, and in particular is mirrored in these offence types in worldwide policing disciplinary examples today, illustrating the globalisation of police culture as explained by Brown and Heidensohn (2000).

In the last few days of writing this book, a young woman, Sarah Everard, who had been missing after walking home from her friend’s house in London, was found murdered. The main suspect in this case is a serving Metropolitan Police Officer, Wayne Couzens, who has been arrested and charged, along with a female who allegedly assisted an offender. It has been confirmed in the news that this officer had been involved in a sexual offence of indecent exposure days before the alleged kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard (Chakrabarti, 2021). This whole shocking case has ignited debate about how women have had to get used to, and live with the constant threat of male violence in everyday life. While unions and women’s groups (Northern Trades Union Congress, March 13, 2021) were attempting to reclaim the streets, the police were worried that a vigil for Sarah would break lockdown measures, and so approached the courts for a decision, which resulted in a suggestion that both sides work together. This case impacts on the feeling of safety of all women when regardless of the care taken by them to avoid harm, this woman was murdered by a police officer whose job is to keep all citizens safe. The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) are undoubtedly as shocked as everyone else about this.

Details of officer discipline on a national level require outside full and rigorous scrutiny if any attempt at legitimacy in policing is to be approached, and where predatory behaviours from officers are found, they should be clearly dealt with so that these behaviours do not become emboldened. This full and rigorous discipline was not evidenced recently in England and Wales when the IOPC were considered ineffective, as fewer than one in ten police officers were fired after gross misconduct in England and Wales (Busby, 2021). I would suggest, given the findings here, and issues in relation to police discipline, that if officers are flagged up as engaging in misogynistic offences and behaviours, this should be an indicator that there is potential for worse misdeeds or offences. An editorial in The Guardian (March 11, 2021) suggested that without safety for women and girls, there can be no equality, and they cite levels of harassment and violence against women and girls from a UK UN study. They note that six women and a little girl were reported killed in the period Sarah Everard went missing. Importantly, they suggest legislative change, but also change in terms of our expectations for girls and boys, where girls should not have to shrink their lives to remain safe, and where boys should respect girls and women and should challenge when this is not happening. In Australia, Gorman (2021) expected demonstrations and protests against gendered discrimination and violence against women in March 2021 in the March4justice. Even within the Sarah Everard murder investigation a probationer police officer was removed from public-facing duties after sharing an inappropriate graphic via WhatsApp with his colleagues (Dodd, 2021). He had been involved in the search for Sarah Everard, and was reported by his colleagues for this communication. Disturbingly, this was a relatively new police officer displaying this misogynistic behaviour, which confirms that this is not just a case of being informed by police culture, as he is new; rather, this illustrates that such notions prevail in society and are taken on board by some men who behave in a way which illustrates that they are happy to dehumanise women in their everyday life and work. The Observer used Freedom of Information requests to obtain disciplinary data in relation to MPS officers. Their FOI study confirmed similar findings to mine in that there were cases involving an officer having sexual intercourse with a rape victim, domestic violence and abuse, and misogynistic offences against women in society by policemen (Townsend and Jayanetti, 2021). This again illustrates ‘institutional misogyny’ as a major problem alongside what we have seen in relation to institutional racism, and as illustrated in The Observer report as well as seen in my FOI data, the misogynistic police culture intensified at the intersections of race and gender. Worryingly, if MPS Commissioner Cressida Dick does not acknowledge institutional racism in MPS, it is unlikely she will accept institutional misogyny either.

Only with a feminist perspective that is aware of the struggle and continual backlash that feminism has faced and continues to face, and the current issues in relation to public order policing today, especially as recently witnessed with the manhandling and rough police tactics used at the peaceful vigil for Sarah Everard at Clapham Common in London (March 2021), can policing retain legitimacy and public confidence for all citizens. With the shift to a more authoritarian approach to policing protests requested by Home Secretary Priti Patel and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) (Siddiqui, 2021) and during the COVID-19 pandemic, attempts to curb the human rights of citizens to protest are being made within the police, crime, sentencing, and courts bill 2021. This bill extends stop and search powers and limits demonstrations like Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Extinction Rebellion (XR). The disturbing reality from the fourth female home secretary and the first female MPS commissioner is that they are leading this call for stronger police powers. Chakrobarti (2021) reminds in her opinion piece, that these women pushing for stronger state action in relation to citizens is a bitter feminist irony, and that it is the system that requires change, not simply the faces within it. In the same week as Meghan Markle came under racist attack and we celebrated International Women’s Day in March 2021, the shameful events of Saturday, March 13, at Clapham Common where females protesting against male violence and misogyny were manhandled by the police illustrates a long way for policing to go in England and Wales. Calls for the resignation of Dick have been made (Chakrobarti, 2021) as well as women’s groups suggesting they no longer have confidence in her leadership of MPS.

The brutal murder of Sarah Everard allegedly by a serving police officer, has sparked a moment in England and Wales where women have noted their own everyday negotiation of their space in relation to their own safety and their continual avoidance of their own victimisation, which is unacceptable, unequal, and requires a feminist understanding and response. Exposure to everyday sexism and racism may be on the agenda for a while, and perhaps those who will produce policy in relation to opposing Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) should look at these debates again and take these into account when addressing these perspectives. Review of policing practice in England and Wales is urgently required to address the misogyny within policing (which has been seen in some of the examples within this book to persist in America and Australia as well as England and Wales), to prevent these outdated ideas about the nature of woman still informing male harassment, violence against, and the murder of, women. The police got this operation wrong, and even given the ‘fiendishly hard’ balance of public order and the pandemic as described by Dick (BBC News, March 15, 2021), the women at the peaceful vigil to remember Sarah and to protest about male violence against them in society should not have been met with police manhandling and handcuffs.

Postscript

Sadly, since completing this book we now understand that Sarah Everard had been kidnapped, raped, and killed before being burned by a serving Metropolitan Police Service officer who used not only his position of power as a policeman but also his warrant card, handcuffs, and ultimately his police belt to facilitate this pre-planned, heinous crime during the lockdown which accompanied COVID-19 in London 2021. Former police officer Couzens was given a whole life sentence to reflect his misuse of his role and police powers, and abuse of his trust. This case clearly illustrates the concerns voiced within my research about misogyny in police culture, as well as the need for much further scrutiny of police disciplinary records especially where former crimes are flagged which illustrate these misogynistic offences.

Editor’s Note: Today is the hundredth anniversary of the start of Hollywood’s first celebrity trial. An adored actor, accused of rape and murder.

Mark J. Phillips is a shareholder at the law offices of Lewitt Hackman in Encino, California.  Aryn Z. Phillips is a graduate of the Harvard School of Public Health and holds a Ph.D. in Public Health from UC Berkeley. In Part One in September, this father/daughter literary juggernaut wrote of the alleged crime.

This month: the trial and its aftermath, retold from their extraordinary book, “Trials of the Century.”

In 1921, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was the highest paid film star in Hollywood. King of the two-reel comedies, he was beloved by millions for his pratfalls, his pie fights and his innocent, angelic smile. Studios churned his movies out by the score, and excited ticket buyers across the country stood in line to watch them.

But all that came to an end on September 5, 1921. Coming off a punishing year-long schedule of back-to-back filming, Arbuckle drove with friends to San Francisco for rest and relaxation over the Labor Day Weekend. Prohibition was in full swing, but liquor was available to those who could afford it, and Arbuckle certainly could. That weekend, after a drunken revel in his suite at the St. Francis Hotel, Arbuckle was wrongfully charged in the rape and death of bit-part actress Virginia Rappe.

Arbuckle did not even know that Rappe had died until two men from the San Francisco Sheriff’s office knocked on the door of his West Adams home and summoned him to San Francisco for questioning. Early Saturday morning, Arbuckle returned to San Francisco with an attorney, Frank Dominguez, and reported to the Hall of Justice, where he was questioned for three hours. Dominguez believed the matter of Rappe’s death would be dispensed with easily and in due course, but was concerned about the consequences of Arbuckle’s possession of bootleg liquor in contravention of the Volstead Act. He advised Arbuckle to remain silent. His concerns were seriously misplaced and at about midnight that night, Saturday, September 10, Arbuckle was arrested and charged with first degree murder.

He spent the next 18 days in jail, a celebrity even incarcerated, until the charges were reduced to manslaughter and bail was granted on September 28.

That Arbuckle came to find himself in this fight for his life was the result of several colliding forces. First, petty criminal and Rappe acquaintance Maude Delmont’s inexplicable fabrication of the assault on Rappe, given in the form of a sworn affidavit, could not be easily explained away or ignored by the authorities. Second, the new district attorney in San Francisco was 46-year-old Matthew Brady, a politically connected and ambitious lawyer now in his second year as prosecutor. Brady, despite his reservations about the quality of his complaining witness, saw the prosecution of Arbuckle as a stepping-stone to higher office. Finally, and importantly, the immediate focus of both the local and national Hearst papers was overwhelming and uniformly biased against Arbuckle.

The coverage was all-pervasive. Beginning Monday, September 12, the Hearst dailies ran sensational front page headlines every day. Those of Hearst’s Washington Times, for example, splashed across six columns for each day that week, started with “Arbuckle’s Wife Rushes to Aid” on September 12th, and grew progressively more negative. On September 13th the headline read “Arbuckle Indictment Held Up,” followed by “Fatty Faces Coroner’s Jury,” “Arbuckle Ready to Give Bail — Orgy Girl Offered Bribe to Keep Mum,” and “Movieland Liquor Probe Started — 40 Quarts Killed At Fatty’s Big Party.” In the nation’s capital where Hearst owned two dailies, The Washington Herald ran similar articles on Arbuckle every day.

So did papers all over the United States. Coverage in The New York Tribune, founded by Horace Greeley in 1841, was nearly continuous, as it was in papers across America. While some reporting was relatively balanced, this was the age of yellow journalism, and much of the content pilloried Arbuckle. On September 13th, for example, The Tulsa Daily World, not a Hearst daily, ran a front-page headline that read “Fatty, Movie’s Falstaff, Falls from Film Throne As Evidence Web Tightens,” and the content included:

Miss Rappe went into the bathroom of 1219 leaving the rest of the party in Room 1220, and when she came out Arbuckle took hold of her and said “I have been trying to get you for five years”…He took hold of her and made the remark. He then closed and locked the door of Room 1219.

This kind of reporting was typical. The film star was routinely referred to as “Arbuckle” or “Fatty,” while Rappe was always “Miss Rappe.” The San Francisco Examiner ran an editorial cartoon featuring Arbuckle with liquor bottles in the middle of a giant spider web and seven women caught in the web. On September 13, The Washington Times carried a Keystone photo of Arbuckle under the headline “Silly Mr. Arbuckle in Idiotic Pose,” and captioned “Roscoe (“Fatty”) Arbuckle, star of ‘The Life of the Party’, as he appeared in one of his extremely foolish films.” On the same page a picture of Rappe under the headline “Miss Rappe Dressed for Afternoon Walk” shows her stylishly dressed and carried the caption “The picture of the dead actress in sporty street attire. She was considered the best dressed woman on the movie screen.”

On September 14, The Washington Times late edition carried dueling headlines “Lead Quiet Life, Victim’s Last Advice to Girls” and “Arbuckle’s Fat and Rum Blamed By Psychoanalysts,” with the article beginning “If Roscoe Arbuckle committed the crime of which he is charged, he did it because he is fat.”

In contrast, prosecutor Matthew Brady was widely championed by the press. On September 16, The Washington Times late edition read:

Lionized by a city to whose service he has given a greater portion of his life Brady is preparing for the biggest battle of his history. “I will get the truth.” Behind these words of the district attorney there is a force at play, mighty and strong and irresistible.

Between his release from jail in late September and the beginning of trial in mid-November, Arbuckle withdrew from public view. His work for Paramount was suspended pending the hearing, and he made no public statements on advice of counsel. He lived quietly with wife Minta in his West Adams house, while his attorneys prepared for what was going to be one of the most visible celebrity trials in history.

That trial commenced before Superior Court judge Harold Louderback on Monday, November 14th with the voir dire of jurors. Arbuckle was now represented by attorney Gavin McNab, well known for representing Hollywood celebrities and highly regarded in San Francisco politics, along with a team of four other respected attorneys. Matthew Brady was assisted by Milton U’Ren and Leo Friedman. After five days of questioning, a jury of seven men and five women was empaneled.

Brady was working with weakening evidence and recalcitrant witnesses. Guests at the party Zey Prevon and Alice Blake had both been interviewed by the police immediately after Rappe’s death, and had initially backed Delmont’s story. While neither could say that they had seen Arbuckle personally assault Rappe, they did testify that the two had been alone in his room together for at least half an hour, and when Delmont attempted entrance the door was locked, facts that all of the men at the party had denied. They had both previously stated that they had heard Rappe accuse Arbuckle of assaulting her. But early on Prevon had recanted her testimony and refused to sign her statement. At the coroner’s inquest, she changed other parts of her testimony, denying that Rappe had named Arbuckle as her assailant. When Blake tried to do the same, Brady threatened both with perjury, and confined them in protective custody until the trial started to prevent the defense from interviewing them.

But Brady’s most difficult challenge was Maude Delmont. The charges were based largely on her claims, but not only was she a lifelong criminal, she had changed her story so many times that by the time trial commenced both sides knew that she was a liar as well. Brady had elicited her damning testimony at the earlier inquests, and to make sure her testimony would not be contradicted by the defense at trial, Brady had her jailed on bigamy charges and refused to release her to testify. Defense requests to call her to the stand were turned down by the court.

The prosecution called as its first witness Grace Halston, a nurse at Wakefield Sanatorium. She testified that Rappe’s body was covered with bruises, and she had found numerous organ ruptures and that the injuries were caused by force. On cross-examination the defense elicited her testimony that the injuries could have been caused by natural causes.

Dr. Arthur Beardslee testified for the prosecution about the actress’s injuries, which he also believed to have been inflicted by an outside force.

On Monday, November 21, the prosecution called Betty Campbell, a model who testified that she was a guest of the party at the St. Francis. She had arrived an hour after the incident and found Arbuckle, Sherman, Fischbach, Semnacher, and Prevon relaxing in the suite. Brady offered this to show that Arbuckle exhibited neither remorse nor concern for the condition of Rappe. On cross-examination, Campbell testified that Brady had threatened her with prison if she refused to testify against Arbuckle, and McNab presented sworn affidavits by Campbell, Blake, and Prevon backing up claims of Brady’s intimidation tactics.

Brady was ordered by the court to bring Prevon to the stand to testify, and when she finally did so she informed the court that she was still being held a prisoner by the district attorney and had been repeatedly interrogated by Brady and his staff. She claimed that Brady kept insisting that she sign a statement that Rappe had said “He has killed me” even though she had already told the grand jury that she was mistaken when she first made that statement and that it was not true.

Prevon recounted to the jury the events leading up to Rappe’s collapse, testifying only that the actress had said “He hurt me,” which could have referred to Fischbach manhandling her into the ice bath, or to an abortion it was rumored she had gotten at a clinic the day before the party. Called next, Alice Blake reiterated Prevon’s story. Neither actress testified that Rappe had accused Arbuckle of causing any injuries.

Prosecution witnesses to follow included a studio security guard who testified to Arbuckle’s having met Rappe two years before in 1919, a hotel chambermaid who testified to the rowdy nature of the St. Francis party, and a criminologist who testified that Arbuckle’s fingerprints on the inside of his bedroom door obscured those of Rappe, suggesting that Rappe had struggled to open the door and that Arbuckle had forced it closed.

The defense opened its case on Tuesday, November 22. Medical witnesses were called to demonstrate that Rappe’s ruptured bladder could have been the result of disease. Three witnesses testified that they had witnessed Rappe on prior occasions drink to excess and run about tearing at her clothes, even running naked in the streets. Fischbach testified that Rappe had been his guest at the party, but witnessed nothing that could have caused her injuries or death.

Arbuckle was the final witness in his defense. His testimony was described as calm, lasting four hours. He recounted the events of the party and how he found Rappe on the floor of his bathroom in front of the toilet, carried her into room 1219 and put her on the bed. He described her distress, the screaming and the tearing at her garments. He testified that it was Delmont that put the ice on Rappe and Fischbach who had carried her into the bathroom for her ice bath.

The cross-examination was carried out by assistant district attorney Leo Friedman. He retraced Arbuckle’s testimony, but was unable to find chinks in his defense. It was clear that if a crime had been committed, no one had seen it and there was no physical evidence that pointed to Arbuckle.

Rebuttal witnesses were called, including medical experts, but the prosecution was unable to demonstrate that the rupture of Rappe’s bladder was the result of external force.

Maude Delmont, with her black past and her shifting story, was never called as a witness.

Both sides made closing arguments, the defense portraying Arbuckle as a kind man who had sweetened the lives of millions of little children, now needlessly suffering when no crime had been committed, and the prosecution calling the same defendant a moral leper with whom no woman in America was safe.

The jury retired for deliberation. After forty-one hours they remained hopelessly deadlocked. After numerous ballots, the jury returned on December 4, unable to reach a verdict at 10-2 for acquittal.

Arbuckle continued to protest his innocence. On December 31st, he told Movie Weekly:

The undisputed and uncontradicted testimony established that my only connection with this sad affair was one of merciful service, and the fact that ordinary human kindness should have brought upon me this tragedy has seemed a cruel wrong. I have sought to bring joy and gladness and merriment into the world, and why this great misfortune should have fallen upon me is a mystery that only God can, and will, some day reveal.

A second trial commenced on January 11, 1922, before a new jury, again featuring Brady for the prosecution and McNab for the defense. Many of the same witnesses testified, and buoyed by his near success in the first trial McNab chose not to have Arbuckle testify, focusing instead on a parade of witnesses who trashed Rappe’s reputation. The strategy backfired, with nearly disastrous results. After two days of deliberation, the jury returned deadlocked again, but this time 10-2 for conviction.

The third and final trial commenced on March 6, 1922. After the near scare of the second jury, this time McNab left no stone unturned, carefully detailing both Rappe’s sordid past and calling Arbuckle to testify in his own defense. After five weeks and only six witnesses called by the exhausted prosecution, the jury retired to deliberate on April 12.

It returned in less than five minutes. Not only did it vote unanimously for an acquittal, it took the few minutes behind closed doors to craft a written apology to Arbuckle which it handed to the court. The jurors wrote:

Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We feel that a great injustice has been done him. We feel also that it was only our plain duty to give him this exoneration, under the evidence, for there was not the slightest proof adduced to connect him in any way with the commission of a crime.

We wish him success, and hope that the American people will take the judgment of fourteen men and women who have sat listening for thirty-one days to evidence, that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame.

But the verdict of a single San Francisco jury, even one motivated to the extraordinary gesture of penning a written apology to the defendant, was not enough to save Arbuckle’s career. Within a week of the death of Virginia Rappe, exhibitors in every city in America had withdrawn Arbuckle’s films, and those that had been completed and ready for distribution were never released. His record-setting three-year $3,000,000 contract was canceled. The day after Arbuckle had been freed on bond pending the first trial, he received a telegram stating that he was in breach of his contract with Paramount and suspended until cleared. Throughout the early fall of 1921, spontaneous women’s groups gathered to protest in front of any theater showing his films to shout at patrons who entered. Although the studio paid for much of his legal defense, without the ability to work Arbuckle was financially ruined.

Delmont’s part in Hollywood’s history was also played out. Why she set the destructive storm in motion with her criminal complaint against Arbuckle is unknown. She had a history of procuring young women as party guests and then blackmailing wealthy men into silence, and perhaps she saw the opportunity to make some money. She is reputed in 1921 to have sent telegrams to attorneys in both San Diego and Los Angeles stating, “We have Roscoe Arbuckle in a hole here. Chance to make some money out of him.” “I believe that the whole trouble started,” Minta Arbuckle wrote on Christmas Eve in 1921, “when someone who thought that Mr. Arbuckle would be an ‘easy mark’…seized on Miss Rappe’s death as the reason for wild statements and unfounded charges. It is difficult to discuss that point without making direct accusations, and that I prefer not to do…” Delmont disappears from the record after 1921.

Fueled by newspaper coverage, the groundswell of negative publicity continued to build. Amid a Hollywood lifestyle considered by most Americans to be out of control, Arbuckle was only the most visible example. In early 1922, other scandals set the newspaper presses running. On February 2, 1922, while the second trial was underway in San Francisco, Paramount director William Desmond Taylor was found murdered. A prolific actor and director, Taylor’s body was found inside his bungalow on Alvarado Street in the Westlake Park area of Los Angeles, then a trendy and affluent neighborhood. He had been shot in the back. Numerous suspects were identified by both the police and the newspapers, including workers in his home, neighbors, employees of Paramount, women with whom he had rumored romantic liaisons, including Mabel Normand, but the crime was never solved. When word of Taylor’s death was brought to Arbuckle as he sat at counsel table awaiting the second jury’s verdict in San Francisco, his eyes filled with tears. In March, papers reported that movie heartthrob and Paramount star Wallace Reid was undergoing treatment for drug addiction. His treatment was unsuccessful and he was dead within a year.

These scandals, along with the Arbuckle trials, led to the creation of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, known as the Hays Office, under the dictatorial sway of Presbyterian elder and former Postmaster General, Will Hays. Just as major league baseball hired Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as Commissioner in 1921 to quell questions about the integrity of the sport following the 1919 World Series Black Sox Scandal, so the movie industry the next year formed the Hays Office to deal with public backlash against a trail of broken lives and scandals that threatened the young industry. Formed in January of 1922, one of Hays’ first moves was to blacklist Roscoe Arbuckle, prohibiting him from working in films. After consultation with Hays, Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky canceled the distribution and showings of all of Arbuckle’s films in April of 1922. Although the ban was lifted eight months later in December of 1922, his career was finished.

Not everyone was sorry. William Jennings Bryan, devout Christian, perennial Presidential candidate and a chief proponent of Prohibition, wrote to Hays:

His [Arbuckle’s] acquittal only relieved him of the penalty that attaches to a crime. The evidence showed a depravity entirely independent of the question of actual murder. As long as his character must be measured by such orgies as that in which he played the leading part, there is no reason why he should be given another chance.

The best of his friends stood by, including Buster Keaton, Al St. John, and his agent, Joe Schenck. When he couldn’t act, he found some work directing. He couldn’t use his own name, so he took credit as William Goodrich, his father’s first two names. Keaton called him Will B. Good. Surprisingly, one of the directing jobs offered him was “The Red Mill,” bankrolled by William Randolph Hearst to feature his companion, Marion Davies. The experience was a disaster for Arbuckle, and the film a box-office flop. Arbuckle did a little live performing on stage for Alexander Pantages, who had given him work when he was an unknown comic. In many places citizens objected to his appearances, forgetting the acquittal and remembering only the rumors of sexual depravity, and battles took place in city councils about whether he should be allowed to perform.

In 1925, Minta, from whom he had been separated nine years, divorced him.

He married twice more. In 1925 he wed actress Doris Deane, whom he met for the first time on the fateful ferry ride home from San Francisco on September 6, 1921. He met her again during a stint doing an unaccredited cameo role for a feature called “Hollywood,” a send-up of the movie business in which dozens of famous Hollywood stars had cameos, including Charlie Chaplin, Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, Mary Pickford, and Will Rogers. The marriage was short-lived, exacerbated perhaps by Arbuckle’s heavy drinking. They divorced four years later in 1929. He married again in 1933, wedding actress Addie Oakley Dukes McPhail, then twenty-six.

Over the ten years that followed his acquittal, Arbuckle had small un-credited roles in only four films. He finally had an opportunity to return to pictures under his own name, appearing in six two-reelers between February of 1932 and June of 1933, but his art and style had not kept up with the public’s taste. His broadly comic slapstick shorts were old-fashioned and forgettable in an industry now producing high-brow full length features. In 1932, the Oscar-winning best film was “Grand Hotel,” the stylish period piece starring Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, and Joan Crawford. In 1933, movie audiences had a choice of Busby Berkeley’s spectacular “42nd Street,” “A Farewell to Arms” starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, and Mae West and Cary Grant in the comedy “She Done Him Wrong.” Katherine Hepburn won her first Best Actress Academy Award that year. Arbuckle’s two-reelers simply didn’t measure up, and it was clear that both his fans and his culture had abandoned him.

After a high-spirited dinner on June 29, 1933, to celebrate a just-received offer to appear in a feature length film for Warner Brothers, Arbuckle and Addie returned to the Central Park Hotel at 55th Street and 7th Avenue in Manhattan and went to bed. Arbuckle died in his sleep. He was forty-six.

His films unwatched, America has forgotten Arbuckle, once its darling. A century of innovation, from silent to sound, short to feature length, black and white to color, faltering nitrate to sophisticated computer graphics, has relegated Arbuckle and his contributions to the back drawer of history. Scholars and critics may know him, but most Americans today will barely recognize his name, and those who do remember only vaguely the rape and rumored coke bottle; the legacy, obituary really, written for Arbuckle in the newspapers in the fall of 1921 when he was still a household name. Few in America have fallen so far or so fast. And few profited from that fall, except perhaps William Randolph Hearst, who once boasted to Buster Keaton that the Arbuckle trial sold more of his newspapers than the sinking of the Lusitania.

“The sentiment of every church on Christmas Day,” Arbuckle had written the December following his acquittal, “will be peace on earth and good will toward all mankind. What will be the attitude the day after Christmas to me?”

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

No soldier ever went to war absent a prayer for victory; none came home absent the burden of it.

My many times great uncle Sam wrote that when we pray for victory, two prayers are heard.

When we have prayed to God to grant our soldiers victory, he wrote, we have also prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory — must follow it, cannot help but follow it.

We have prayed, he wrote, that other soldiers be torn to bloody shreds; that foreign fields be covered with the pale forms of their patriot dead; that the thunder of guns be drowned with the shrieks of their wounded writhing in pain; that their homes be wasted with a hurricane of fire; that we wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; that we turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring that same God for the refuge of the grave and denied it.

For our sakes who adore God, he wrote, we ask Him to blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet. We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

Uncle Sam, whose last name was Clemens, called it The War Prayer, the one we hear in the dark pit of our heart, when we utter the prayer for victory we hear in our ear. His publisher refused to print it, fearing it might tarnish the man many knew and loved as Mark Twain. It was made public for the first time in a collection of stories and essays called “Europe and Elsewhere,” thirteen years after Sam died.

It may have darkened the notion that there is honor and glory to win for the flag or, as he put it, fail and die the noblest of noble deaths, but I don’t think it threw any shade on Sam.

I’d rather anyway our prayers paraphrase the words of another great being, and that in Veterans Days to come we pray that every one of us — every one of us — will fight no more, forever.

Brian Owsley teaches constitutional law at the University of North Texas at Dallas College of Law. Here he tries very generously to make sense of a United States Congressman’s threat to ruin any telecommunications company that dares comply with a lawful order to turn over his and other lawmakers’ telephone records that could implicate them and the scrote to whom they abased themselves in the 6 January insurrection against the United States of America.

(Professor Owsley is a much, much nicer man than I am.)

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is extremely unhappy because the House select committee investigating the January Sixth attack on the United States Capitol Building requested that telecommunications providers preserve his telephone records for that day along with other Republican lawmakers. Although it is known that he spoke with President Trump several times as the attacks were occurring, it is unclear the precise times or for how long. Moreover, it is unknown whether he spoke with individuals who participated in the attacks either that day or in the days leading up to January Sixth. Regarding the committee’s request, McCarthy made a couple of intriguing statements.

First, McCarthy recently complained that “Adam Schiff, Bennie Thompson, and Nancy Pelosi’s attempts to strong-arm private companies to turn over individuals’ private data would put every American with a phone or computer in the crosshairs of a surveillance state run by Democrat politicians.” Second, he threatened that “If these companies comply with the Democrat order to turn over private information, they are in violation of federal law and subject to losing their ability to operate in the United States.”

The first statement demonstrates that McCarthy does not understand that telecommunications providers routinely provide this type of information daily to law enforcement officials. In light of the fact that the select committee only requested preservation of records as opposed to provision of any records yet, McCarthy’s concern is a bit premature. Regardless of the timing of providing any records, there are a couple of federal laws that would authorize the release of his cell phone records.

The Pen Register Act is part of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which Congress enacted in 1986. A pen register is a record of all outgoing calls from a specific telephone number, which is often requested in tandem with a trap-and-trace device that is a record of all incoming calls to a specific telephone number. Congress established a very low standard for law enforcement officers to obtain such information. They only needed to certify the information sought was “relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.” Regarding the January Sixth attack, members of the select committee need only demonstrate that the investigation concerns criminal conduct in a situation that has already resulted in charges against over five hundred people for various violations of federal law. In other words, a list of McCarthy’s outgoing and incoming telephone calls is readily obtainable pursuant to the Pen Register Act.

Additionally, the Stored Communications Act is also part of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, authorizing law enforcement officers to obtain subscriber or customer information from electronic communications service providers, including telecommunications companies. Specifically, the statute authorizes such providers to release a subscriber’s name; mailing address; the dates and times of telephone calls along with the length of such calls; and the telephone’s unique identifier numbers when they received a valid request. In order to obtain this subscriber information from a provider, law enforcement officers need only obtain a court order after establishing “specific and articulable facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the contents of a wire or electronic communication, or the records or other information sought, are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.” Although this standard is higher than the standard mandated by the Pen Register Act, it does not create much of a burden for law enforcement.

With these two acts as a basis for the select committee to obtain telephone information that it asked telecommunications providers to preserve, we come to McCarthy’s second statement threatening consequences against any company providing such information. Addressing McCarthy’s threat, it is a little unclear what law he is referencing. As both the Stored Communications Act and Pen Register Act establish, telecommunications providers must provide this information when provided a court order based on relatively low standards. Furthermore, there is not much one can do if law enforcement officers adhere to these statutes and obtain court orders for the information. The Pen Register Act outlines criminal penalties making unauthorized obtaining of this information a misdemeanor. Similarly, the Stored Communications Act also makes it a felony for individuals who obtain the subscriber information in an unauthorized manner, but that would not apply to persons who obtain a court order for the information.

If officials obtaining the information adhere to the procedures outlined by the statutes, then it is unlikely that McCarthy’s legal threat has any basis. Instead, it appears that he was more likely threatening retaliation against these telecommunications providers. For example, McCarthy asserted that “If companies still choose to violate federal law, a Republican majority will not forget and will stand with Americans to hold them fully accountable under the law.” This threat of retaliation is comparable to his Republican colleague Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene who threatened to “shut down” these providers if they provide January Sixth records to the select committee. In Greene’s defense, as a new member of Congress, she has never voted for the Patriot Act and other federal laws supporting such electronic surveillance like McCarthy has on every occasion.

With McCarthy’s newfound interest in privacy concerns related to governmental electronic surveillance, it may present an opening for reform of both criminal statutes. As an initial matter, in Smith v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that information like a person’s pen register data is not protected by the Fourth Amendment because people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the information that they willingly provided to a third party. Here, McCarthy willingly provided the phone company the numbers that he dialed as well as the calls that he received. This legal fiction that people using a telephone or in this case a cell phone willingly give their personal information to a third party—the phone company—has been the law of the land since 1979.

In light of the Smith v. Maryland decision, individual privacy has been undermined for over forty years. However, instead of the low standards of these two statutes, Congress could enact new standards with bipartisan support requiring that law enforcement officials obtain such records only after obtaining a search warrant from a magistrate judge based on probable cause. Such a standard would align the provision of such information with the standard outlined by the Fourth Amendment. It is doubtful that Congress can act quickly enough to protect McCarthy, Greene, and their colleagues, but they can work to strengthen privacy protection for all of us.