Without Consent

Until the mid-1970s, marital rape was not a crime anywhere in the United States. For centuries, English common law, rooted in the writings of 17th-century jurist Sir Matthew Hale, treated marriage as permanent, irrevocable consent to sex, effectively rendering wives the property of their husbands. Sarah Weinman's Without Consent traces how one obscure Oregon trial in 1978 catalyzed a decades-long campaign to change this, centering on the stories of Greta and John Rideout, the activists who fought to criminalize spousal rape in all 50 states, and the women John continued to assault long after his acquittal. Weinman frames the book against a contemporary backdrop that includes the overturning of Roe v. Wade, arguing that progress on gender equality remains fragile and reversible.

Greta Hibbard, born in 1955 in Arizona, grew up in a turbulent household marked by her mother's institutionalizations and repeated relocations. At 19, she followed her older sister to Salem, Oregon, where she met 18-year-old John Rideout, a cook whose childhood had been equally unstable: His mother cycled through four marriages, and his stepfather had a criminal history that included assault with intent to rape a minor. Greta and John's daughter, Jenny, was born in April 1976. After months struggling alone on welfare while John served in the army, Greta accepted his marriage proposal. The marriage deteriorated quickly. According to Greta, John began emotionally and physically abusing her within months, escalating to violence and demanding sex on his terms. Greta fled with Jenny to Minnesota but returned to John in May 1978, pressured by family and financial desperation.

By October 1978, the couple lived in a small apartment complex in Northeast Salem. John had quit his job, leaving Greta as the sole breadwinner. At the Salem Women's Crisis Center, volunteer Helen Bibelheimer informed Greta of her rights as a battered woman. A sign on the wall reading "If she says no, it's rape" made Greta realize for the first time that what John did to her had a name.

On the afternoon of October 10, 1978, John demanded sex. Greta refused. He chased her through the apartment complex, caught her in a nearby park, and threatened to beat her. She walked back to the apartment with him. Once inside, he threw her to the floor, choked her, punched her, and raped her as their daughter screamed from the next room. Greta submitted, deciding it was better to endure the assault than have her jaw broken. She escaped to a neighbor's house, called the crisis center and the police, and was examined at the hospital. On October 13, police arrested John. Oregon had criminalized spousal rape the previous year, and Greta's case was the first test of that law.

The trial became a national sensation. Reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, and international papers packed the Marion County courthouse. Prosecutor Gary Gortmaker, the county district attorney, faced defense attorney Charles Burt, a veteran trial lawyer. Before trial, Judge Richard Barber ruled Greta's sexual history admissible, and Gortmaker made the risky decision to drop assault charges and pursue only first-degree rape, leaving the jury no option for a lesser conviction.

Greta testified for nearly two hours on December 26, 1978. Under cross-examination, she conceded that she and John had a pattern of having sex after arguments and that half the time she had sex with John, she did not want to. John testified for 30 minutes, insisting the sex was consensual. In closing arguments, Burt attacked Greta's credibility by highlighting her prior abortions, a recanted accusation of sexual assault against John's half brother Jack Hinkle, and an admitted lie about a supposed lesbian relationship. Gortmaker undercut his own case by telling a reporter that even if convicted, John should not serve prison time. After two and a half hours, the jury returned a unanimous not-guilty verdict.

Ten days later, Greta and John stunned the country by reconciling, appearing together on Good Morning America and attributing their reunion to Christian faith. National columnists mocked them, and pundits attacked Greta for undermining marital rape reform. The reunion collapsed within two months. Greta fled with Jenny and filed for divorce. John broke into her apartment that August, pleaded guilty to criminal trespass, and later served 40 days in jail for violating his probation by threatening Greta. In 1980, CBS aired Rape and Marriage: The Rideout Case, a television film starring Mickey Rourke as John and Linda Hamilton as Greta, which drew favorable reviews but which Greta criticized for making her seem passive and weak.

Weinman traces the national campaign to criminalize spousal rape that the Rideout case helped ignite. Laura X, born Laura Rand Orthwein Jr. in 1940 to a wealthy St. Louis family, read about the trial on Christmas morning 1978 and devoted the next 15 years to lobbying state legislatures. Around 1970, she had changed her name to Laura X, inspired by Malcolm X's rejection of his slave owner's surname, to symbolize that women's history had been stolen from them. In California, assemblyman S. Floyd Mori introduced legislation that Governor Edmund Brown signed into law in September 1979. Diana Russell's 1982 book Rape in Marriage documented that 14 percent of married women surveyed reported being raped by their husbands, lending empirical weight to the campaign.

Several landmark cases accelerated reform. In New York, Mario Liberta raped and sodomized his estranged wife, Denise Liberta, in front of their son in 1981. His 1983 conviction led to a landmark ruling by the New York State Court of Appeals, People v. Liberta, which struck down the marital rape exemption as unconstitutional. Chief Judge Sol Wachtler's 1984 opinion declared that a married woman has "the same right to control her body as does an unmarried woman" (157). Laura X later called the decision more important than any legislative victory because it rested on constitutional grounds of equal protection and bodily integrity. In South Carolina in 1992, Anthony Dale Crawford was acquitted of raping his wife despite videotape evidence, because state law shielded the defendant's prior bad acts while exposing the victim's sexual history. Crawford later murdered Sarah Powers, whom he had married in 1999. The 1993 Bobbitt case in Virginia, in which Lorena Gallo cut off her husband John Wayne Bobbitt's penis after years of alleged abuse, drew massive public attention and helped push North Carolina, the final holdout, to criminalize spousal rape on a 44–3 vote.

After the trial, Greta settled in Minnesota, raised Jenny, and avoided public life for decades. John drifted through Northern California under the name "Joe R.," working marginal jobs and fathering at least five children by various women. In June 2013, he raped Sheila Moxley, a widow he knew from a church community in Turner, Oregon, while she was incapacitated by sleep medication. In spring 2016, he anally raped Teresa Hern, a woman with multiple physical disabilities who had been an on-again, off-again girlfriend, while she slept. Both women reported their assaults, and John was arrested in July 2016.

At his March 2017 trial, prosecutor Gillian Fischer argued that the two independent victims, unknown to each other, established a pattern of predatory behavior. John testified but faltered under cross-examination. The jury found him guilty on both counts, and he was sentenced to 16 years and eight months. However, the 2020 US Supreme Court decision Ramos v. Louisiana, which required unanimous jury verdicts in criminal cases, vacated the sodomy conviction because it had been 11–1. At a September 2022 retrial, the jury returned a unanimous guilty verdict in under 45 minutes. John was resentenced to 25 years, with eligibility for release in 2041.

Weinman concludes by surveying the current legal landscape. As of the book's publication, 10 states still will not prosecute spousal rape if the victim is unconscious or incapacitated, at least 18 states retain other loopholes, and intimate partner violence within LGBTQ+ couples remains significantly underreported. Greta Hibbard never responded to the author's interview requests. In spring 2024, Weinman learned that Greta had died on November 11, 2023, two weeks after her 68th birthday. Her daughter Jenny wrote on Facebook that Greta "did this life for me" (258). Greta died with her privacy intact, surrounded by family.