In-Store: Sarah Weinman: Without Consent w/ Alex Mar

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From Sarah Weinman, author of Scoundrel and The Real Lolita, comes an eye-opening story about the first major spousal rape trial in America and urgent questions it raised about women’s rights that would reverberate for decades.

In December 1978, Greta Rideout bravely testified that her husband, John, whom she still lived with, had raped her. She was the first woman in United States history to do this, at a time when the idea of “marital rape” seemed ludicrous to many Americans and was a crime in only four states. After a quick and conservative trial acquitted John Rideout and a defense lawyer lambasted that rape was perhaps "the risk of being married," Greta was ridiculed and scorned from public life, while John went on to be a repeat offender. Thrust into the national spotlight, Greta and her story would become a national sensation, a symbol of a country’s unrelenting and targeted hate toward women and a court system designed to fail them at every turn.

A now little-remembered trial deserving of close, wide, and lasting attention, Sarah Weinman turns her signature intelligence and journalistic rigor to the enduring impact of this case. Oregon v. Rideout directly inspired feminist activists, who fought state by state for marital rape laws, a battle that was not won in all fifty until as recently as 1993. Mixing archival research and new reporting involving Greta, other women victimized by John in later years, as well as the activists battling the courts in parallel, Without Consent embodies vociferous debates about gender, sexuality, and power, while highlighting the damaging and inherent misogyny of American culture then and still now.

Sarah Weinman is the author of Scoundrel and The Real Lolita and, most recently, is the editor of Evidence of Things Seen: True Crime in an Era of Reckoning. She was a 2020 National Magazine Award finalist for reporting and a Calderwood Journalism Fellow at MacDowell, and her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, the Atlantic, Esquire, and New York magazine. Weinman is the Crime & Mystery columnist for the New York Times Book Review and lives in New York City.

Alex Mar is a writer based in the Hudson Valley and New York City. She has published two works of nonfiction: Her debut Witches of America (2015) was a New York Times Notable Book in non-fiction and a New York Times Editors’ Pick; and Seventy Times Seven (2023) was recently a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and received enthusiastic praise in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine (Best Books of 2023), among other outlets. Some of her journalism and essays have appeared in The Believer, Wired, New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, Elle, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Oxford American, and The Best American Magazine Writing; and she has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award (ASME) for Feature Writing. She is also the director of the feature-length documentary American Mystic. Mar is currently at work on her debut novel, slated to be published in 2027.

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