Rape? No

A wife loses

When the eight women and four men retired to a back room in the Salem, Ore., courthouse last week, feminists everywhere expected the jury's verdict to be another stride for women's rights. For what may have been the first time in the U.S., a husband was being tried on charges of raping his wife while they were still living together.

For 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 hold of her arms. She slapped me again. Then I felt pain. She had kneed me in the groin." Soon afterward, he said, they made up, kissed and had sex. "It was voluntary on her part," he insisted.

At 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."

The 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.

Said Nancy Burch, director of the Salem Women's Crisis Center, which had urged Greta to bring the charges in the first place: "I feel terrifically saddened by the verdict and concerned about the future of women who have to live with marital violence daily." But other feminists were more optimistic. Despite the defeat, said Noreen Connell of the National Organization for Women, "the very fact that there has been such a case" means other married women will now be less hesitant to seek legal remedy if they are sexually assaulted by their husbands.

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