THE RED WIDOW-Sarah Horowitz

into the good graces of the rich and powerful. Her ambitions, though, go far beyond becoming the most desirable woman in Paris. At her core, she's a woman determined to conquer French high society. But the game she plays is a perilous one. Navigating misogynists, double standards, public scrutiny, and political intrigue, she has soon vaulted into infamy in the most dangerous way possible.

A real life femme fetale, Meg influences government positions and resorts to blackmail and maybe even poisoning to get her way, leaving a trail of death and disaster in her wake. She earns the name the Red Widow for mysteriously surviving a home invasion that leads both her husband and mother dead. With the police baffled and the public enraged, make breaks every rule in the bourgeois handbook and becomes the most

notorious woman in Paris. The book that we're featuring this evening is The Red Widow, The Scandal that shook Paris and the woman behind it all, with my special guest, historian and author Sarah Horowitz. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Sarah Horowitz, Thank you.

And so when he's twenty six, he falls in love with a fourteen year old girl who is the son who's the daughter of tavern keepers, so a very humble background, and his family is aghast. He marries her two years later. So there is I think a twelve year difference between the two of them, as well as a considerable class difference between them, and they were shocked very much by the class difference, although we of course would be very shocked and are very shocked by the considerable age difference

between the two. They have four children, of whom Marguerite is one of them, as you say, born in eighteen sixty nine, and they live in Beaucour, which is this town in eastern France that is very much dominated by the Jappie family, and so they have this very Margareite grows up with this very interesting existence. On the one hand, she is part of the most dominant family of the town and lives in this sort of very beautiful chateau.

But the larger family always holds Edward and Emily and their children, including Marguerite, a part because of the sort of scandalous nature of Edward and Emily's marriage, and her father is a very bad manager of money. Marguerite or Meg as she comes to be known, is clearly his favorite, and she absolutely adores him. She loves her mother, I think, although has a sort of more somewhat more distant relationship

with her mother. She's often quite disappointed in her mother, and so I think they're relationship between father and daughters quite complicated and quite possibly quite troubling. There are lots of rumors that fly around the town that Edward was sexually abusing Meg. I don't, obviously, you can't know if that's true, but it does seem clear, even from her own accounts, that there was some sort of sexual charge to their relationship. She Marguerite falls in love with a

young army officer when she's in her teens. The army officer is a friend of her brothers, is very charming. Everyone loves him. He comes to stay at the house a lot, and he and Marguerite hope that they can marry and maybe sort of like get engaged in secret at a time when engagements were not supposed to be secret and were something that was carefully scripted by families

and carefully managed by bourgeois families. There also is some evidence that they have sex before marriage, which is a huge no no. Her father finds this out lies into a rage and sends her to live with her older sister across France, so on the other side of France. And then her father dies soon after, quite tragically and quite suddenly, and it seems maybe that the stress of what he sees as his favorite daughter's betrayal really undoes him.

But this leaves Marguerite in a very perilous situation. So there's increasing financial strain because her father has died, her mother really can't manage all the work it would take to marry her off well. And of course there's a huge scandal in her hometown about her relationship with this young army officer, So She is, however, pursued by a man named Adel Stenel, who's an artist who's about twice her age and is seems clearly very in love with

her and absolutely smitten. She is not with him, but I think she has a few other options and is facing a lot of pressure from her family to marry him. So she marries him in eighteen ninety and goes to live with him in Paris, in his home where he lives the life of a sort of not terribly successful artist. I would call it a middle class life. She doesn't have to She's never going to go hungry, but it's not going to be particularly glamorous. The relationship is not happy.

She's very ambitious, he's very passive. He's very much in love with her. She is always sort of iffy about him. And also he is having affairs with both men and women, and those affairs with men really horrify her. For many people of the day, male homosexuality was absolutely horrifying, and so she wants to get a divorce very early on, soon after the birth of their first and only child,

but he convinces her not to. Part of the reason is that divorce at the time was so scandalous, and so it was seen as scandalous that kind of last resort, and would have required airing the family's dirty laundry, including

her husband's affairs with men. So that they decide to stay married, live fairly independent, lives in the same home, and he basically promises that he will allow her to have affairs as far as I can tell, And so she starts off on a course of affairs with very prominent Parisians, starting with her husband's best friend, who's a very prominent former jurist. He was essentially the former Attorney General of Paris, and he introduces her to this world

of high society that she absolutely adores. So there's this young woman, she's in her early twenties. She's very beautiful, she's very very charming, she's very seductive, she loves male attention, and she does quite well for herself in Parisian high society, having a string of affairs, particularly with men in the judiciary, and the arrangement she strikes with them is fairly unusual. That they will buy a painting from her husband and

in return she will have an affair with them. So this means that she never has to directly trade sex for money and is also a way of boosting her husband's career and indirectly her family's prestige. And she's very famous because in eighteen ninety seven she starts having affair, an affair with a president of France at the time, Felix Fauch, and she's absolutely smitten with her, and he sends huge sums of money her to her husband to buy this not very great art to finance their relationship.

And what Marguerite and faux are perhaps most famous for is in February of eighteen eighty nine, he has a stroke during one of their sexual encounters. Legend has it at the height at the climax of one of their sexual encounters, but I don't know if that's sexually true, and then dies of it a few hours later. This is of course very embarrassing to her and it never makes it into the press, or at least she's never named in the press, but everyone in Paris knows about this.

She becomes as a result of their affair even more famous. You know, people are really excited because they see her as this very talented lover who is so good that she just might kill you, right, and she has a series of affairs with very prominent, very powerful men, including industrialists, some evidence of some kind of you know, members of royal families. And she has these affairs, but her system is really faltering. By nineteen oh eight, she and her

husband are increasingly at odds with each other. She wants to divorce them, and the family is also increasing lee under financial strain. She's having some trouble keeping lovers. And so this is nineteen oh eight, and in May thirty first, nineteen oh eight, her valet wakes up in the morning, comes down to the second floor of their house, finds her husband and her mother, who had been staying with them, strangled, and Marguerite tied to the bed with a gag by

her side, calling out for help. And so the police come very rapidly. They start this search, and Marguerite is the only survivor of this attack and the only witness, and she says that three robed men and a redheaded woman entered the house. They thought it was empty, they were intending to rob it. They realize that the residents of the house are still there. They kill her mother and her husband, but they spare her life, thinking that she is the adolescent daughter. And this is a very

improbable tale from the beginning. I mean, you know, Marguerite is sort of on the verge of forty. The idea that she would be mistaken for an adolescent is one problem, But there are also no signs of forced entry in the house. There are no signs of struggle on the corpses of either her husband or her mother. There's really there are valuables that are left in plain sight in the house, including just cash lying out there. And the

house is really not in disarray. You know, it looks like some drawers have been rifled through, and so, you know, people read this report and think she has to be lying, and I think any of us would also think she has to be lying. It can't have been an intrusion. This wasn't robbers. You know, there are no The fct that there are no signs of struggle are very strange

for many people. But the police go along with her, and the police say, yes, we believe her story, and they start trying to find people who match her the description that she gave. And I think it's important to note that she is very very well protected, that she has so many connections amongst French politicians, among French officials, and in particular the chief investigator of the affair, a band named Joseph Laidie. He was at the very least admirer,

but quite possibly one of her lovers. Right, so it seems quite likely that the police are engaged in a cover up, and there are lots of theories about what actually happened. We don't know what happened. The murders remain unsolved to this day. There's some people who think that she might have done it, that she he was so tired of being married to her husband and that being a widow was less scandalous than getting a divorce, so

she just decides to kill him. The most probable theories they were having a bite and then her husband wakes up and sort of lumbers towards the lover. The lover freaks out, he thinks he's been as this is a trap, and he strangles the husband, and then the mother quite possibly just dies of fright, you know, the sort of seeing her son in law murdered, essentially. And then after that she and her lover decide to stage this crime scene,

and so they rifle through the drawers. They put a cane by her husband's corpse to make it look like he had defended himself, even though of course there are no signs that he had engaged in any struggle. And then they tie her to the bed, or the lover ties to the bed, but ties her quite loosely rangely, also ties her to the bed toe by toe, which is a very unusual method of tying someone to the bed, and then puts a piece of sort of cotton wadding by her head to make it look like she had

been gagged and cried out. So it seems like this has been staged, very sloppily staged, but just enough so that the police would have enough to say, oh, we believe her account that this was intruders who meant to rob the house.

media is very important in this story. What's the role and the public's rule in this what happens next?

And so in this era where there's this tremendous press competition, everyone wants a good story and they love stories about crimes, they love stories about female celebrities and sex, and they love stories that have a little bit of political intrigue. So this immediately after the murders is front page news. That being said, there's some press norms so that there's a lot of hints in the press about Meg's relationship with Foe, but for the most part, journalists don't really

mention it. Right after the murders. They still feel that's a little bit off limits. That, you know, the former president deserves a kind of certain degree of respect, and the press very early on points out all the many contradictions of Meg's story, and they're very skeptical, and particularly the left wing press is very skeptical because they were very skeptical of the police, who they see as basically a pressing workers, and so there's a lot of skepticism.

What that means is that Meg is under a cloud of suspicions, and so the public really suspects her, and she has friends and lovers who are saying, we can't have a relationship with you until your name is cleared. So that means that her financial situation is very imperiled because she's dependent on her love for money, so she's really desperate to clear her name. It's pretty clear to me that the government just wants to put this case to bed and to say we couldn't find the murders.

Too bad. They're just, you know, these horrible, nefarious criminals. We all know that Paris has experienced a crime experiencing a crime wave. This is just one other terrible thing that criminals have done. And so the authority stop talking to the press quite within a few weeks about this case and say there's no news, we don't have anything. This is just a very ordinary crime. The problem, of course, from Marguerite is that she needs more than that, right,

she needs perpetrators to be found. But if we assume that either she's the perpetrator or that one of her powerful lovers was the perpetrator, that it can't happen. And so she really has this shifting series of stories in the coming months. Chi blames Germans, Italians, Brazilians, North Africans, and then what happens is a kind of fairly strange coincidence.

So the day after the murders, someone who worked in the Persian Metro finds in the Parisian Metro card that has an invitation to an exhibit of her husband's artwork, and it also has another card with a list of addresses, And so this metro employee turns this over to the police, thinking it could be a clue, and the police tracked down all the addresses that's on this sort of supposed clue, and one of them is of a theatrical costumer, and

the theatrical costumer says, well, a little bit before the murders, I rented out some robes to a bunch of strange Americans and they never returned them. And so then the police go after these They find these strange Americans, one of whom is a journalist, another whom is an artist, and they start following these men, thinking that they could be possibly the murderers. And Meg is, of course she knows about this. She's so excited. She has these increasingly

certain identifications of these men as the perpetrators. As the police show her photographs and also arrange for her to see these men on the streets of Paris. She's sort of dressed up so she wouldn't be visible as herself. She dresses as an err and girl. One time she says, oh, yes, I think it's these men. And the problem for Meg and for the police is that these men have rock solid alibis, and the American journalists had actually been out of Paris. He had been on a especially hiking trip

all over France. And there's a hotel owner who says, yes, he was here that night. He couldn't possibly have been in Paris, and so this is at this point Marguerite is increasingly frustrated. She really really needs to clear her name, and so she goes back to the press and she tells this journalist and says, I there's the police are on the verge of an arrest any minute now. They're going to arrest the perpetrators who matched my initial description.

And the police are very upset with her at this point because by doing this, she had essentially reopened the case, put herself back in the spotlight after months of a media silence about the case. And so they say, actually, no, this league didn't pan out. These men have alibis. But immediately the press sees on this and they're so excited and marguerite. At this time, she keeps giving interviews to journalists.

They're besieging her. They're sort of you know, there must be sort of probably dozens of them at her house at any one time. She's giving all these interviews. She's making herself, you know, sort of saying, I'm bound and determined to stallve these murders and avenge the deaths of my beloved family members. And so she's great to copy for these journalists because she's so dramatic and she's so wild, and you know, she's just so accessible too, and she's

a bit of a celebrity. But she runs into trouble and there's no perpetrator, and she's put the news back into headlines. And so what she does is she plants evidence on her valet, and then when a journalist is over, she has the journalists look through her valet's below longings find the evidence, and they go to the police and say, oh, the Valley must have done it because you can see here he has a piece of jewelry that was stolen

on the night of the murders. And so the police throw the valet into jail and he becomes a chief suspect for a few days.

on her valet, Was she involved in the murders? Why was she lying about what had been stolen after the murders or during the murders. At this point, the case is absolutely front page news of basically every Parisian newspaper.

They can't get enough of this story. So she admits that her vallet did it, and then very quickly she says, oh, it was the cook's son who did it, and I've known it all along and I recognized him, but I didn't say it was him because I really I didn't want to hurt the cook and I didn't want to hurt cook's feelings feelings, which is an absurd defense that she would shield her cook in order to let the murderer of her husband, Her husband and mother go.

just Marguerite, her lover, and the cook. So her cook knows all her secrets and they're very close, which sort of is a problem because Marguerite is accusing her cook's son of a crime he didn't commit. And we know he didn't commit it because he also has a rock solid alibi for the night of the murders. He was at a large dance and so you know, hundreds of

people saw him. He can't have done it, and the police know this, but they still arrest him and they drag him to the courthouse, and there's this really dramatic confrontation between him and Marguerite and Marriette the cook and her daughter, and Marguerite's daughter and the chief investigator who

is possibly one of Marguerite's lovers. And this goes on for hours, and it's covered absolutely breathlessly by the press, really blow by blow coverage, and finally the chief investigator he just I think he wants to stop her from

spinning out any more versions. And at this point both a press and the public are so enraged at all her lies and just are so enraged also that the government has gone along with her lies, that he arrests her for impeding the progress of the investigation, for essentially abetting the murderers by doing so, and throws her into the Parisian Women's prison, and that's where she remains for a year. The chief investigator very quickly resigns from the case. He sort of says, like, I know that I am

in trouble. I know at this point that everyone knows that I was a lover or an admirer, that I took the case just to help her out and to help her clear her name. And the new chief investigator is very suspicious of her and treats her as the chief suspect in the murders, and so it begins a whole new investigation where she is the chief suspect and maliciously on his part. But for a historian, it's wonderful.

He feeds so much, so many of his interrogations, so much evidence to the press, who covers in breathless detail, right what he reveals about Marguerite's affairs, what he reveals about her relationship with her family members, And so for about a month after she's arrested, maybe even two months, that there's just report after report, but all her scandalous behavior in the newspaper.

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magistrate named Andre and tell Us. Also the unique French judicial system feature where the magistrate has much different it's much different than in US judicial jurisdictions.

not a police official. He worked quite closely with the police, but he's the one who is essentially directing the investigation and in many cases leading the interrogations. And so this is it's a very unique system. It's a very different system, and it also means that the judge who is in charge of the investigation has a great deal of latitude

typically to investigate how he would like to investigate. So you see this in the first investigation where lay Day, this first investigator, who is you know, her lover, is you know, basically trying to investigate in a way that is trying to clear her name and protect her from scrutiny. But then the second investigator who really hates her, his

name is Ensley. He just tries to make her look as bad as possible and leaks all this information to the press about sort of all the negative information that he finds about her over the course of his investigation.

But again, he has enormous latitude to conduct this investigation how he wants, and I think that he overplace his hands so that the public had been really really hostile to her at the time of her arrest, But as all this information about sort of Andrea's investigation comes out in the next batch of months following her arrest, the public really becomes much more sympathetic to her because they think that Andrea went too far and was too mean to her and really sort of looked into things that

he shouldn't have looked into. And so I think, again, this sort of independence of the judiciary is a really crucial feature, as well as the sort of notion that judiciary's rule is to ferret out the truth through lengthy investigations. That's not at all how we see just judges as operating. It's also really important because Meg is so connected to

the Persian judiciary. Her sort of her base of lovers were really Parisian judges, and so I think, right, we can also understand why there was such an effort initially to protect her because she's so protected, she's so connected to that particular world.

doing in their last encounter. So you know, there's a lot of information about the sex act that supposedly the two are engaged in during their last encounter where he has the stroke and then dies. And then there's a lot of information too about you know, her other lovers, about her sort of ascent through high society, about her family, all these things that in many cases the press had known but had kept quiet. And I think one dynamic

here is a kind of dynamic of scandal. So you know, we've had these other moments where there's a press silence that's broken and then all these stories come flooding out about person's behavior. And I think, for instance, the kind of the press silence like kind of after there were a batch of the stories about Harvey Weinstein and his decade long pattern of sexual as thought and harassment, that all these other stories came pouring out. So I think this is partly just a press dynamic as sort of

dynamic as scandal there were seeing. But I think the other dynamic is that there was a lot of protection for elites about their private lives. That the understanding was rich people, their private lives are you know, sort of to be kept private, and so I think that's partly what had prevented the press from reporting on this before. But once Meg is in prison, she loses all her status.

She's in a prison where she's surrounded by really poor women, you know, women the state treated really horribly like sex workers, and so she's surrounded by these poor women. She sort of comes to have their status, and as a result, she has all her privacy stripped from her. And so I think that that is the sort of moment of a kind of outpouring that the press and the state

really participate in. And so suddenly the public gets all this access to these elite secrets, which it really circulated as gossip among elites for years, but which now become public knowledge and really sort of in you know, all these papers are reporting on all her different affairs and write her relationship with fall again in quite graphic detail detail that's fairly shocking actually to read.

a scandal, and it just absolutely monopolizes public's attention. They are these fascinating documents that I found in libraries and archives, songs that were sung about her, postcards that are kind of imagining her with her lovers, you know, these sort of naughty images of her that circulate in Paris that people buy up as this kind of like memorabilia in a way. And so this case is Meg is arrested

in November nineteen oh eight. The cases sort of front page news really I would say, until January nineteen oh nine, and then every so often pops back up for the year that she's in jail. And she's finally put on trial in November of nineteen oh nine for the murders. And you know, had she the sentence that she's facing is she could have been guillotined because that was the method of execution, and she was being tried for capital crimes,

right and sort of killing her husband. And then the crime that is seen as even worse is the killing of her mother, which is under the umbrella of parasite. So killing of a parent just seen as one of the worst things you can do because it violates the bonds of family and so she's put on trial in November nineteen o nine. She's interrogated for three days by the judge at the trial, and not the judge who had investigated the trial, another judge named val Valles, I think,

and he interrogates her for three days. He there's all these witnesses about her family life, her valet testifies, her cook testifies, some of her lovers testify, the journalists who were involved in uncovering the affair testify, and then of course there's lots of police testimony and sort of testimony

relating to the physical evidence. And this case again is absolutely sort of dominates the front pages of every Parisian newspaper for this sort of more or less ten days doesn't let the judge who's interrogating her get any sort of never gets a leg up on her. She makes fun of him. She's funny, she's witty, she's cutting. She sometimes is kind of plays up, you know, the tragedy

that befell her. She's absolutely captivating, and the thought is that she charms really the jury, and she's an incredibly charming woman and she just turns her attention to them, and that dominates the court room and state is really never able to prove its case that she did it. I think it's quite because you know, she didn't actually do it. So they can prove that she murdered her husband, and they can prove sorry, not that she murdered her husband.

They can prove that she hated her husband and we wanted to end their marriage. And she can prove that she lied about what she saw on the night of the murders. But they can't prove anything else, and so

she's acquitted. And I think it's this combination of a very weak case that the government brings, but also the enormous public sympathy for her in the degree to which she charmed you know, at that point, the jury, the journalists, public, the public just reading the newspaper that they really sort of loved her at that point and saw her as a kind of exciting, sexy celebrity. So she's acquitted in

November nineteen nine. Again the case remains unsolved. She after that has to flee because there's so much press attention. She's a star, she's a celebrity, and she has to flee. So she goes to London and lives the rest of her life. She lives for many decades after and sort of pretty quiet seclusion.

she's like a social media influencer in a way. And she also gets lots of all these men who fall in love with her at the trial and they offer to marry her or to have an affair with her, and she turns down all the commercial offers, so she really wants to regain her privacy. She turns down the offers of marriage. I don't know if she turns down the men who are sort of interested in paying for sex with her. She may say yes or she may

say no. But she moves to London. We know that by nineteen seventeen she's living in a house sort of in actually like kind of suburbs of London, a quite large house, a very beautifully furnished house, which suggests that, you know, her husband's estate wasn't much. She didn't have much money afterwards. So my guess is that her lovers are still paying her some money for affairs, still, you know,

interested in visiting this kind of alluring, captivating woman. In World War One, she decides to start up a gam factory to make provisions for the troops, and so this is a kind of form of war work. A lot of women engaged in war work at the time to sort of help out or to make some extra money. And at some point in the nineteen tens, this lawyer who's a British baron, he had seen her at the trial. He falls in love with her. He proposes to her

right after the trial. She says no, and it seems like a few years later they meet again, you know, at some sort of society event in London, and she takes him up on his offer, and so they marry in nineteen seventeen. He at the time is serving in the navy. He's a baron, and you know, they kind of they live i think, quite nice life in He has a big castle in the Scottish Highlands and they're sort of redoing that and they also have a place in Surrey where they live and they have a quite

nice life. We don't know much about their marriage. It seems like she sort of continued to go to parties but probably was not received in the best circles of British society. Was a bit too scandalous for that. And

then he drops dead. I'm ten years after they're married, he has a heart attack while she's away sort of with a servant's child at the you know, giving him a kid a nice day at the seaside, and that puts her in some financial strain again because a lot of the property goes basically to the heir to the title and not her. So she to Hope, which is a British seaside town. I've been told it's very lovely.

I've lives out as a kind of dowager, you know, sort of going to parties, going to charity bazaars, attending luncheons with friends, receiving visits, visiting people for sort of the kind of next decade of her life until she dies in the nineteen fifties. She refuses to speak to the press. There's you know, every so often a journalist tracks her down and is kind of really says like, can you please tell us your story, you know, tell

us who did it? Can't you do that now? And she just absolutely refuses, and so she dies in the nineteen fifties, taking her secrets with her.

doesn't reveal any juicy secrets. There's some very interesting kind of emotional passages about her her childhood and her family, but some of it is just like basically reads like a news report of what happened, you know, in eighteen eighty nine. It's something like no insight, something you could read in a textbook. And she really sort of skims

over her relationship with Falk. She says that she was just kind of helping him write his memoirs, and when it comes to the murders, it's even worse in her account, so she blames Jews for the murders, and she had soon after the murders kind of fluted all these theories that Jews had been responsible and really tried to rile up anti Semitism in France. And you know, people don't

really believe her. Like the sort of far right nationalist anti Semitic press is willing to believe her, but a lot of the kind of the sort of other press organs are just like, no, this woman is nuts and so but in her memoirs, she's really kind of trying to say that there was this international Jewish conspiracy that had something to do with Faugh and she doesn't quite know what it is, but that's who killed her husband

and mother. And so it's a really nasty conspiracy theory that plays on a lot of horrible anti Semitic tropes, including right sort of ideas about Jews as ugly as sort of criminal, as you know, masterminds of an international conspiracy plotting against the nation. And so I think quite fortunately for the time, people just don't like her memoirs.

I think their disappointment. People are very upset that she's not willing to say who did it to reveal much, and also that she's still continuing to float these conspiracy theories. That being said, the right wing nationalist press still picks up on these conspiracy theories, and they really use this crime as fodder for their theories that Jews were a danger to the nation, that they're sort of plotting against people,

and that they control the French state. And of course this is why the murders will never find out, and that feeds into fascist currents in France. And so I think that is the kind of one of the dark side. Meg, her whole life, has this propensity for lying. Some of her lies seem kind of harmless or some are sort of obviously untrue. This one is really harmful, does a great deal of damage in the long run.

too intimate for anyone that would look at it. You talk about sexual celebrity and the effect of Meg this affair and this entire story on society.

a form of him loving her. What she does is I think she she learns quickly that being a sort of sexualized demeanor is a form of you know, it can get her attention, can get her sort of things she wants, and so she uses this ability to kind of drop men's attention to cultivate their right sort of

their interest in her throughout her life. And I think, you know, we might see this as in some ways making best of what you would see as a very bad situation that she she manages to kind of use this for her own purposes and so this is this helps her become a celebrity, particularly you know, during the trial.

I think that, you know, one of the interesting things is about the trial, but also with the sort of the scandal in general, is this fascinating series of debates about gender and about women's roles and men's roles, some of which have a lot of resonance today and some of which very much I think we can say we

fortunately have passed them. So, you know, she really plays up how traditional she is at the trial, that she was just a kind of loving family member that she you know, she if she lied after the murders, it was just to protect her daughter, that she's this loving mother.

So she's really playing on these traditional roles feminist Interestingly at the time sort of try and take her as a hero because she's so smart, and she's so eloquent, and she's so talented, and they say this is proof of that women are actually really smart, right, that they can outsmart like kind of male judges and male officials. It's also I think that there's this absolute horror how weak her husband was that he let her have affairs.

That's he's seen as sort of responsible for her affairs and also, I think there's some absolute horror for his relationships with men. This is also a kind of sign of moral weakness, of his being kind of corrupt. So I think, you know, it's really interesting to me that some of these ideas really resonate with some of our ideas and some of our debates. Right, So often we judge women based on how are they good family members?

Are they loving? And I think that really resonates. At the same time, I think we also understand sort of that we also have more space for women to have professional opportunities, which there was very limited ability for women to do at the time. And I think we also can say that our attitudes about same sex sexuality are for the most part right. There are a lot more people who would sort of not see this as absolutely horrifying.

So I think it's a really interesting case where we see these debates over what men should be like, women should be like. And you know, I was in college when the sort of Bill Clinton's relationship with Monic Blinsky came to light, right, and I just remember it as this time where this, you know, again, the scandal was so kind of centered so much on bates about women should be like, what men should be like, you know, like sort of women in the workplace, women's power, sort

of men's authority. And I think there are these way in which scandals really quite often become ways for us to have these discussions and right to sort of think about these things in terms of people's behavior kind of what they should and shouldn't do. So that's just one way in which I think we're sort of very much sort of living in a world that's quite similar to Meg's world.

But I do think again there's this way in which we often judge women who are accused of crimes based on sort of whether we like them or not, And so I think that sort of is something that resonates, right, do they fit what a woman should be? Do we find them charming? Do we find them the sort of monstrous? And she really benefits from the degree to which she

was able to charm folks. And I think that's still the kind of degree to which we judge female defendants on sort of based on our kind of gut feeling about them, as opposed to necessarily the evidence.

a defense attorney. The defense attorney brings back the army officer who was her first love, and then he testifies about how wonderful she was and just how loving she was, and how much he loved her, and how sort of sweet their relationship was, and how she was such a good daughter, and so she really is able to kind of cast herself as this loving figure. Again, I think that we often judge women based on whether we see them as loving or not, based on their sort of

their family relationship. So this is this way in which I think this also kind of is very reminded me a lot of some of the kind of cases we see today.