Half a century ago, marital rape wasn’t a crime anywhere in North America. That would change by the late 1970s, particularly when 21-year-old John Rideout of Salem, Oregon was accused by his wife, Greta, 23 — whom he was still living with — of raping her, leading to a widely publicized court case in December 1978. This is the subject of my new book Without Consent: A Landmark Case and the Decades-Long Struggle To Make Spousal Rape a Crime.
The trial, at which Greta bravely testified, was an eye-opening spectacle, leading to national conversations about whether it was, in fact, legally possible for a man to rape his wife. John was acquitted, and couple briefly reconciled before their marriage ended for good in the spring of 1979, but the story, for the Rideouts and for the country, had only begun.
As outrage over the verdict catalyzed activist campaigns into criminalizing spousal rape in every state (only achieved, with many loopholes, in 1993) the town of Salem, Oregon just wanted to move on. But the made-for-TV movie Rape and Marriage: The Rideout Case (1980) reopened a local wound, turning the real-life spectacle of a marital rape trial into a spectacle viewed by millions. Here’s how it happened:
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On Oct. 30, 1980, a group of people assembled at the home of Charles Burt to watch a television movie. The defense lawyer had long since moved on from the Rideout case to defend other clients, including one accused of hiring someone to kill his former wife. But he hadn’t let go of the infamous trial entirely, having given a lecture just a few months earlier at a lawyers’ conference in Las Vegas on the topic of “Rape of a Spouse: From the Common Law to the Present.”
Burt wasn’t exactly looking forward to what was about to air at 9 o’clock that night, though his family certainly was. The broadcast was one of CBS’s “Special Movie Presentation” programs, scripted films often drawn from real-life headlines. The network had high hopes for this particular production, airing it during “sweeps week.” But this film also revived a wound that the city of Salem would have preferred to cover over entirely, dredging up everything about the Rideouts all over again.
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The lawyer steeled himself for the next 90 minutes. To play Burt, they had cast Rip Torn — an actor known for his masterful portrayals of irascible, angry characters who were just as troubled as he was in real life, if not more so.* The experience was deeply discomfiting for Burt. Yes, the actor inhabited some of Burt’s traits and flourishes, and his conservative style of lawyering came through. But Burt couldn’t help but notice certain mistakes, major and minor. This fictionalized, televised depiction of the trial wasn’t the truth, and it couldn’t be. As he later grumbled to the Western Law Journal, “[The movie] made the legal profession look like it was playing cheap games and we weren’t.”]
* Torn’s infamy grew after the 1970 film Maidstone. During the filming of a fight scene, Torn struck the director—author Norman Mailer—in the head with a hammer, after which Mailer bit Torn’s ear. Torn would later tell interviewer Studs Terkel, “I have certain flaws in my makeup. Something called irascibility. I get angry easily. I get saddened by things easily.”
But for Burt’s family, that mattered less than the entertainment value of the movie. As his daughter, Cindy, later said, “Seeing the scenes in my dad’s office, and the makeover that they put John Rideout through, that was a hoot.”
Almost two years earlier, two women — Vanessa Greene, a 25-year-old Brit, and Blue André, in her mid-thirties and originally from Louisiana — had become captivated by Greta’s decision to press charges and testify against her husband, John’s acquittal, and especially the couple’s brief reconciliation. “It blew us away when they reconciled,” André told the Los Angeles Times.
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Neither Greene nor André had ever produced a feature film. Greene, a photographer who had learned the tools of the producing trade from Columbo cocreators Richard Levinson and William Link, had recently filed for divorce from her much-older director husband, David Greene, not long after having a baby son (she also adopted an older child). André had worked on low-budget films in New Orleans before moving to Los Angeles, where she was a production assistant on the Terrence Malick film Days of Heaven. Greene and André became friends when André’s house burned down, and Greene took her in.
They joined forces as Blue Greene Productions and set out, during the brief two-month window in early 1979 when Greta and John were reconciled, to make their project happen. They borrowed money, bought plane tickets to Portland, and rented a car for the hour-long southbound drive from the airport to Salem, where they would stay for a single night. Upon arrival, they arranged to take Greta, John, their daughter Jenny, and their respective lawyers out for dinner, during which Greene and André would make their pitch for both of their life rights.
There was a snag: John Rideout, in dire need of cash to fund his legal bills, had already sold his life rights to the production company Lorimar, chiefly known for bankrolling made-for-television films. That seemed to scuttle any chance at Blue Greene producing the film, and the two producers returned to their motel room to regroup. At midnight, they heard a banging on the door. It was Greta, John, and Jenny, the family in full reunification mode.
As André recalled, “They told us they had come back to us because we were the only producers they had met who wore jeans.” From there, negotiations began anew. Greta and John sat on one of the beds. André and Greene assured the reconciled couple that “there were always two sides” to a story and that the film would reflect both as best as possible.
It took all night, but by 5 a.m., Greta had agreed to give André and Greene the option on her life rights. Greta would receive $25,000 if the film was made, and nothing if it was not. “When they left the room, we were like two schoolgirls,” said Greene, “screaming and jumping in the air and dancing around the room.”
In order for the movie to go forward, Greene and André would have to work with Lorimar, which held John’s life rights. It was a complex negotiation, a dance involving the individual production deals: Blue Greene Productions with Lorimar, and the joint entity with CBS. Give-and-take was a given, and according to André, CBS and Lorimar were more reluctant to portray Greta in a sympathetic light and look out for her interests. “We had to fight for her. Someone else might have sold her down the river.”
Greene and André were determined not to make a film with a supposedly “feminist” agenda, as they told the Associated Press. “Our biggest effort was to keep it balanced,” said André. “What good would it do if we turned off all the men and they wouldn’t watch. It’s not a feminist film—it’s about the manipulation of people.”
They hired Peter Levin, with many TV episodes and a handful of films to his credit, to direct, while Hesper Anderson, a seasoned screenwriter who would later score an Oscar nomination for writing the 1985 film Children of a Lesser God, and who also happened to be the daughter of Broadway playwright and lyricist Maxwell Anderson, was tapped to write the script. Greene and André, along with Anderson, returned to Salem for a week of research and interviews in the spring of 1979.
But this time, John Rideout was reluctant to meet them in a motel. He had grown paranoid, fearing the place was bugged. And the producers and screenwriter agreed that something weird was going on.
“We were three women in this godforsaken motel in this horrible town and we were scared,” Greene told the Los Angeles Times. Statesman Journal columnist Bill Bebout, who would eventually devote considerable ink to the making of the movie, chalked their collective fear up to paranoia: “I don’t think anyone was watching them,” he said. “The district attorney’s office didn’t care what they were doing.”
Greene, André, and Anderson arrived in Salem, they later said, with an open mind about what had actually happened between Greta and John. But at the conclusion of their week of research, which included heavy consultation of the original trial transcript, the trio were convinced that John had, in fact, raped Greta—and that the legal community in Salem “just decided they didn’t like this law [marriage is not a defense in a rape case] and they just didn’t want it.”
Anderson went to work on the script, at one point locking herself in a Southern California motel room to figure out how to synthesize more than seven hundred pages of trial transcripts and other documents. She finished the teleplay in early fall. CBS was set to greenlight it that October, but a budget freeze put that off until the following January. Bebout dedicated a number of columns to the waiting period before the film went into production, which mostly amounted to assuring his local audience that this would be a film worth watching, and that it would not, in fact, be “trash.”
He also predicted in a September 1979 missive that Salem residents would tune into the docudrama “out of curiosity” — that, in essence, “we will feel we are on trial with John Rideout, and Greta, because we cannot escape the certain knowledge that the nation’s television viewers will render a verdict on this community.”
Greta, however, was particularly nervous about the forthcoming film. “I still get butterflies in my stomach because it will be brought up again,” she said in a December 1979 interview with United Press International. “But I feel the movie is going to try to be objective and may answer some questions.” She worried what it might do to her hard-fought anonymity: “It’s nice not being recognized every place I go.”
Blue André and Vanessa Greene felt the need to make a film about the Rideout trial to show that marital rape was a topic to be taken seriously, and that Greta and John were far removed from the “fun couple” depicted in the press during and after the trial. The film would also, they hoped, go a fair way to dispelling myths about the kind of woman who would charge her husband with rape.
Production on Rape and Marriage: The Rideout Case finally began in May 1980. Mickey Rourke, a 27-year-old struggling actor, was cast as John, while the role of Greta initially went to Jenny Wright, just 18 years old — who would, for unknown reasons, be replaced during filming with 23-year-old Linda Hamilton. Rip Torn would play Charles Burt, while Conchata Ferrell was cast as Helen Bibelheimer.
Rape and Marriage begins its narrative four days before the alleged rape, with the couple embracing in their car, parked on the beach, nostalgic for better times in their relationship, before the birth of their daughter and the continued employment problems they both, but particularly John, faced. (In opening the film this way, the script undercut the later serious examination of John’s intimate partner violence against Greta that preceded the rape allegations and trial.) Hamilton and Rourke are arresting to watch, the respective talents that would make them movie stars in the 1980s well evident.
The scene feels like the beginning of a romance. In fact, Rape and Marriage is structured as a real “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl can’t figure out how their problems have multiplied so quickly and become a national concern and, later, punch line, and then, of course, boy gets girl” story arc. Even though the end credits inform the viewer that John and Greta’s reconciliation was short-lived, and that at the time of the movie’s premiere the couple were, in fact, divorced, the romance narrative trajectory overrode any serious examination of what was actually happening in the couple’s relationship, before or after the trial.
Where the film succeeds is in its depiction of John and Greta as pawns of larger societal forces. The two were young and unworldly, and expecting them to grapple with bigger concepts of rape reform, second-wave feminism, and baked-in misogyny was a tall order. The confusion written on the faces of Rourke and Hamilton as they contend with lawyers (one memorable, albeit invented, scene depicts Torn, playing Charles Burt, paying for John to get new clothes better suited for courtroom appearances and skincare treatment to remove his traces of acne), special interest groups, and particularly the media onslaught is palpable, indicating how easy it was for them both to lose their sense of self.
Rape and Marriage, by drawing directly from the trial transcript, also illustrates the “he said, she said” nature of the trial, but its sympathy, despite not ever being overtly stated, resides with Greta. Her testimony, depicted on-screen, is wrenching, especially when her sexual history is brought up. Viewers see Greta’s and John’s versions of what happened on the afternoon of Oct.10, 1978, and while equal time is given to John, the film clearly gives greater weight to Greta’s story.
When Rape and Marriage finally aired on CBS on Oct. 30, 1980, the reviews were generally favorable. The Washington Post’s Sandy Rovner judged it a “remarkable television drama about an extraordinary case,” and said that Greene and André re-created the trial, verdict, and aftermath with “stunning reality, a sensitive script and utterly believable character portrayals.” Ron Cowan, writing for the Statesman Journal, praised the film for its “remarkable honesty” and that it “neither attacks nor vindicates anyone. It instead attempts to tell a complicated story in straightforward fashion.”
Philadelphia Inquirer television critic Lee Winfrey said the film “manages to restore seriousness to a criminal case that degenerated into comic opera.” And the Baltimore Sun’s Bill Carter (later a longtime television industry correspondent for the New York Times) also remarked on the “social issue war” that enveloped both Greta and John, calling the “activist feminists” and the lawyers the “real villains of the piece, though the feminists come off better than the lawyers, who really take a beating in this one.”
But critics also pointed out the ways in which the film deviated from real life. By ending with the couple’s brief reconciliation, completing the arc of the opening scene, it augmented the idea that Greta and John were locked in a bad romance script, rather than the darker narrative of repeated intimate partner violence. The Salem Women’s Crisis Center came off as more antagonistic than they were in real life, to underscore the point that second-wave feminism had pushed things too far and led Greta to press charges, rather than her having actual agency in doing so.
The portrayals of Greta and John by Hamilton and Rourke — both far prettier than the actual former spouses, as Hollywood intended — leaned more into complicated sensitivity than brutality. Rourke’s charisma, already evident but predating a memorable supporting role in Body Heat (1981) and star turns in 91⁄2 Weeks (1986) and Angel Heart (1987), went a long way toward redeeming John Rideout in the public eye, even as Hamilton’s, which would become nationally famous four years later in The Terminator (1984), did not do the same for Greta.
John was pleased with his portrayal in the film — so much so that in later years, he would specifically mention its existence in his résumé.* He wasn’t the only one who approved. Richard Barber, the judge who had presided over the rape trial, gave his verdict: the film didn’t make him as uncomfortable as he had feared. “I’m kind of surprised,” he told the Statesman Journal’s Cowan. “I think, pleasantly, that they have not tried to paint a picture of John and Greta that they are not.” He had little to say, positive or negative, about the actor cast to play him, Richard Venture, but was happy to find “few errors of fact” in the filmed version of the trial. “I’m glad to say I’m not disappointed in it,” Barber remarked, perhaps damning the film with faint praise.
* He also brought up the film, and Rourke ’s portrayal of him, unprompted in an April 2024 letter to me.
Greta, however, was far from thrilled. “When I read the script, I hated it,” she told the Los Angeles Herald Examiner the week the film aired. “Not because I thought it was a bad script and not because I thought they fabricated anything. But there were real-life scenes, dialogue I had gone through that was never put into the script. What they left out was more disturbing than what they put in.” Greta also felt “uptight” upon meeting the actress who would play her in the movie, “because she really did remind me of me. I think [Hamilton’s] prettier than I am. And I’m flattered they chose someone pretty. I’m sure the movie portrays me as I was then. I’m just not that way now.”
According to the Washington Post, Greta felt that she came off “less strong than she sees herself having been.” She’d only received the final script a month after filming had finished, subsequently telling Helen Bibelheimer that she hadn’t liked the “mealy-mouthed” and “weak-willed” version of herself. She was still smarting about the film in 1991, taking particular issue with the “terrible things” about her parents, specifically the false depiction of them throwing her out: “They’ve been very supportive.”
Bibelheimer also had good reason to criticize the film, as Ferrell’s portrayal of her was wildly at odds with the truth. One example highlighted by the Statesman Journal was when Greta, in the film, tells the police she wishes to press charges against John, and Bibelheimer is standing alongside her. In actuality, Bibelheimer arrived at the station only after Greta’s initial meeting with officers. Bibelheimer had been warned that there would be major changes to her personality and portrayal in the film, and “figured it would be all right, whatever it was.”
Hindsight, however, made her see things differently. She ought to have done more to stand up for Greta, as her fictional avatar had.
Rape and Marriage aired on Greta’s twenty-fifth birthday. By that time, she was no longer living in Oregon. She had at- tended Chemeketa Community College, pursuing a journalism major, for approximately a year after John’s acquittal, but after John was released from prison, she felt it was safer for her and Jenny to move back to the Midwest to be closer to her family.
As she told the Los Angeles Herald Examiner in October 1980, ensuring that Jenny had a stable and happy home life was of the utmost importance: “Like me, she had her periods of ups and downs. For a while, she asked a lot of questions. She wanted to know what was going on, but it was difficult to explain. We went through a lot together.” Greta sought counseling and found it helpful. She read up on intimate partner violence, finding particular meaning in Del Martin’s now-classic 1976 text Battered Wives.
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Greta refused to let bitterness seep into her mind, but it would take constant work and diligence. She had hated John for a long time. But she had also loved him, and it took even longer for Greta to get to a place where both of those states could recede and a more neutral one could prevail. “The weakest I ever got was during my reconciliation with John,” she said in 1980. “I think all I wanted to do was save the best of what I had. Eventually, I did what I needed to do, but I needed to find that out on my own.”
From the book “WITHOUT CONSENT: A Landmark Trial and the Decades-Long Struggle To Make Spousal Rape a Crime” by Sarah Weinman, to be published by Ecco on November 11, 2025. Copyright 2025 by Sarah Weinman. Books available for purchase here.
