The Facts of the Case
On September 3, 1921, Arbuckle took out three rooms on the 12th floor of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Arbuckle and his friends partied in that hotel for two days, eating well and drinking bootleg liquor, culminating in a well-attended September 5 Labor Day bash, where actress and model Virginia Rappe (her age is usually estimated to have been between 25 and 30 years old) appeared.
What happened to Rappe next remains a subject of dispute, but at some point, she was discovered in Arbuckle’s suite writhing in pain. According to one of the party guests, Bambina Maude Delmont, Rappe explicitly told her that Arbuckle was responsible for her condition before slipping into unconsciousness.
Later, Arbuckle would say that it was he who discovered Rappe in her condition. He’d left the party area to go into his own room. Upon discovering Rappe there, vomiting, he assisted her, moving her into his bed before summoning help from the others.
The guests attempted to revive Rappe through a variety of means, including holding her upside down by her feet and immersing her into a tub of cold water. When those methods failed, they called for a physician.
The physician administered morphine and eventually moved her to a private hospital. There, Rappe’s condition further deteriorated, and four days after the party, she died from a ruptured bladder.
The degree of Arbuckle’s fame combined with the salaciousness of the case turned his case into a celebrity media circus with little prior precedent.
Leading that charge was media mogul William Randolph Hearst, a godfather of American tabloid journalism whose publications made sensational allegations about the case with little to no corroborating forensic evidence, stating that Rappe’s bladder was punctured due to her being trapped underneath an overweight man (Arbuckle was 266 pounds), or that Arbuckle was impotent and was thus motivated to sodomize Rappe with a bottle, ultimately causing her death. (There was no forensic proof to suggest Rappe had been sexually assaulted, let alone brutalized with a foreign object.)
At the time, many powerful Americans (notably white Protestants) were afraid of the growing power of immigrants running Hollywood, who were in turn changing American cultural values, according to the documentary Scandal! Then And Now. As such, the Arbuckle trial became about larger questions of identity, much as the O.J. Simpson double murder trial would be during the 1990s.
“The group who felt their status being threatened saw the movies as a potential for undermining all of the ideas they had tried to instill in America,” explains Garth Jowett, an expert in the history of mass media and professor of communication at the University of Houston, in Scandal! Then and Now. “And most particularly moral ideas. Ideas associated with sex, ideas associated with certain kinds of behavior.”
For protestant elites and associated church groups, the rise of Hollywood elicited a moral panic—and Arbuckle’s alleged depravity became a flashpoint to rally around.
Arbuckle’s first trial ended in a hung jury, with 10 voting to acquit and two voting guilty. A second trial also delivered a hung jury the other way.
The Final Trial
The third and final Arbuckle trial began on March 13, 1922. Arbuckle’s attorney Gavin McNab went on the offensive.
He attacked the character of Delmont, the star witness for the prosecution, saying she’d been trying to blackmail Arbuckle and noting that she had sent telegrams to multiple attorneys in the days after Rappe was hospitalized, writing to them, “We have Roscoe Arbuckle in a hole[; here’s a] chance to make some money out of him.”
Another major component of the defense was that Rappe’s bladder might’ve been ruptured in ways unrelated to sexual assault.
On this detail, McNab approached from several fronts, pointing out the ill-advised attempted treatments by the guests, malpractice on the part of medical staff and the behavior of Rappe herself.
Given that bladders can puncture as the result of sexually transmitted infections or heavy drinking, McNab painted an unflattering portrait of the victim, claiming that before her time in Hollywood she was a sex worker, had five abortions before she turned 16 and recovered from multiple STIs, though these are all unconfirmed.
Later, Arbuckle took the stand, told jurors that he had done nothing wrong and withstood the travails of cross-examination.
The jurors ultimately sided with Arbuckle. Not only did they return a not guilty verdict, but they also released a written statement, which started with, “Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We feel that a great injustice has been done [to] him. We feel also that it was only our plain duty to give him this exoneration, under the evidence, for there was not the slightest proof adduced to connect him in any way with the commission of a crime.”
Despite the acquittal, Arbuckle’s career was over. There was no more market appeal in his slapstick demeanor, the image forever tarnished by the gruesome details, true and untrue, surrounding Rappe’s unsolved death. He worked briefly as a director, then died of a heart attack at the age of 46 on the night of his first wedding anniversary.
