What Happened After Greta Rideout's Husband Raped Her

WOMAN SHOWS up at the police station and says she would like to press charges for rape.

- ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN

Asked about the perpetrator's identity, she says "My husband." A laugh track plays.

The show was Barney Miller, the year 1978. "The subject of marital rape is handled fairly sensitively," writes Sarah Weinman in Without Consent. And yet, she notes, that laugh track keeps coming back throughout the episode.

It was in this muddled atmosphere that 22-year-old Greta Rideout (née Hibbard) accused her husband of just over two years, 21-year-old John Rideout, of raping her.

The Oregon-based couple had been struggling with issues both mundane—money woes, erratic employment—and volatile. By the fall of 1978, Greta had already left John once over what she described as both emotional and physical abuse; there had been frequent fights over everything from his hygiene to how often they had sex. But he promised to change, and she was broke, and they had a small child. So Greta went back.

Things were OK, then quickly not OK. And on October 10, 1978, everything exploded. By Greta’s account, a disagreement over sex—he wanted it, she had to get to work—became a frantic argument followed by an outdoor chase. It culminated, Greta later recounted in court, in John hitting Greta, pushing her down, and physically forcing himself inside her, even as their 2-and-a-half-year-old daughter entered the room shouting “Mommy! Mommy!”

Greta was not a feminist activist. She was not particularly political, educated, or steeped in social concerns. When she pressed charges—accusing her husband of not just battery but rape—she was simply determined not to sink “into the gutter” and be “brainwashed into thinking I had deserved it,” she told Betty Liddick of the