‘Without Consent’ recounts Greta Rideout’s landmark spousal rape trial

Without Consent: A Landmark Trial and the Decades-Long Struggle To Make Spousal Rape a Crime, by Sarah Weinman, Ecco, 320 pages, $32

A woman shows up at the police station and says she would like to press charges for rape. 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 Los Angeles Times two months after the assault. “I did it for my daughter,” she told the Salem, Oregon, Capital Journal.

Oregon had just criminalized spousal rape the year prior. Only a handful of other states had done the same, and even those were a bit murky on the issue. Michigan allowed spousal rape charges only if the couple was living apart and divorce proceedings were underway. Delaware allowed rape charges against a woman’s “voluntary social companion,” which could include a husband, but it was a lesser charge than regular rape. South Dakota criminalized spousal rape in 1975, then decriminalized it again in 1977; it would not recriminalize it until 1990.

In the vast majority of the country, the law either specifically defined rape as forcible penetration of a female by a man who was not her spouse or was silent on the question but given a de facto marital exception by prosecutors and judges. Marital rape would not be definitively criminalized in all states until 1993.

Greta Rideout became the first Oregonian to file rape charges against a spouse with whom she was still living. John told the cops, who showed up at his door, and later a courtroom, that he had hit Greta, but he maintained that they made up afterward and that the sex between them that afternoon was consensual.

John’s lawyer initially tried to get the rape charge dismissed on privacy grounds, arguing that if a wife was unhappy with her treatment, the proper remedy was divorce. A judge rejected this motion.

Meanwhile, the case launched the young couple into the international spotlight, making them unwitting avatars of passionate disagreement about whether a man even could rape his wife and about sexual autonomy, marriage contracts, and gender norms. “But the trial ended up further confusing people, because Greta and John’s relationship was difficult to shoehorn into an easy narrative, where a perfect victim is overpowered by a monster,” writes Weinman. They were “so young, so in over their heads, so ill at ease with themselves and the archetypes that the media and the public had cast them as.”

Greta seems to have had a particularly bad time of it. Her sexual and reproductive history—two prior abortions, an alleged lesbian relationship, a prior rape allegation against John’s brother—were held up as evidence that she couldn’t be trusted. John’s lawyer suggested the case was about her seeking attention and money.

Weinman grapples with what happened between Greta and John, the media firestorm the trial provoked, and the larger political and cultural hopes and muck in which the case was situated. The book delves into the origins of marital exceptions in rape law, tracing it back to the 17th century English jurist Sir Matthew Hale, who believed that “the husband cannot be guilty of rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife” because “by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract, the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband which she cannot retract.” It looks at some historical American jurisprudence on the subject, including a 1905 case—Frazier v. The State—in which Texas held that a wife gives sexual consent when she enters a marriage and “the law will not permit her to retract in order to charge her husband with the offense of rape.” Weinman also explores how ending spousal rape exceptions became a contentious political issue.

The book reads more like something in the true crime genre than the academic exercise, political allegory, or feminist polemic one can imagine such a subject yielding. It’s interesting, easy to digest, and admirably sparse with editorializing, for the most part letting its subjects’ actions and words speak for themselves.

Especially compelling are the book’s myriad accounts of the Rideout case and its fallout from contemporaneous reporters and pundits, along with its cache of quotes from lawmakers, lawyers, and judges. The mix of attitudes toward the idea that a husband could rape a wife are fascinatingly alien from a 2025 vantage point.

“If you can’t rape your wife, who can you rape?” said California state Sen. Bob Wilson, a Democrat, when his state considered a bill to end its marital rape exception. Wilson later claimed the comment was meant to illustrate the way some people felt about the issue, not his own belief, Weinman notes. Either way, Wilson seemed uneasy with the change, saying “he was worried that a wife would use the threat of a rape charge to get a more favorable divorce settlement,” the Associated Press reported in 1979.

Wilson’s worry was not unusual. While some opposition to ending the marital exemption was rooted in an obvious attitude of male supremacy—the kind confident that husbands owned their wives and that men had a right to women’s bodies—much of it turned on a more subtle anxiety that wives would make false allegations or use the threat of them to their advantage.

“The idea that marriage implies or requires perpetual consent, under all circumstances, to sex is grotesque,” conservative writer George Will wrote in 1979. “But it is a grave business when the law empowers one partner to charge the other with a felony punishable by 20 years in prison.”

The Rideouts didn’t exactly help allay such anxieties by quickly reconciling after John was acquitted. But their reconciliation was short-lived, and their divorce was finalized in May 1979.

Without Consent goes on to discuss a 1980 TV movie about the Rideouts starring Mickey Rourke, Linda Hamilton, and Rip Torn. And then it goes on for over 100 pages after that. It looks at “Laura X,” a debutante turned activist devoted to ending marital rape exceptions. And it walks us through a few cases—including the infamous story of John and Lorena Bobbitt—that helped crystalize American attitudes and laws about spousal rape.

This part of the book sometimes seems meandering. The individual cases can be interesting, but they also feel a little disconnected. And filtering the fight to change other state laws through Laura X was a bit baffling, as she seems neither individually compelling enough nor central enough to rape law reform to warrant such prominence.

The Rideouts do return, though—especially John. In 2017, he would be convicted of raping two other women. The last section of Without Consent hones in on their stories. The implication is clear: Men willing to rape their wives are men willing to ignore consent and engage in violence elsewhere. Protecting wives from sexually abusive husbands is a good in itself, of course, but it’s also a means of protecting women more broadly.

The book doesn’t beat readers over the head with this point. It lets John Rideout’s behaviour speak for itself. And despite a few nods to current legal paradoxes around women’s bodily autonomy, Weinman refreshingly refrains from trying to shoehorn this into a metanarrative about Our Current Moment. This is, at its core, a compelling tale about two people and the world’s reactions to them.

But if there is a takeaway in Without Consent for today, it may be how far we’ve come. People in 2025 seem to hate being told that we’ve made progress and that we’re not living in hopelessly unenlightened and dramatically doomed times. Yet it’s impossible to read this book without marveling at the retrograde attitudes of a time not that long ago.