Simon Baatz

I first learned about this case from the musical Ragtime, so when I saw this book on Overdrive I thought it would be interesting to learn the whole story. It WAS interesting, and it's a timely read that deals with sexual assault, public opinion, and wealthy, powerful men. It's also kind of a bummer. But the writing style worked really well, making something that happened so long ago into a page turner.

I had a few frustrations with the author's note where it feels like the author was trying to defend Nesbit but still managed to imply that her account of her assault was questionable because she couldn't remember the exact day it happened and because she continued to see her rapist by choice afterwards. It felt victim blame-y and unnecessary.… (mehr)

Another take on the Evelyn Nesbit/Harry Thaw/Stanford White murder case (see American Eve). In this case, author Simon Baatz is a professor of legal history, and devotes much more time than Paula Uruburu to the trial of Harry Thaw – despite the appearance of a winsome Evelyn on the cover, almost two thirds of The Girl on the Velvet Swing is about Harry, not Evelyn. There are some major differences in the two accounts; Uruburu takes it as a given that Stanford White raped an unconscious and underage Evelyn in his New York apartment; Baatz notes that Evelyn gave contradictory statements about the event and suggests that it was invented by Evelyn and the Thaw family to keep Harry out of the electric chair by giving him a motive for killing White. OTOH, Uruburu says Thaw whipped a naked Evelyn on their honeymoon in Austria, such that her blood stuck the bedsheets to her body, while Baatz suggests this is based on an affidavit more or less coerced from Evelyn by a lawyer working for White and didn’t really happen. This long after the fact, who knows?

Baatz’s account of Thaw’s escape from Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane is almost comic. According to Baatz, The Thaw family spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to get Harry out; deluging the local courts with various writs and working to get the hospital administrators removed and replaced with others more willing to sign discharge papers. Eventually, Harry got out on his own, slipping through a gate while a milk wagon was making a delivery and making his way to Canada. After considerable legal wrangling with the Canadian authorities, he was summarily deported and dumped on the US side of the border, turning up in New Hampshire until finally extradited back to New York. The legal catch was pretty amusing; the defense argued that Thaw hadn’t broken any laws in escaping; he didn’t assault any guards or bribe anybody. The prosecution claimed that Thaw had engaged in a conspiracy to escape (it’s pretty clear he had outside help) but the defense turned that on its head, arguing that if Thaw was insane and therefore unaware of the consequences of his actions, he couldn’t engage in a conspiracy, and if he wasn’t insane, what was he doing in Matteawan – and he was released from custody. Once again, Uruburu and Baatz differ in what happened next – Uruburu claims Thaw whipped a bellboy and Baatz says the whippee was a young student from Kansas whom Thaw had befriended. At any rate, Thaw’s family finally agreed he was at least a full bubble off level and had him recommitted.

The two books together are interesting in giving different points of view of the same situation. Baatz has gathered a number of Evelyn’s “cabinet” photographs, which were considered scandalous at the trial (in one you can see HER ANKLES. Shameless.). There are extensive references, mostly to newspaper articles of the trial but some to Nesbit’s autobiography, which I’ll have to track down. Definitely read both Baatz and Uruburu and see what you think.… (mehr)