← Back to the front page

Some of the Greatest Men in History Had Dark and Scandalous Secrets

Khalid Elhassan January 31, 2022 36 min

21. Newspapers Had a Field Day With This Scandal

Fatty Arbuckle’s suite, shortly after the party. Babilonia

The hotel’s doctor examined Virginia Rappe, concluded that she was incredibly intoxicated, and gave her morphine to calm her down. As it turned out, the situation was more serious. Two days after the San Francisco hotel party, Rappe was rushed to a hospital. There, a friend claimed that Fatty Arbuckle had assaulted her at the party. The next day, Rappe died of peritonitis, caused by a ruptured bladder. Although medical examinations found no evidence of assault, newspapers nonetheless had a field day.

The press, no less restrained in the Roaring Twenties than it is today, printed increasingly salacious stories about Rappe’s death and left no awkward angle unexplored. Some alleged that Arbuckle had killed Rappe with his weight when he got on top and assaulted her. Other stories claimed that Fatty had penetrated Rappe with a piece of ice. The ice assault take eventually grew into accusations that Arbuckle had ruptured Rappe’s insides when he penetrated her with a bottle of Coca-Cola or champagne.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.