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gatheringbones · 6 months

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[“Beyond the glamorous magazine covers of celebrity activists, beyond the surface-level empowerment rhetoric deployed by influencers and millionaire actors, survivor justice movements haven’t actually progressed that far in the mainstream, contrary to narratives that it’s progressed “too far.” It’s been well over a decade now since a Nebraska judge in 2008 prohibited a rape victim from even using the word “rape” during her testimony—she was one of several women told during their 2000s trials to use the more palatable term “sexual assault” instead, ostensibly to help their case.

Not much has changed nearly two decades later. On the 2021 HBO miniseries Catch and Kill, an exploration of the rigorous journalism that led to Weinstein’s undoing, New Yorker deputy editor Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn recalled at one point, “Weinstein’s team was pushing very, very hard for us to not use the term rape, to use assault—and it seemed that was the direction things were going.” Tammy Kim, a New Yorker fact checker, added, “There were a couple colleagues who were skeptical or thought readers would be skeptical if we characterized certain acts as rape.” “Would using the term be sensationalist?” journalist Ronan Farrow then asked Kim and New Yorker head of research Fergus McIntosh, who were responsible for fact-checking the Weinstein report. McIntosh responded, “Being cautious about something isn’t an excuse for not telling the truth about it. Being cautious means being really sure about what happened.”

As Catch and Kill and the US Department of Justice explain, sexual assault is legally defined as “an attempt or apparent attempt to inflict bodily injury upon another by using unlawful force, accompanied by the apparent ability to injure that person if not prevented.” Rape is legally defined as an “act of unlawful sexual intercourse accompanied through force or threat of force by one party and implying lack of consent and resistance by the other party.” The extensive conversations that guided the New Yorker’s editorial choice to specify that several women alleged Weinstein had raped them are a focal point of that particular Catch and Kill episode. But even beyond the docuseries, the policing of victims and survivors’ language and characterizations of their lived experiences persists all around us.

In the introduction of Chanel Miller’s memoir Know My Name, in which Miller recounts her story of surviving sexual assault perpetrated by Stanford rapist Brock Turner, she writes: “The FBI defines rape as any kind of penetration. But in California, rape is narrowly defined as the act of sexual intercourse. For a long time I refrained from calling [Turner] a rapist, afraid of being corrected. Legal definitions are important. So is mine. He filled a cavity in my body with his hands. I believe he is not absolved of the title simply because he ran out of time.”

When we hyperfixate on correcting the language survivors use that feels most honest and true to their lived experience with trauma, what we may be striving for is accuracy and a patriarchal conception of objectivity—but really, we’re just reinforcing the ways that patriarchy protects abusers by casting doubt on victims and their credibility.

Whenever survivors speak up, they’re frequently forced to hear some condescending argument about how false accusations happen—and they do—but without the crucial context that all credible research shows this is highly rare, and there is nothing to gain and everything to lose from coming forward about experiencing sexual assault. When we focus on a very narrow set of experiences over a far more common one—that one in five women is a victim of completed or attempted rape—this is a direct manifestation of violent, sexist power dynamics. The maintenance of these power dynamics relies on the implicit and explicit characterization of women and victims as untrustworthy. They are either purposeful liars or, at best, irrational, overly emotional, and likely to exaggerate—for example, by erroneously calling their experience a rape.”]

kylie cheung, from survivor injustice: state-sanctioned abuse, domestic violence, and the fight for bodily autonomy, 2023

#kylie cheung #cw rape #cw abuse #currently reading

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scooty-spice · 1 year

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You know that feeling when you spend so much time thinking about a concept, never mind how basic, that you feel compelled to write about it somewhere? No matter if no one ever sees it? Yeah, that’s me right now so here goes.

TW: discussion of sexual assault

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I see and hear an awful lot of discourse and rhetoric these days about trans-ness, gender non conformity, non-binary genders, drag performance, and every little thing in between.

Specifically, people who take issue with people who live in those realities and say it’s on the basis of protecting children from:

1) sexual assault

2) being groomed in some way that leads to sexual assault

And here’s the thing- I agree with protecting children from sexual assault. I agree with protecting *everyone* from sexual assault! But it seems to me like using those arguments against everything from gender-affirming care to drag story times at libraries completely misses the point.

HERE IS THE POINT: SEXUAL ASSAULT IS WRONG NO MATTER WHO DOES IT.

If you choose to sexually assault someone, that choice has nothing to do with: your gender identity, your assigned gender at birth, your gender presentation, the gender-affirming care you have or haven’t received, your clothing choices, or even your sexual orientation.

Here’s another way to frame it: a trans woman who sexually assaults another woman is just as much of a rapist as, say, the university student who sexually assaults a fellow student. I will grieve equally for both of those victims. Neither one deserves it. Neither rapist is entitled to their victim.

The reality is, one of those scenarios is FAR more likely to happen. But if anything has become clear (to me, at least), it’s that rape has very little to do with access to a victim and everything to do with the choice to rape someone.

Larry Nassar assaulted hundreds of girls in his time as a doctor. His access to girls didn’t make him a rapist. His actions did.

Brock Turner assaulted Chanel Miller while she was intoxicated at a party on the Stanford campus. His access to intoxicated girls and women didn’t make him a rapist. His actions did.

Catholic priests all over the world have molested children in their parishes. Their access to parishioners didn’t make them rapists. Their actions did.

These examples go on and on! And yet, very few people are interested in vilifying doctors, university students and religious leaders. It’s almost as if you can’t paint them all with the same brush, or something. It’s almost as if no sane parent will refuse to take their child to any doctor on the basis of “some doctors are rapists”.

So when I hear people say they’re opposed to trans people receiving gender-affirming care or using the bathroom of their choice BECAUSE it will create an environment in which sexual assault is inevitable, it makes no sense. Those ideas are dangerously misguided at best.

If you’ve read this far, holy shit, thank you. Like- am I way off base? Am I missing the point? Probably this is sort of heavy and a bit much to be thinking about, but I don’t know.

I would love for someone to expand on this topic - my experience as a cisgender woman means I probably have some blind spots and I want to learn as much as possible so I can help my trans siblings gain acceptance in all the small ways I can. ❤️❤️

#transisbeautiful #gender affirming care #gender identity #drag #drag story time #lgbtqia #2slgbtqia+#trans liberation #trans lives are valid

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female-malice · 1 year

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One of my biggest fears is the capture of key sciences such as ecology or chemistry by postmodernism. We've seen it happening with medicine. Survival of the biosphere would be much slimmer if we can't categorize deleterious exotics from native species. By the sounds of your newer posts it seems to be happening already. Are things that bad in the US?

Yes, it's starting.

A certain degree of internal criticism is healthy in any field of science. I think the argument against the current species taxonomy system is interesting. That argument criticizes the anthropocentric worldview of Carl Linnaeus. So it does ultimately help the field. But this argument could get out of hand if postmodernists co-opt it and go "don't say species!" That would get tiring. But that hasn't happened yet. For now, the point of the argument is to examine how Linnaeus's dominionism shaped biology perspectives.

But then there's Banu Subramaniam's Aliens essay and the EEB Language Project. Both have the potential to set disastrous precedents in Earth science.

It's interesting to look at the schools involved in EEB Language Project...

UC Berkeley – post-modernism think tank Harvard – conservative neoliberal capitalism think tank Princeton – liberal neoliberal capitalism think tank UC Davis – biggest agricultural university in the country and home to the CLEAR beef and dairy greenwashing project Stanford – great at protecting campus rapists

There's other schools involved but those five stood out to me.

Earth science is interesting because geography is important. There's good Earth science programs in every public university because there's always something of local interest to study. The best program at my tiny state school was the ecology program. That seems to be a common theme at a lot of small state schools. People deride these schools by calling them "party schools." But when you look at a lot of top ecologists, they spent their entire careers at "party schools"

Big names like Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford don't actually give you extra credibility in the Earth science world.

So there's a class dynamic here. You don't need to pay an arm and a leg to access the top Earth science programs. But now, through EEBLP, "prestigious" schools are talking down to the "party" schools. They're basically saying "you working class scientists are so uncultured and problematic!"

Luckily, Earth scientists have been tangoing with corporate capture and greenwashing for decades. They know what bullshit looks and smells like.

And this is still the face of botanical popular science:

youtube

So postmodernists have their work cut out for them lmao

#cc

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unwounding · 1 year

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mariacallous · 2 years

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Winning in the court of public opinion

Jurors in the multi-million-dollar trial could begin deliberations as soon as Friday after Ms Heard’s and Mr Depp’s teams deliver their closing arguments to the court.

But, based on the online circus surrounding the case, has Mr Depp already won the real battle in the court of public opinion?

“Amber Heard’s reputation has ironically been defamed during what is a defamation trial,” sociologist and sexual violence researcher Nicole Bedera tells The Independent.

“Regardless of the outcome of the trial, it will be very difficult for Amber Heard to be the winner here.

“She has faced so much online harassment and threats of violence… there isn’t necessarily any fixing of the trauma from that.

“So even if she wins I think it will still feel like a failure for her.”

If “humiliating” Ms Heard and gaining empathy and supporters was Mr Depp’s motivation for bringing the case, then Ms Bedera says he has already “won”.

During the trial, the court was shown a text message where Mr Depp said that his ex-wife was “begging for total global humiliation.... she’s gonna get it”.

“Sometimes when perpetrators bring defamation cases it is just to harass the victim and sometimes the goal is to stay in contact with them,” says Ms Bedera.

She adds: “It is about revenge and humiliating the victim.”

Mr Depp strongly denies all allegations of physical and sexual violence made by Ms Heard and claims she was the abuser in the relationship.

Regardless of innocence or guilt, Ms Bedera says the outpouring of support for Mr Depp is not actually surprising.

Himpathy

Given the extent of his star status and how long he has been in the public eye, people are more likely to empathise with him, she says.

It was back in 1984 when Mr Depp first hit screens in A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Three years later, he then shot to fame on the series 21 Jump Street and, over the next almost four decades, he has become one of the biggest stars in the world.

Ms Heard meanwhile is far less well known, rising to fame only around a decade ago in the 2011 movie The Rum Diary where she starred opposite her future husband Mr Depp.

The sad reality is that people would rather believe that Ms Heard is lying about the abuse than believe that the movie star they grew up watching and looked up to could have done the things he is accused of, says Ms Bedera.

“For people who grew up watching him and who saw him as a role model in their childhood to see him as a perpetrator of gender-based violence is hard to stomach and it makes people feel unsafe,” she says.

“It also makes people feel guilty if they continue to like him,” she says.

“Everyone thinks gender-based violence is wrong up until they like the perpetrator.”

As the trial progressed, she says it became something of a “moralistic problem” where people struggled to renege their support and admit they could have been wrong – regardless of any of the evidence.

“As people got more invested in the case and publicly announced they were on his side it became harder and harder to admit they were wrong,” she says.

“People are more prepared to protect their own self image than to protect the truth.”

From a sociological standpoint, it is also common for the public to have more empathy for an alleged perpetrator of sexual violence than for the victim.

Dubbed “Himpathy”, Ms Bedera says people are “programmed” to show more concern for the impact on a perpetrator’s future than on the future of the victim.

It’s a concept that is most clear in one particularly shocking case.

When Brock Turner raped Chanel Miller on the Stanford University campus in 2015 he was facing up to 14 years in prison.

He was sentenced to just six months and he walked out in three after the judge sympathised with the rapist because – prior to the attack – he was regarded as a model student with a possible future as an Olympic swimmer.

“The centre of cases is often not do we believe victims but is it right to hold the man accountable?” says Ms Bedera.

“It’s a very one-sided level of empathy which sees a lot of men who engage in negative behaviour benefit from it because people reason that they have been ostracised and deserve a second chance.”

As a result, not only has Mr Depp been “exonerated” he has actually “benefitted” from the online obsession over the case, she says.

The explosion of the case on TikTok has given Mr Depp access to a younger fan base, with the biggest proportion of users on the platform aged between 18 and 24 years old – and age group where the 58-year-old actor would not typically be their go-to star.

“He’s definitely become more famous and an entirely new generation of young people know who he is and care about his life,” agrees Mr Nierman.

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ritualofthehabit · 4 months

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Btw I feel like the Israeli propaganda has exposed some of the fallacies ppl believe generally speaking in regards to crime and punishment

prison abolitionists in America will call for an end to prisons and the judicial system and people will shout “what about the rapists and murders???” As if the judicial system that upholds American imperialism and the prison system that maintains working slavery will fairly asses who the rapists and murderers are. Israel and Hamas have been bargaining over mutual captives and Israel has at this point released ~ 200 Palestinian prisoners, mostly women and youth imprisoned while children. If you point out the disparity - that Hamas has a small number of captives from Israel while Israel has thousands of prisoners from Palestine - Israeli supporters will almost always say “but those people committed crimes” and therefore deserved life in prison. Meanwhile Palestinians have no say in what is considered A crime by israel, nor do they have fair judicial proceedings. Children are tried and imprisoned as adults and kept separate from their parents for years. To label them as criminals is to believe in a system where criminal prosecution is always just, and if we are honest that’s just not the case anywhere. Is it possible that this child released randomly stabbed an Israeli citizen? Sure, although if you read farther that citizen was a working IDF soldier which makes me more skeptical about the random unprovoked nature of that encounter. If I stabbed a cop in the USA it wouldn’t matter to the judicial system if the cop was causing harm to me first.

People act like “rape” is the most serious and punishable crime - until it happens, then it’s a “more complicated issue.” Personally my rapist (a serial rapist of queer women, at one point had at least two no contact restraining orders against him) works as a public school teacher. When Brock Turner, a 19 yr old white student athlete attending Stanford, was charged guilty on multiple sexual assault charges, he was given a 6 month sentence and served 3. The judge proceeding over the case was a white man and was later recalled from holding court in California - based on evidence that he gave white rapists unusually light sentences.

This idea that “rapists and murderers” are exceptions to the general idea of prison abolition just leads to false claims of rape - see Emmet Till, see the false claims by Israeli propaganda, read Ida B Wells “the red record” from the late 1800s where she documents claims of lynching victims being “rapists” likely because they were a black person who had found some economic success in a white town, read about the Central Park 5, etc. I’m sorry bc I know this is a touchy subject and many people are affected by sexual assault - but that’s what makes it so ripe for lies and speculation. The more emotions wrapped up the better. Idk

#Eeek

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scentedchildnacho · 7 months

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Alamogordo told me that if certain people leave for youth neo Nazis I will have to leave with them or they are abu ghraibs Stanford's and they will cop harass me till I have to kill them

The library a few days ago wasn't all that bad of a place but they dropped in in the last storm this blond youth and ever since that storm it's been called a really rape it's ass place

He spoke German but I think he is a Mexican and just alters that way......they want to really really rape that blond youth dropped here and if he isn't avoided you will get raped in ways that you have to kill it off you

Priorly the outside sleepers were just ageing veterans and they act out and then leave and that's if they had to be around creep youth gets to go they would have to kill it or all it's rape friends go

And that's the creepy McKinney Texas mentals with Hollywood are here and if the Russian cliche feels it's his film then you have to leave or it's friends will stalk and attack you also till you kill everything that hosts anything that repulsive

It will maybe be okay though the whole meaning of my experience is anything repulsively hateful disgusting and rapist has rapists that find it repulsive and non violence left me with extensive facilities to beat dog crackheads off their repulsive disgusting unsanitary conduct ....they probably will just have to get really beat sanitary

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rebeleden · 1 year

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Convicted Stanford Assaulter Brock Turner Goes Viral Again Via 'Whisper Network' In Ohio

CC CODDLED RAPIST BT

CC AMERIKKKA

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denverworksheet · 1 year

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Stanford employee arrested for allegedly lying about sexual assault on campus

The false stories had Stanford University students fearing that a serial rapist was loose on campus.

from California https://ift.tt/8rRyzWP

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sparklyandhaunted · 1 year

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"First, did Stanford ever ask what this football player was doing in public? Why wasn’t he home studying or in class? If he’d been where he was supposed to be, instead of out with his friends, he wouldn’t have gotten coffee spilled on him. Assaults never happen at home or in class, and he should have known that.

Second, before we can judge anyone, we need to see what he was wearing. Was it shorts? If so, he was asking for it. Was it pants? That fabric doesn’t absorb liquid well. He should have been wearing a hazmat suit because then no coffee would have had bodily contact with him. He would have been fine.

Third, it’s also possible Meyer was giving him coffee in a friendly way and he completely misinterpreted her gesture. A woman can’t give a guy coffee without being accused of spilling it on him on purpose? She could have been giving it to him as a gift and he could have waved off the cup, which would definitely cause spillage.

Fourth, where’s the video? Are we supposed to take this guy’s word as truth? How are we supposed to know what truly happened if we don’t have video.

Fifth, at any point did he tell Meyer that he didn’t want coffee spilled on him? Because if he never said no, that’s not Meyer’s fault at all. She’s not a mind-reader. He needed to communicate what he did and didn’t want.

Honestly, until a ten part true crime podcast comes out (brought to you by Axe Body Spray), we’ll never know what happened. I don’t see the point in Stanford ruining Meyer’s life over one innocent mistake."

- Family Sues Stanford After Student Who Spilled Coffee on Friend’s Alleged Rapist Is Found Dead

#that one racoon #who makes it better #there aren't many things that make me angry

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cinema-tv-etc · 1 year

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Real-life scandals of NYC’s ‘Gilded Age’ more shocking than any HBO show

By Jane Ridley, Lucy Dunn and Zachary Kussin January 24, 2022

Eat your hearts out, “Real Housewives.”

New York City’s Gilded Age came with a lot of excess, fraud and ploys from heavy hitters from the day.

HBO’s new show “The Gilded Age,” premiering Monday at 9 p.m. EST, chronicles the lifestyles of the rich and famous in Manhattan during the late 1800s — with ostentatious displays of wealth, ridiculous parties and heaps of tabloid-worthy gossip and scandal.

Created by Julian Fellowes, the man behind “Downton Abbey,” the series also highlights the deep-rooted rivalries and prejudices among NYC high society (and the social climbers desperate to get a leg up).

Here, The Post looks at some of the wildest stories of the real Gilded Age.

The Washington Square Arch architect murdered for being a ‘rapist’

To this day, the creations of Gilded Age architect Stanford White define New York City: the Washington Square Arch, Judson Memorial Church and the Players Club, among many other wonders.

But it was his 1906 murder, and the shocking reason behind it, that really rocked the city.

White, 52, had attended the premiere of the musical “Mam’Zelle Champagne” at the second Madison Square Garden, which he also designed. But the show was a flop and theatergoers left early. Among them were Harry Kendall Thaw — 35-year-old heir to the Pennsylvania Railroad fortune — and his 21-year-old wife, Evelyn Nesbit.

When bullets hit White in the face and he fell to the floor, the crowd first thought it was part of the show. But he had been shot dead by Thaw.

“I did it,” Thaw said while being escorted from the theater, “because he ruined my wife.”

Five years earlier, Nesbit was a teenage model and chorus girl who was seduced by the married architect to visit his secret lair on 24th Street — complete with a red velvet swing and a bed topped by a light-up, mirrored canopy.

Nesbit later testified that she drank champagne, blacked out and woke up naked with White next to her. She saw blood on the sheets — White, she would allege, had drugged and raped her.

White designed the Washington Square Arch (above), as well as Judson Memorial Church and the Players Club in Manhattan.Getty Images

Still, Nesbit continued seeing her attacker, who lavished her with furs and jewelry, until she fell for coal baron Thaw.

Nesbit resisted Thaw at first, and he became jealous of her relationship with White — a matter made worse by the architect blackballing Thaw from the exclusive Knickerbocker Club.

Once Nesbit and Thaw began dating and she confided in him about the attack, Thaw became enraged, hiring eight detectives to follow White, at a sum of what would be $170,000 today. (As to why he did this: Who knows?)

White was killed by Henry Thaw (left), who claimed he was getting revenge for White having drugged and raped Thaw’s wife, chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit.Getty Images; ZUMAPRESS.com

After the murder, Thaw was sentenced to incarceration in a hospital for the criminally insane in 1916. Some historians have speculated Nesbit’s testimonies about the White rape may have been coerced by Thaw’s defense lawyers.

In her memoir “Prodigal Days,” Nesbit described the events of that night differently: White didn’t drug her; she had too much champagne and fell asleep.

She went on to carve out a successful career in silent films. Just before she died in 1967, Nesbit summed up her part in the trial of the century: “I rocked civilization.”

New York City’s original snob

Samuel Ward McAllister decided if you were in or o

Wealthy by marriage, he kept a list — The Four Hundred — of the people who mattered most in the city’s social scene. The New York Times published it, and those who were left off were not happy. (See: Alva Vanderbilt, below.)

Samuel Ward McAllister kept a list of the 400 most prominent people in Manhattan society — angering those left off it.NY Historical Society

“[The Four Hundred] was the epitome of excess,” said historian Tom Miller, author of “Seeking New York,” a guide to landmark buildings in Manhattan including many from the Gilded Age. “It invented a society that hadn’t existed before.”

McAllister (one of the few real-life characters on the TV show, he’s played by Nathan Lane) claimed 400 was the number of people in New York who felt at ease in the ballrooms of high society. Anything beyond that, he sniffed, was riff-raff.

“He said: ‘If you go beyond that number, you find you run into people who make others feel uncomfortable,'” Miller explained.

Debra Schmidt Bach, curator of decorative arts and special exhibitions at the New York Historical Society, told The Post that McAllister was “an absolute elitist … He was apparently very charming and good at conversation, but he was only interested in people descended from ‘Knickerbocker families’ — those who could trace their roots to colonial Dutch families.”

Bach added that McAllister reportedly bragged that he only had time for elites whose ancestors were “the Huguenots, the Pilgrims or the Puritans.”

The list, meanwhile, was also McAllister’s way of getting invited to the city’s best parties and events — a goal since he had moved to the city in the mid-1800s from Savannah, Ga.

Miller said that, as soon as McAllister arrived in Manhattan, he spent the $1,000 he’d inherited from his grandmother on one set of dress clothes to wear to a society affair. Later, the prominent Manhattan socialite Caroline Astor would become his patron and close friend.

Caroline Astor was a patron and friend to McAllister — until he screwed over his wealthy friends with a tell-all book.Heritage Images via Getty Images

McAllister quickly found that the way to gain the respect of the wealthy was to prey on their inferiority. He told a journalist that $1 million was “respectable poverty” and enjoyed belittling Midwestern ex-pats he considered nouveau riche.

He drew the ire of the Chicago Times after writing that, if hostesses from that city wanted to be taken seriously in New York, they should hire French chefs.

He was also known to take cash for getting wannabes invitations to fancy parties — sometimes for as much as $250,000 in today’s money.

But, much like Truman Capote would do 85 years later, McAllister wrote a book that burned the very people who had embraced him.

“It was a tell-all that laid out all the dirty laundry [of the elite],” Miller said. “He didn’t name names specifically, but it was easy to read between the lines. He would use initials — ‘Mr. SV did that,’ or ‘Mrs. B did that’ — so everyone knew who they were.”

When he died five years later, McAllister had fallen from grace to the point that hardly anyone showed up for his funeral — including Mrs. Astor. She had a dinner party that night.

The Vanderbilt who schemed her way into high society

Alva Vanderbilt shocked Manhattan’s polite society more than once.

While she and her husband, William Kissamm Vanderbilt, were incredibly rich thanks to his family’s shipping empire, they weren’t embraced by the city’s upper crust.

Railroad money was “new money” and looked down upon by clans like the Astors, who had made their fortune through real estate and, before that, the fur trade.

📷Excluded from McAllister’s “The Four Hundred,” Alva Vanderbilt showed up other wealthy Manhattanites with the party to beat all parties.Wiki Commons

But Alva, who had been excluded from McAllister’s “The Four Hundred,” was determined to elbow her way to the top of it.

“The first step to get included in high society was to get the attention of high society,” said historian Miller, who runs the blog Daytonian in Manhattan.

And that meant outdoing them. So Alva enlisted famous architect Richard Morris Hunt — who designed the Grand Hall of the Met — to build a French Renaissance-style manse on Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street, called “The Petit Chateau.”

But there was nothing petite about it: Completed in 1882, the four-story, castle-like home occupied a city block and had a 1,750-square-foot banquet hall that proved the perfect backdrop for Alva’s grand scheme.

She sent out more than 700 invitations to a lavish ball — said to cost more than $5 million in modern money. But she purposely left Carrie Astor, the city’s It Girl, off the list. When Carrie complained to her mother, who just happened to be McAllister’s patroness, that she wasn’t invited, Mrs. Astor was forced to invite Alva to tea. At last, Alva had her pass into high society.

“It was such a devious and wonderful move,” said Miller.

And Alva, whose husband was cheating on her, wasn’t done shocking her new peers.

Alva and William K. Vanderbilt’s “Petite Chateau” stood at 660 Fifth Ave. in Manhattan.Getty Images

“Infidelity was rampant and wives were supposed to turn a blind eye,” said Miller of the era.

Alva instead filed for divorce, an unheard-of move in 1895. It became, as one newspaper deemed it, “the biggest divorce case that America has ever known.”

The Gilded Age doyennes resented her for bringing their elite circles into disrepute, and Alva — now with a $10 million divorce settlement — was rendered an outcast.

But by then she’d moved on to other pursuits, including her second husband, Olivier Hazard Perry Beaumont, a wealthy politician.

She also became a key figure in the women’s suffrage movement and helped establish and lead the National Women’s Party. In 2016, Barack Obama designated a home she had bought for the group as a national monument.

And Alva ultimately found yet another way to show up the Manhattan beau monde: She married her daughter Consuelo Vanderbilt off to the Duke of Marlborough, a member of British royalty.

https://nypost.com/2022/01/24/scandals-of-real-gilded-age-more-shocking-than-hbo-show/

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