I shouldn’t be so glib with the double entendre, but that is often the best way to think about disturbing things. The critical difference between the transcript of Roscoe Arbuckle’s first trial testimony published in newspapers in late November 1921 and the real thing is vomit. According to Arbuckle, he found Virginia Rappe in bathroom of room 1219 lying on the floor in front of the toilet bowl. She had already vomited and had not missed the bowl. Then the comedian assisted her in another bout. So that she didn’t miss the bowl, he lifted her up by the waist. Then, from behind her, with one hand still around the waist and the other pulling back Rappe’s hair back and head to keep it centered over the toilet bowl, he let her finish.*

The defense’s contention, based on their medical experts, was that Rappe had suffered a spontaneous rupture of her bladder due to any number of causes separate from any sexual assault on the part of Arbuckle. Yet, in one of the penultimate moments in his first trial, they allowed him to posit himself in such a way that one could see that he had caused the fatal injury while being such a Good Samaritan. But the prosecutor didn’t go there. Assistant District Attorney Leo Friedman took as much interest in Rappe’s copious vomit and its odor as I have in writing my book.

He questioned Arbuckle at length, who repeated what he said during his direct examination. Arbuckle had given Rappe two glasses of water and helped her to the smaller of two beds in the hotel room. Then he returned to the bathroom to do his business. He flushed his—and Rappe’s—away.

When he exited the bathroom, he found Rappe on the floor between the two beds in room 1219. He lifted her up and put her on the larger bed, whereupon she vomited again on the pillow and down the side of the mattress.

The vomit testimony wasn’t published in newspapers as a matter of taste. Indeed, not one reporter mentioned how “wet” the cross-examination was, not even euphemistically. No one knew that Friedman never let go of the subject.†

Nevertheless, dispensing with any squeamishness on the part of the jury, Friedman kept asking about whether the vomit had spattered the tile floors, had it gotten on Rappe’s clothes, Arbuckle’s, the odor, the stains, and so on. They had to have disappeared by the time the Labor Day party guests entered the comedian’s bedroom to help the fatally injured Rappe. And not one of them mentioned the presence of vomit or its distinctive smell, which can induce one to vomit sympathetically.

There was, in a manner of speaking, nothing for the school janitor to mop despite the puke buckets Arbuckle’s lawyers coached their client through.

Friedman, while diligent on the above, danced around the major theme of Arbuckle’s testimony to disassociate himself from Virginia Rappe: taking Mrs. Mae Taube for a drive. As you can see, my Juror Number 0, whose inquisitiveness informs some of my PDF notes, finally asks the really big question that was never asked at the Arbuckle trials.

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*What Arbuckle says here fits the hypothesis that his testimony had a scaffold based in reality on which to project his testimony. This is discussed in the book. But for rarified minds, it’s not hard to imagine.

†Rappe also frothed at the mouth and Friedman made Arbuckle demonstrate for the jurors. He did.