Forty Quarts of Liquor

Nearly a century before Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey shamed Hollywood spawning the #MeToo and Time's-Up movements, popular film star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle - second at the box office only to Charlie Chaplin - stood trial for the murder of the young starlette Virginia Rappe. Some medical experts, and the court of public opinion, concluded the girl died in a sexual assault after a weekend of consuming illegal alcohol, her bladder having ruptured under Fatty's 266 pounds. But after three trials and a defense that cost Arbuckle more than did O. J. Simpson's "Dream Team," the comedian was freed. The public was never persuaded. "Everywhere today," one period commentary said, "Arbuckle's name, with its unsavory associations, is met with a sneer; everywhere indecent living is branded as 'Fatty Arbuckle stuff.'"Using contemporaneous accounts, "Forty Quarts of Liquor," - a reference to the amount of prohibition-era illegal alcohol Arbuckle's party consumed - documents Hollywood's first scandal.