Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Femme Fatale & The French President

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

This is the story of Marguerite Steinheil, the woman who shook Paris at the turn of the 20th century with one scandal after the next…one of which involving the French president apparently dying in the midst of a sex act.Marguerite is an ambitious woman, but being born into a middle-class family and trapped in a marriage with a failed artist 20 years her senior, she knows her life choices are limited.So how did Marguerite, who became known as ‘the Red Widow’, find herself at the centre of a scandal (and it’s not even the one involving the president) with both her husband and mother dead?Author Sarah Horowitz joins Kate Betwixt the Sheets to share Marguerite’s story.You can find out more about Sarah’s book here.*WARNING There are adult themes and explicit descriptions about sex and death in this episode. *Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Annie Coloe.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit. This episode includes music by Epidemic Sound. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, it's me, Kate Lister, jumping in as I normally do to let you know that we will be talking about grown-up things in a grown-up way in a grown-up context. So maybe you're not grown-up enough. And if you want to skip this one, you are more than welcome. But if you're happy to have your ears filled with historical smut, let's get into it. It's 1889, and we are in Paris.

and I want you to meet Marguerite Steinhale. Marguerite is a young and ambitious woman, but being born into a middle-class family and trapped in a marriage with a not-so-fantastic artist who is 20 years her senior. Marguerite knows that her life choices are limited. So what's a girl to do? Well, fast forward a few years,

and Marguerite is now notorious, known as the Red Widow. She found herself at the centre of a scandal which shook Paris, Actually, the world, and it wasn't even the first scandal she'd been at the center of, but the big one left both her husband and her mother dead. Here is Marguerite's story. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, for beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it. Hello and welcome to Betwixt their sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Kate Lister. What are the ingredients of a juicy scandal? Sex, definitely. Murder? Possibly. High society rich people? How about a president that died while receiving a blowjob? Yep, that'll do it every time. Well, this is the 19th century story that has it all. And today we're joined by Sarah Horowitz, who wrote

the book on this scandal, The Red Widow, the scandal that shook Paris and the woman behind it. And that woman was our mate Marguerite. So stay tuned to find out all about this notorious femme fatale. So thank you so much for joining me today, Sarah Horowitz, author of The Red Widow. It is so good to have you here. Thank you so much. I'm a huge fan of this show, so I'm really excited to be on it. I couldn't be more thrilled to have you here because you very, very, very, very very kindly sent me an early sneak peek copy of your book just the other day. And it's on my phone and I've been reading it and I was reading it in the bath and I'm not easily shocked. And even I, there were moments from that book where I nearly dropped my phone in the bath. And I was like,

that is, I've been studying the history of sex and sexuality for a long time. And there were things in your book that even made me go, whore, hello. Well, I love. Well, I love you. Well, I love that. I will say there are moments when I was doing the research when I was like, all right, I got to go. Like, this is just too much for me. Like, I just cannot handle this anymore. I think I have to go, lie in a dark room and recover from what I just read. It was like some kind of like 19th century Tiger King madness of like, this is all one woman. Yes. Anyway, so let's take it back down a notch for the people that are listening. And please tell me on the people who are listening, who was Marguerite Steinhold. Am I pronouncing that correctly? I think it's pronounced Steinhall, but I'm not

entirely sure, which is very embarrassing for me, but we'll just say it's Steinhael. So she's Margaret Steenhal. She's very commonly called Meg, and that's her sort of nickname. And she's the wife of a kind of mediocre painter in Paris. And she's not really happy being the wife of a mediocre painter. She's very ambitious. And so she decides that she's going to kind of launch herself into high society. And she does that largely with affairs through kind of like her husband's patrons. And essentially, the deal is that if you're, say, a rich person in Parisian high society, you would commission one of his not great paintings. And then you would get an affair with her as a kind of bonus. It's just the hustle of that is just what date are we talking here?

So what date was she born? She was born in 1869 and she's from a very kind of prominent industrial dynasty. But her branch of the family is sort of the black sheep because her father is like sort of terribly behaved. And so she's sort of always kind of on the brink of sort of falling out of elite life. and then she gets married in, I think, 1890. And she is basically sort of living in Paris from sort of in the 1890s and the 1900s, these two decades where she is just like, you know, creating this trail of death and destruction in her wake.

She is an absolute chaos muppet. The chaos mupp. That's a perfect description of this woman. I mean, it's like that setup that she had with her husband who's kind of a crappy artist, but the idea was like if these rich people come and pay extortionate amounts of money for some crappy art that my husband's doing, but you know, we can have our thing on the side. That was just, when I read that, I was like, I'm impressed, but I'm also like, but the thing that kind of got me was like, the husband, he wasn't like an active part of like, this is a brilliant idea. He was very much just kind of like, I suppose so. I've got a real sense of him just being quite downtrodden. It's a very tragic marriage. So he's considerably older. He's about 19 years older than she is.

He's always in love with her. And she kind of is like not really into him. And she's the sort of force of activity. And he's, I think, very passive, has very little ambition where she's just all hustle. And the other thing, too, is she finds out, I think, fairly early in their marriage that he is having affairs with men. And she's just horrified. And so they strike a bargain that they'll stay married, which is what he wants.

But she can basically do whatever she wants. And eventually this is the way he makes his money, right? He sort of, I think he says to another artist at one point, like, I don't have a choice. This is how I sort of, you know, feed my family. She's got him, hasn't she? By the paintballs. Absolutely. So like this is kind of where we're starting from.

is, well, this isn't where we're starting from, but she's like, this is the woman that you're imagining. She's extremely beautiful. She's very ambitious. She doesn't think much of having her lovers come to the house and employ her husband. And when you say she has a string of affairs with elite men, you're not joking. No, no, no. I think her first lover is her husband's best friend. Also, that's a fair amount of chutzpah, who is, he's basically the sort of,

former prosecutor of Paris, like very high up in the judiciary, very well connected. And then a lot of her sort of partners are from the judiciary, industrialists. And then her biggest affair in terms of her most prominent affair is with the president of France, Felix Ford. Go big or go home, Meg, right? The president. Absolutely. They start having an affair in 1897. And, He is very willing to use state funds to buy her husband's bad art to have an affair with her. And he's totally smitten. Thank God, president don't behave like that anymore. Right?

He's totally smitten with her. And I think she sort of likes the power of the access. And then, according to French legend, this is probably what he's most famous for. They're having an assignation in the French white house, the French, equivalent of the White House, the L.A.Z. Palace. He has a stroke. During that assignation, the legend is that she is performing fallacious, that at the sort of moment of his greatest pleasure is also... Oh, Meg. He has the stroke, and that I don't know if this is true, but this is what everyone thinks is that he is grasping her hair so tightly that his AIDS

have to come in and cut her hair to release her from his grasp as he is dying. I mean, that is every hustler's worst nightmare, isn't it? Like the client dying on you mid-act. That is, what a way to go. Is there much evidence of this, or is it all kind of like rumor and hearsay and gossip? Because, I mean, it's a hell of a story. It is. So there's a fair amount of evidence that they were having an assignation.

And he definitely died on that date, definitely. He definitely died on that day. There are his closest aide who is quite devoted to him is very clear that he has a stroke while he is in a boudoir with his mistress. It's not totally clear what the two are doing. It might have been that they were just chatting. Tiddly Winks. Right, exactly.

But it's very clear that she was there while he had the stroke while he died. And then there's this sort of elaborate mythology that builds up on this incident about the particular sex act they're engaged in, about the hair, that she is in a state of undress and has to be essentially escorted out of the Elysee Palace as quickly as possible. And so leaves her corset behind and is, you know, a guard, I think, gives her her coat. She's driven through the streets of Paris. That is a walk of shame. When you've left a dead body of the guy that you were blowing behind and you've had to leave your knickers in the same room. I want everyone to make that that benchmark of the walk of shame.

And if you haven't done that, you're fine. Exactly. Have you killed a president with your sexual charge? But here's the thing is like, when I read that, I was like, well, this will stop her. This will stop. her. Surely anyone after this would, I've just blown the president and killed him. That's, I'm done. Not the case. No, she is bold. She has no ability to be stopped, even in cases when she really should be stopped. But this is, I think, somewhere where she just is like, I could kind of quit my

life in Paris and go back and sort of live in shame, or I could go big. And so she decides to go big, she kind of reopens her salon. She really trades on the cachet that the president's affair and then death gives her as... So this, it wasn't even like a reputation, right? In some ways, like it actually kind of added to her, you know, sort of slightly sensationalist reputation. Absolutely, because I think that the appeal is the danger. So she has affairs with, or at least is rumored to have had affairs with the Prince of Wales, various Russian Grand Dukes, and I think it's the appeal of like, she could kill you. And that would make... I mean, the woman has delivered a blowjob so great it caused the president to drop dead. That's a hell of a thing. Exactly. I read somewhere

that, it might have been in your book, actually, that there's some suspicion that he was using something called Spanish Fly. What is Spanish Fly? So Spanish Fly is a chemical that I think is derived from some sort of beetle. And it's essentially used as an aphrodisiac, but it's not an aphrodisiac in the sense of increasing desire. It's more that it's an irritant to human tissue. And so it engorges For's penis. Ah, right. To the point where he can have an erection and therefore have sex. It's like lip plumping, but for... Yes, exactly. But he has... has a heart condition. And so it aggravates his heart condition. And that is what brings on the death. And did people know that it was her? Because I know that the aide said it was his mistress, but did people

know it was, presumably had other mistresses? He had lots of other mistresses. So there are lots of people in high society who know it's her, lots of journalists who know it's her. There are a couple newspapers who are kind of threatening to reveal her name, but they don't actually do it. And she is very mortified by these rumors that it's her. So she has some, I think, friend of hers, like write a note saying that she was sick and the friend was taking care of her, which is... It's just making it worse. Exactly. And so people in sort of this high society world and in journalistic world very much kind of know it's her.

That doesn't mean the kind of general public knows it's her. Her name is not published at the time. So it's like one of those open secrets that you get, but like they can't print it because there's not definite proof, but kind of everybody knows. Exactly. It's one of those everybody knows open secrets. We'll sort of joke about it when we see her pass.

Wasn't it the French word for conscience and the French word for acquaintance are the same words? So they became this like running joke about the president's conscience. Then people go, oh, but she's just left. Yes, yes. So there are all these jokes about their last encounter. So this is one that's attributed to George Clemenceau. So to for late is Pompeii in French, which is also sort of like...

It's going to make a note of that. Pompeii. It's also like related to the word for like funerary rights. That's a weird mesh. Okay. It is. And so there are all these jokes about her as the sort of deadly philator or the kind of funerary rights, all these puns. And then there's this other pun which is about Pompey the Great, this Roman politician and that...

Could you even imagine if Twitter was a thing back then? It's just the fun that people would have had with this. Absolutely. My God. So it's so much fun. And, you know, there is a kind of pre-Internet version of this, right, which is these jokes, you know, the kind of quips that people say, the puns they make. I mean, it must have been mortifying as well.

Like, even if, like, it eventually added to this kind of mystique of, like, what was her husband doing? Is there any sense of what he was doing at this time? I think they actually think about getting a divorce at this time, because he's just mortified. And a lot of his family members at this point, they decided. to cut her off because they're so embarrassed and they think she's so immoral, even though they benefited from her relationship with Felix Ford. So there's a lot of hypocrisy there.

So there's this enormous sense of shame. Her husband thinks about divorcing her, or that they would finally get a divorce. And then the rumor is that people close to the president come to the, couple and say don't get a divorce because it will create too much of a scandal for Felix Forre and his grieving family. And so the rumors that they decide to stay married, but also maybe that they start blackmailing the widow because she also doesn't want this information to come out. Shameless. Absolutely shameless. Yeah. So all of this awfulness is going on. And this, even like the most slutty and brazen people listening, I think this would have been caused to kind of go,

do you know what, I'm just going to go and live in the country with my husband and we'll just do some crap painting. It's fine. It doesn't stop her, does it? This, she's more affairs. Yes. And she clearly launches into having affairs with wealthier, more prominent men. She becomes a sort of very sought-off sexual celebrity, sex worker. Her salon becomes like the sort of place where, you know, royalty comes courting her. What is a salon, just for anyone listening who's not quite sure? What is a salon? Oh, sure.

So this is this tradition that goes back for centuries in France of basically women hosting gatherings at a regular basis where there'd be conversation and maybe music and readings. And these were also places where sort of elites would meet and, you know, kind of get a leg up on their jobs or... Networking event. Exactly. That doesn't make it sound too boring.

And she's got one of these in Paris, hasn't she? She does. So she's a society hostess. And suddenly everyone wants to go to her salon because you get to see her and maybe have an affair with her. Scali-wag. So we haven't even got to the most scandalous part of this yet.

I'll be back with Sarah after this short break. So this woman is just jagging anything with a bank account in Paris. And I just can't help but admire her though. Like I don't know if that's something about my moral, but I'm like her hustle was... Yes. I look at like women in the past and even today women have limited choices

and, you know, financial constraints. But what the hell were you supposed to do in the 19th century if you wanted to make money and make your name? Like you couldn't be a career woman. There was very few options. So I have this grudging respect for her. However, it is tested by the next scandal that hits her. So tell us what happens next, like the big event.

So in 1908, her husband and mother are found murdered in their home. She's the only survivor of the attack. She is found tied to the bed and she then is sort of presumably the only witness as well. And so she tells the police this absolutely outlandish and very shifting. set of lies. And her initial tale is that these three robed men and a red-headed woman, they were wearing robes and hats that looked a little bit like sombreros. Robed.

They were robed. Okay. They enter into the house intending to rob it. They kill her husband and her mother, but they spare her because they think that she is the family's adolescent daughter, who happens. to be staying at the family's country home at the time. And they then sort of threaten her and menace her and tie her to the bed. And so this is the story that she tells. It's very clear that there was no intrusion, that not much has really taken from the house, that the house hasn't

really been ransacked. And her story of what happens keeps shifting. So initially, she says it was one of her husband's models was involved, the sort of artist models. And then she says, no, it wasn't. And then she blames Brazilian or North African men. And the thing is that the authorities essentially go along with her story. Oh, do they? They do. And so one of the reasons is that the chief investigator is maybe not her lover, but certainly an admirer. It's like, Wow. Okay. So she's got the chief of police to investigate her as well. Brilliant. Yeah, fantastic. And so he's a judge, but he's this investigative judge, it's this system the French judiciary has. And he's like, sure, we will try and track down these robed men. Sounds great. These robed men with sombreros, the red-headed woman, the Brazilian person, and the artist's model.

Yeah, exactly. Was Meg a bit dim? Why would you? Like, come on, Meg. She's got. such a good hustle and this is what she comes up with. Yes. So I think she's very smart, but I think she is under such mental strain and from what I can tell has quite fragile mental health that she really can't handle this level of scrutiny, this level of strain. And she also has a very loose relationship to the truth her entire life. Do you know if this reminds me of actually when I was reading about it, there was a case in, I think it was Canada and her name was, is it Jennifer Pan or Jessica Pan? And she was a young girl who had really overbearing parents

and she basically organized for her secret boyfriend to come into the house and kill them all. And she tied herself up upstairs and then came out with this story to the police that there had been intruders and that they had been dressed in black and that they had taken all of the money. And you can watch it on YouTube,

the investigation of it just being broken down. And like you just said then, the mental stress that she's under does actually make her, create more and more outlandish stories. So yeah, I can see that now. Yeah. She sort of keeps going and keeps spinning. And, you know, the public, they're reading these newspaper reports of the crime and all these shifting stories and they don't believe her. And they think, clearly she's lying. Clearly the police and the judiciary are helping her cover this up. There's some sort of

conspiracy going on. What had happened to her husband and her mother? Like, how had they been killed. So her husband is strangled. So he is found with a cord around his neck. And you can actually find the crime scene photos, which are horrifying online. They're just so sort of hard to look at because of the kind of way they show the violence. So he's found with a cord around his neck, but it turns out he was actually strangled with someone's bare hands, which suggests that there's some amount of staging going on. And the story about the mother is that she was gagged. And when the perpetrators gagged her, they shove her dentures back into her throat and she suffocates. Oh, that's nasty.

It's horrible. It's not clear that's true either. So there's some suspicion that she essentially died of a heart attack after seeing her son-in-law be more. murdered and sort of drops dead of fright basically. They're really, really awful murders. It's not that there's ever a good murder.

So what we've got is terrible murders. Somebody who's in the house and is just clearly coming up with nonsense, but they're going along with this. It did go to court though, didn't it? It did. So the police more or less are willing to bury the story. The police and the judiciary are willing to bury the story.

But she is, not willing to let it go because she needs to be cleared of any involvement in the murders or else she can't regain her position in high society. And how does she go about attempting to regain her reputation? So she tells a reporter that the police are on the verge of arresting perpetrators. Then she suggests that the perpetrators are Jewish. Oh, nice. Right, but it's a Manticemitim as well. Honestly, Meg. Right. Okay. Yes. Yes. So this is a sort of time when there's a lot of anti-Semitism in France and in Europe more generally. So she tells the story about there's a kind of imminent arrest of the perpetrators. And then it turns out that there's actually no

imminent arrest. And that the police are like, yeah, no, we check that lead out. It's actually not true. That's totally bogus. And so then she's under more scrutiny at this point because her name is back in the newspapers. She's been exposed as a liar. And so she plants evidence on her valet. She plants evidence on her valet? Yes. Oh, right.

Okay. Yes. And then she has the evidence discovered. Right. And he is thrown into jail and becomes the chief suspect. But then... What did she planned? She planted a ring that she said had been stolen.

on the night of the crime. And a photograph of the ring is published in a major Parisian newspaper. And then her jeweler goes to the police and says, hi, actually, she's lying because she gave me this ring to work on after the murders. So not only did the valet not have it during the murders, but also she has been lying about what was stolen during the murders. Oh, Meg. I would think at this point that would be bang to rights. That would be, you are guilty. Was that the thing that like brought her to court? Or was, what was the response to that?

Not quite. That's just wild. Then these two reporters keep pressing her and they're saying like, how was the ring put on him? Like what you have to tell us the story, you have to clear your name. And so she blames her cook's son. Oh, right. Okay. Just something. like she's flailing wildly at this point and just pointing at everybody. She is. Yes, absolutely. And so then she goes to the police and she tells the police that it was her cook son who did it. And they drag in her cook son and he's like, well, I have a airtight alibi for the night of the crime. You've already investigated me. He was at a big public dance

in the night of the crime. There's no way he did it. And so, Finally, the man who's in charge of the investigation, this judge who is perhaps her lover, is like, I cannot handle this anymore. You have to stop it. And so he throws her into jail. He has her arrested on basically for impeding the progress of the investigation. But at that point, she becomes the chief suspect. I mean, there's enough evidence, isn't there?

This is just, so, like, she was the only person in the house where the bodies have been moved. She's been caught lying numerous times. She's blamed Brazilian people, Jewish people, black people, her cooks and the valet and anyone else. Anna's been court planting evidence. Yes. That's not looking good to me. It's not looking great for her at all. No. And she's thrown into jail and this is when all her secrets come pouring out in the press and her relationship with the president, all her other lovers, all the way that they use state funds to buy sex with her. it's very embarrassing for her, but she's in jail for about a year and then is eventually put on trial for the double murders.

On what grounds? Like, what could she possibly say? The trial is an absolute media spectacle in the way you would 100% think it is. And this is where Meg is so complicated because she's so terrible. She's so terrible. And at times she's so amazing. And she just runs the trial and she runs right over the judge. and she just sort of helps, like, destroy the prosecution's case.

Because that's what you've got to prove, isn't it? You can't just prove that it really, really, really looks like someone might have done it. There has to be the smoking gun. So they never have a lot of evidence of her direct involvement with the murders. And they have evidence that she was lying about the murders, but they don't have any evidence that she actually committed the murders. And I think the other thing is that she charms the jury. And it's an all-male jury, and they just seem to be unable to resist her absolute magnetism.

And so she is acquitted. She is not acquitted. That is what? Oh, my. She is acquitted. And you will love this. then she goes to London to escape media scrutiny, and in 1917, she marries a British lord. I mean, that's just, I can't help but admire that, the hustle, that's just...

Does she have a happy ending? Does she, like, stay with the Lord and just behave herself? So, he dies 10 years into their marriage. Okay. Was she, was there some suspicion around that? No, it seems that it's entirely, in fact, natural causes. And then she lives a very quiet life in Hove as a sort of lady of some but not great means. I think she goes to teas and charity bazaars and various parties and refuses to talk to the press about the murders.

I love that. There's this little town of Hove and there's this little old, elegant lady just shuffling around in retirement. And no one has any idea. She blew the president of France. and he died. Never underestimate your elders, ladies and gentlemen. Oh, I'm kind of glad that she maybe, I hope she had a happy retirement. But see, here's the thing is, do you think that she did it? I don't. Oh, oh, right. Okay. The kind of best guess is that she had a lover over on the night of the

murders, that they get into some sort of fight, possibly because she is not willing to have sex with him that night but still wants the money. And there's some speculation that that's because she had her period. And so she's trying to say like, hey, like give me the money, but we'll just have to have sex later. That the lover becomes enraged and that then her husband hears that this fight is happening. He gets involved. The lover thinks that the husband is there to fight him and the lover just strangles the husband.

And then she and the lover help stage this crime scene. So the guess about that is that she drops out of fright. Oh, okay. Because I was thinking like when I was reading it, is strangling is, this is my true crime documentary obsession coming back to haunt me. Strangling is not an easy thing to do, actually, despite what you may have seen from detective shows. It's actually, it takes a long time and you have to be quite strong.

and for a woman to strangle a man, you know, I mean, I'm no delicate flower, but it would, that's difficult when it's somebody that's much bigger than you, and she was quite a dainty little thing. She was tiny, so I think it's very unlikely that she could have strangled him. I also think she hates her husband,

but she really is very fond of her mother, and is very protective of her mother. There's no motive there at all, is there? There's no motive whatsoever. I also think if she wanted to kill her husband, there are lots of sort of easier ways to do it. Like, you know, he maybe had a substance of abuse problem at the end of his life. She could have slipped something into his drink.

He could have fallen down the stairs. I think that there would have been easier ways to have killed him had she wanted to that would not have involved her mother. And also, like, she could have done it before then. I mean, she seems to have had a pretty simple arrangement set up, is that he's not going to do anything. he's not going to say anything. So what would be the motivation?

What do people think was the motivation? Why would she want to kill her husband? People thought the motivation was that she wanted to marry one of her lovers, but he would not marry a divorced woman because that was scandalous. That was scandalous, right? Exactly. There's the line. Right.

So she killed her husband so she could be a widow so that she could marry one of her lovers. So when you're actually explaining it, it's just, it's not sounding very believable. Like, why would she protect this lover? Like, she seems quite happy to throw literally anyone under a bus. So do we know who this lover that she's protecting was? We do. It's the mayor of a very small town. And I actually don't think that they really had any intention to get married.

They have a kind of short and passionate affair. He seems to sort of be like, eh, maybe we're. we should cool it. And he's very clear with her that he does not want to get married because he doesn't want to oppose a stepmother on his children. So I think she had other options other than killing her husband. So it just has never made sense to me that she would actually kill her husband. I think that that seems extreme, unnecessary. And particularly, I don't think she would have wanted her mother to have died in the way that she did. No, and just physically as well. Well, that's really difficult.

But she never revealed Diddley Squat, did she? Whatever happened? She didn't. She took that to her grave. She absolutely. But there's some police officials who kind of occasionally seem to hint at a story. And so that they have more or less given us the story that it was her lover who gets in a fight. And that her lover was so powerful and protected that basically the police decide we're

not going to touch this with a 10-foot pole, and we're just going to go along with this cover-up. He must have been quite powerful as well if she was scared to say anything. Like over a hundred years ago that this happened, and just reading it and listening to you, I could see so many modern parallels. Did you find that when you were reading, like with the kind of modern implications or things that you thought when you were reading it? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think she's sort of one of these women who was like a sexual celebrity.

like we love her because she's kind of bad. Yeah. Right. And we love kind of watching the kind of very messy relationships play out. And so I think. And we still do, don't we? Absolutely. I also think there is this, you know, we're having all these discussions about a very

inegalitarian justice system. And she is someone who is so protected. And that seems to have really difficult to deal with contemporary pariah. parallels. You know, the police, like, arrest her valet and then her cook's son on suspicion of murder, and they don't have any good evidence. So this sort of very inegalitarian justice system. And then we're also, this is like an era where there are a lot of sex scandals. And some of them are just sort of like, oh, you know, that sort of politician was caught having an affair. And some of them are kind of really, really kind of troubling, sort of reveling.

about non-consensual behavior within elite circles. So I'm thinking in particular about like Jeffrey Epstein. I think so much of the kind of Me Too movement, right, began with a kind of scandal revelations about Harvey Weinstein's pattern of sexual assault and abuse. These are not comparable scandals in so many respects, right? Because we're not talking about sexual violence, non-consensual sex. but I think this kind of way in which scandals allow us insight often into elite worlds that are otherwise closed to us and allow us to see kind of how power operates.

And that that is, I think, something that is very much revealed by Meg's life is kind of the importance of scandal in revealing how power works in society. And on that note, you have been an app. absolute treat and a joy. And if people want to find out more about your work on this case and more about you, where can they find you? So I have a website, Sarah E. Horowitz. I'm also on Twitter at Sarah E. Horowitz, although it's just a lot of my dog. But that's fine. She's very cute. And my book is coming out in September and it's available for pre-order at all the usual places and it's called the Red Widow. Absolutely. And do buy it and then we can kick around forever about did you do it, did you not do it? It's a fantastic who done it, isn't it?

Oh, Sarah, thank you so much for joining me between the sheets. You've been absolutely wonderful. Thank you. This has been so fun. Thank you. Thank you for listening to today's scandalous episode. And thank you so much to Sarah for sharing that story. That was an eye opener, wasn't it? If you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. We've got episodes on the history of poppers. Do you remember them? Come in your way, along with Victorian drag queens and a whole plethora of episodes that are now in the back catalogue for you to dip in and out of.

We've got episodes of vasectomies, bedlam, tudosex, and a whole load more. This episode was produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie G and includes music by Epidemic Sound. I'll see you next time.