Wilbert Rideau The Real Story

            In promoting his memoir In The Place of Justice (Random House 2010), Wilbert Rideau has discussed the recurring issue of sexual violence and sexual enslavement in the world of prison. Rideau presents himself as an authority on the subject. And perhaps for good reason: after all, he won the 1979 George Polk Award for an in-depth piece titled “Prison: The Sexual Jungle.” In his memoir, he talks about two rapes, both of which occurred in the Baton Rouge Parish Jail. The first rape occurred shortly after Rideau was placed in the jail in June 1964. The jail was still racially segregated at the time. This rape involved a 17-year-old black teenager arrested for the rape of a “fifty-two-year-old white housewife.” Rideau said the young man was raped by several inmates in one cell the first night he was in the jail and again by several inmates in another cell the following night. He was then passed around to whoever wanted to fuck him next. This sexual violence occurred, Rideau said, because the teenager was a “sex offender” and his rape reflected the collective social animosity towards such offenders by the other inmates.

            This is another of Rideau’s “prison episodes” that did not happen. I was placed in the same jail, although in the “white” section, in 1965. It was not a violent jail where inmate-on-inmate rapes occurred. The inmate population, black and white, consisted of misdemeanor offenders charge mostly with public drunkenness or disorderly conduct and felony offenders charged mostly with  burglary, car theft, or robbery. There were only a handful of inmates charged with serious violent crimes like me and Rideau. While a few of the inmates had prior “prison experience,” the vast majority had never been inside a prison and were terrified of the very prospect of going to one. The bulk of them were just career drunks or petty thieves.

            Rape was simply not a phenomenon in relatively small jails like Baton Rouge which housed at most a few hundred non-violent inmates in 1964. Although a young inmate like the 17-year-old may have faced the possibility of an older inmate trying to “turn him out” (to make him a punk), they were not the targets of “gang rape.” And certainly given the hostile racial relations in Louisiana in 1964, a black teenager charged with raping a white woman would not have been considered a “despicable” sex offender anymore than Rideau himself was considered a social pariah among black inmates because he cut a white woman’s throat while she begged for her life.

            Rape did not become a part of the American jail experience until the decade of the 1970s when young offenders, black and white, were packed into big city jails by the thousands—troubled young men caught up in the social upheavals of the “love and peace movement” that gave birth to Richard Nixon as president and spawned his Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) funded “war on crime.” These jails quickly morphed into bastions of physical brutality and sexual violence that created a collective mindset of violence that eventually led to such disastrous prison riots like the “Attica uprising” in 1971. An excellent look at this subject can be found in States of Siege, U.S. Prison Riots 1971-1986 (Oxford University Press 1989) by Bert Useem and Peter Kimball.

            The Baton Rouge jail in 1964 was more akin to an experience of being locked up in Sheriff Andy Taylor’s jail in Mayberry, North Carolina than in Chicago’s Cook County Jail packed with gang members from the city’s South Side. A black teenager would simply have not been gang raped in the Baton Rouge jail in 1964. The inmates in the jail at that time, either black or white, did not possess the kind of violent mindset that would have allowed them take turns fucking another man in the ass. Thus, the rape of Rideau’s 17-year-old teenager did not happen—and he’s an unmitigated liar for saying it did.

            The second rape Rideau attributes to the Baton Rouge jail is a particularly graphic sexual assault he reportedly witnessed. This rape scene opened Rideau’s “Sexual Jungle” article and was reprinted in his memoir. This rape entailed an inmate walking into a cell, being slammed against the wall, hand encircling his throat, and a voice warning, “Holler, whore, and you die.” Armed with a knife, the attacker jams a rag into the mouth of the victim, throws him to the floor, and pulls his pants off. The attacker then brutally rapes the inmate-victim while applying a burning  cigarette to the victim’s side as other inmates “gleefully” watched.

            Rideau was housed in the Baton Rouge jail from June 1964 until sometime in December 1966. He was then transferred to death row at the state penitentiary in Angola where he remained housed until May of 1969 when he was transferred back to Baton Rouge. But by then Baton Rouge had a new “state of the art” Parish Prison which featured some rather heavy security systems for that era. And while the inmate population had changed some from 1964 to 1969, the new Parish Prison did not have the kind of inmate environment conducive to the brutal rape described in the “Sexual Jungle” piece, much less the jail’s environment in 1964 which certainly would not have produced “The Sexual Jungle” rape. Thus, the second rape did not happen, either between 1964-66 or 1969-73–the periods Rideau was in the “Baton Rouge jail.”

            Although Rideau was around sexual violence when at Angola, I doubt seriously if he ever witnessed a sexual assault. And this brings to mind the immediate question about the rape he allegedly witnessed in the “Baton Rouge jail”: was he was one of those “other inmates gleefully watching” the rape or was he just a curious bystander? It’s hard to imagine someone watching such a rape merely as an idle bystander.

            The question of how Rideau witnessed the alleged rape begs asking because Rideau in the mid-1950s was sent to the “notorious State Industrial School for Colored Youth” where he “volunteered for a part-time job sorting files and cleaning the office of the chaplain” in “an effort to get closer to Sexy Black, a gorgeous teenage resident I was infatuated with.” There were not many—if any, except Rideau—black 13-or-14-year-old kids from Lawtell, Louisiana who would become “infatuated” with an effeminate homosexual called “Sexy Black” in a reform school. 

            So while Rideau has always possessed an interest, intellectual or otherwise, in the homosexual subject matter, this alone does not answer the question about how he witnessed that graphic Baton Rouge jail rape.