Rhinelander v. Rhinelander

Alice and Leonard Rhinelander had only been married for a few weeks when his family lawyer came to their house and took Leonard away with him. The next time Alice saw her husband was a year later, in a courtroom. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:29Speaker 03

  How did Leonard Rhinelander and Alice Jones meet?

• 1:32Speaker 04

  They had a meet cute. They had the 1920s version of a meet cute.

• 1:39Speaker 04

  He was driving on a road near her house and had car trouble. And actually, I should say it was a meet cute once removed because he actually met her sister Grace first.

• 1:57Speaker 03

  It was September of 1921. Grace Jones struck up a conversation with Leonard and his friends. The next day, Leonard met her older sister, Alice.

• 2:08Speaker 04

  And from then on, they were as inseparable as they could be.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  Writer and producer Laura Wexler.

• 2:18Speaker 04

  Alice was fiery. She was funny. She loved music. Leonard loved music, too, and they really, as they sort of courted each other, really bonded over music and film.

• 2:32Speaker 03

  Leonard and Alice would go to the movies together and like to take long drives. When they met, Alice was 22, Leonard was 18.

• 2:42Speaker 04

  Leonard had grown up in a very wealthy family, the Rhinelander. They were people who had come over from Europe to New Amsterdam and helped to settle and establish the town of New Rochelle, which actually is where Leonard and Alice met and where she lived. So his family had, you know, from the 1600s when they got here, had bought land, built ships, really expanded and grown their wealth until, you know, at the point at which Leonard

• 3:25Speaker 04

  and Alice meet, the Rhinelander family is second only to the Astors as owners of New York City real estate. So everybody knew who the Rhinelander were. They were sort of the closest thing to American aristocracy.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Leonard was the youngest child of Philip and Adelaide Rhinelander. When he was 13, his mother died in an accident. An alcohol lamp she was using to curl her hair exploded.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  Growing up, Leonard was known to be extremely shy. He also had a stutter.

• 4:02Speaker 04

  At the time, stuttering was seen to be a mental issue. And so even though he was part of the elite, he was not one of, you know, the shining stars of the family.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  At the time that Leonard met Alice, he was enrolled in a school that served as an inpatient clinic for people suffering from nervous disorders.

• 4:29Speaker 04

  He's kind of hidden away from the family and society. And it feels like it's kind of a last ditch effort to try to cure him of this stutter and make him into a son that the father would be proud of.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  And what about Alice's family?

• 4:51Speaker 04

  Alice's family were immigrants. Her parents came over from England in 1891. So the Rhinelanders had already been here for more than 200 years. And Alice's parents, George and Elizabeth Jones, had both been servants on an English estate. Her father was a coachman and her mother was a cook.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  When Alice's parents arrived in America, her father worked a variety of jobs. Alice and her sisters eventually went to work as maids.

• 5:27Speaker 04

  So they were very much working class.

• 5:31Speaker 03

  In December of 1921, Alice and Leonard drove into New York City, where they were going to see a play. They ended up getting a room at the Hotel Marie Antoinette, where Leonard registered them as a husband and wife named Mr. and Mrs. James Smith. They stayed there for five days. The next month, they went back to the hotel.

• 5:54Speaker 04

  It's pretty clear that the chauffeur, the family chauffeur, lets Philip Rhinelander, Leonard's father, know that Leonard and Alice have taken a room at the Hotel Marie Antoinette and are having, basically, you know, a love fest there. So, acting on this tip, Philip Rhinelander sends his lawyer to the Hotel Marie Antoinette. He bangs on the door and discovers them and then immediately separates them.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  Philip Rhinelander sent his son away. Leonard went on long trips to Cuba, Bermuda, and San Francisco. His father even enrolled him at a ranch school in Arizona.

• 6:44Speaker 04

  They worried about Leonard being with a woman who was a maid. Philip Rhinelander's brother, about 30, 40 years before, had married a housemaid. And he had been excommunicated from the family and had died poor and sick and, you know, never was invited back into the family and, in fact, was buried outside the family mausoleum. So Philip Rhinelander, in a way, was following the family rules. This was their playbook.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  But Alice and Leonard kept writing to each other.

• 7:27Speaker 04

  Over the next two years, they wrote 700 letters, maybe even more, back and forth to each other.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  When Leonard turned 21 in 1924, he inherited more than $300,000 from his grandfather. He immediately got on a train to New Rochelle, back to Alice.

• 7:50Speaker 04

  He sort of went rogue, went immediately to Alice's house before he even, you know, saw any member of his family, and they reunited.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  A few months later, Alice and Leonard got married in New Rochelle.

• 8:03Speaker 04

  And not only does his father not know, but her parents, or at least her father, they don't know that they're going to get married either until after it's done.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Before they were married, Alice's father had told Leonard that he didn't think he should propose.

• 8:20Speaker 04

  George Jones basically says to Leonard, "This marriage can never work because the class difference is too great. You can't span this class difference between you, you know, of the aristocracy, and Alice, who is of English working people." So his reservations about the marriage had everything to do with class, which had everything to do with how he understood society from his years in England.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Still, once they were married, Alice's parents let them move in with them while they were busy setting up their new apartment.

• 9:00Speaker 04

  They bought dishes, they bought linens. And all of that was like, was very, you know, romantic and wholesome. You know, as romantic as this was, Leonard was living a double life. Even though they were married, he still didn't want his father to know that he had married Alice. And so Monday through Friday, he was living at his father's house and working in the family real estate company. And after work on the weekdays, he would come out and eat dinner with Alice and her family and go back. And then on the weekends, he would come and he would live with them.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  They were planning to tell his father that they were married by having a party once their apartment got set up. And so even as Leonard was prepared to be excommunicated, there was also this hope that, once his father saw how happy he was,

• 10:11Speaker 04

  that the father and the family would welcome them. But they never got a chance to have the party because the news leaked to the newspapers.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  On Friday, November 14th, 1924, The Daily News ran an article about Alice and Leonard's marriage. The headline read, "Blue Blood Weds Colored Girl."

• 10:35Speaker 04

  And from there, the newspapers say she's the daughter of a black man.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  Reporters wrote that George Jones, Alice's father, was, quote, "a colored coachman, who was, quote, 'generally believed here to have West Indian blood in his veins.'" Alice's skin was described in the papers as, quote, "coffee-colored."

• 10:59Speaker 04

  So it's not only the rich-poor Cinderella angle, but it's the, you know, black and blue blood, you know, contrast.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  When the news breaks and the newspapers are publishing these headlines, how does the couple react initially?

• 11:19Speaker 04

  Initially, they both deny it. They say that they're going to sue the newspapers for printing lies.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  Alice told one reporter, "I'm going to sue the papers that have called my father colored. I'm going to file suit for libel." One paper said that Leonard urged his wife to answer questions calmly, to, quote, "help clear things up." Newspapers started printing stories about their marriage every day. Leonard and Alice went into hiding at her parents' house in New Rochelle.

• 11:57Speaker 04

  There's just, you know, crowds of onlookers, crowds of press. The police are called to kind of prevent people from getting too close to the house. You know, someone throws a rock through the window. So after a week, they're really looking to escape.

• 12:17Speaker 03

  Leonard Rhinelander's father had issued a statement that his son had married without his knowledge.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  Behind the scenes, of course, this is their worst nightmare. You know, he, he had been worried that Leonard had been found with a...

• 12:36Speaker 04

  A woman far below his social status and took extreme measures, exiling Leonard from New York for two years because of that. Now, you know, this is, this is orders of magnitude worse. You know, there's a threat that, you know, this bloodline of the Rhinelanders that they've protected and have been so proud of for 200 years is, is going to be, you know, contaminated. That's how they see it, contaminated by non-white blood. And this is, this is horrific to them. The 1920s, this is the height of the Klan.

• 13:16Speaker 04

  They have four million members. They're absolutely a mainstream organization. And this is the height of the American eugenics movement.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  The Rhinelander family sent a lawyer to Alice's parents' house, who said he could help the couple relocate.

• 13:34Speaker 04

  Somehow, he convinces them that the best way to do this is for him to take Leonard separately and go look for a place and then return for Alice the next day and take her to him. So that's the plan. He takes Leonard, they drive off in a limousine. And that is the last time that Alice sees Leonard until she sees him in court a year later.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

• 14:11Speaker 03

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• 16:35Speaker 03

  Alice Rhinelander spent days waiting to hear from Leonard after he left her parents' house with his family lawyer.

• 16:42Speaker 04

  At a certain point, she realizes that he's been, you know, essentially kidnapped, as one of the newspapers calls it.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  And then, about a week after Leonard left, the Rhinelander's lawyer came to the house again.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  Not to take Alice to meet Leonard so they can continue their married life, but to serve her with legal papers indicating that he is suing her for annulment, charging that she committed racial fraud by pretending to be a white woman when in fact she was not.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  That same day, a messenger delivered a letter from Leonard. It said, "I hope you will win this case. Get the best lawyer."

• 17:40Speaker 03

  Both of Alice's parents had been born in England. Her father, George, didn't know much about his father, but described him as being a "native of one of the British colonies." Alice's father, George, had brown skin.

• 17:55Speaker 04

  In Alice and her family's understanding, they are not black. To them, the term "black" means "African-American." It means "an American black person." They are English. And Alice, again and again, and her family, again and again, say, "My father is English. He has dark skin because his father was from an English colony, probably India. But he's English, and his mother was white. So we don't identify with being black, negro, or colored."

• 18:38Speaker 04

  That was how they had lived their lives. That, of course, was not the view of most Americans at the time, which was, if you have dark skin, you're black, you're negro, or you're colored, depending on... Sometimes those terms had slightly different definitions. Sometimes they didn't. But she has to be either black or white, really. That's just how the American racial understanding went. So she's stuck in this racial binary as soon as this news comes out.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  In 1924, interracial marriage was illegal in more than half of the states. But it was legal in New York, where Alice and Leonard had gotten married.

• 19:28Speaker 04

  What that means for...

• 19:32Speaker 04

  The Rhinelander family is that getting Leonard out of this marriage is not going to be as simple as it would have been, say, in Virginia or Georgia, where if, you know, he had been able to show proof that Alice wasn't white, automatically the marriage would have been invalidated. So they're in this tricky position here in New York, which is interracial marriage is legal and divorce is very hard to get. Like divorce, I think until the 70s in New York was only allowable in cases of adultery. So he wasn't going to be able to get a divorce.

• 20:14Speaker 04

  There was no way he was going to prove that Alice had, you know, been adulterous to him. So annulment is really his only legal option. And the other benefit of annulment is that it, you know, it erases the marriage completely. So for the Rhinelanders, who, you know, are losing their minds about the possibility of this stain on their proud family lineage, it would make it as if it had never happened. It would disappear the marriage and Alice completely.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  In order to get an annulment, the Rhinelanders would have to prove that Alice had defrauded Leonard by leading him to believe she was white when she wasn't.

• 21:04Speaker 04

  Her defense is, she is white, so she didn't commit fraud. Therefore, the marriage should stand.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  The annulment trial began in November of 1925 in White Plains, New York. Newspapers reported that Mrs. Rhinelander has repeatedly declared her faith in Leonard and has steadfastly refused huge sums of money said to have been offered to her by the Rhinelander clan in lieu of her husband. Leonard's lawyer, Isaac Mills, began by describing his client as a, quote, "weak, utterly unsophisticated young man, upon whom," Mills said, "no woman had ever smiled until he encountered Alice Jones."

• 21:52Speaker 03

  He said Leonard suffered from an illness that, quote, "affects both his speech and his mind."

• 22:00Speaker 03

  Leonard's lawyer claimed that Alice had told Leonard before they were married that she was white, when in fact, quote, "she was colored and of colored blood."

• 22:10Speaker 04

  The main piece of evidence that his lawyers present at trial is that on her birth certificate, Alice had been marked as black, even though on the census, many years, the family was listed as white and Alice was listed as white. And even though when she and Leonard got married at the new Rochelle City Hall, she was identified as white by the clerk. The fact that she had been identified as black on her birth certificate carried a lot of weight.

• 22:47Speaker 03

  When it was time for Alice's lawyer, Lee Parsons Davis, to present his opening statements, he did something that took everyone by surprise.

• 22:57Speaker 04

  He stands up during his opening statement and he says, "We're going to concede that Alice Rhinelander has colored blood. Our defense will be that Leonard knew and that therefore, there was no fraud."

• 23:16Speaker 03

  Alice's lawyer told the court that Leonard Rhinelander had spent lots of time with Alice's family at her house, including with her father. He said that Leonard's lawyer should not have claimed that Leonard was, quote, "mentally unsound," but instead, "blind," when he asserted the young man was deceived about Alice's color.

• 23:40Speaker 04

  What happens once this concession is made is that the focus of the trial moves off of Alice and on to Leonard. So, his lawyer needs to show that Leonard truly believed she was white, so he didn't know. And the reason he didn't know was, A, he was mentally backward, as he said, and B, Alice, through her, you know, according to him, lascivious ways, had bewitched Leonard to the point where, as he says during trial, Leonard could no longer tell black from white.

• 24:23Speaker 03

  Against Leonard's wishes, his lawyers had taken letters that Alice had written to him and submitted them as evidence to be read aloud in court.

• 24:32Speaker 04

  In some ways, the letters were very conventional, romantic expressions of two young people who had fallen in love and were being kept apart. So they were remembering the good times they had. They were pledging their loyalty and their care for each other.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  One letter said, "Len, I am true to you. A nice little chap came here the other day and wanted a date, but I refused because I have one boy I love a lot. You always take care of your Alice." But there are also letters that are read that are meant to be embarrassing.

• 25:16Speaker 04

  Yes. In their letters, they recall in great detail the intimacy that they shared in their stolen days and weeks at the hotel Marie Antoinette. And they depict her in the most negative light possible.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  These letters were also read aloud.

• 25:39Speaker 04

  Here is a young woman who's not only having sex before marriage, as her letters describe, but really taking great pleasure in it and really expressing that pleasure. And that really violated the norms of womanhood at the time. I mean, we are in the roaring twenties, but most people are not flappers. Most people are still kind of Victorian at this time. And so these letters absolutely destroyed her reputation as, you know, a good woman, so to speak.

• 26:18Speaker 04

  And then when her lawyer, when he cross-examines Leonard, he basically threatens him by showing Leonard a letter that Leonard had written to Alice, having Leonard read it silently, and then saying, "Leonard, are you sure you want to go on with this trial?"

• 26:39Speaker 03

  Alice's lawyer said that if the Rhinelander's would drop the Anulman suit, he wouldn't read Leonard's two most explicit letters in court. The trial was paused for several days while the Rhinelander's lawyers considered what to do.

• 26:55Speaker 04

  You know, many people are betting that this is the Rhinelander family is gonna drop the suit rather than have these letters read in court because whatever it is has got to be so damaging. And then court reconvenes and Leonard's lawyer says, "We go on with the trial, no matter what."

• 27:20Speaker 03

  We'll be right back.

• 27:37Speaker 03

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  Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know Criminal sent you. It's the best way to support the show. On November 23rd, 1925, Alice Rhinelander's lawyer, Lee Parsons Davis, prepared to read two so-called "mystery letters" from Leonard Rhinelander aloud in court.

• 29:55Speaker 04

  But before he reads them in court, the judge clears the courtroom of women and young people. And at that point, they had constituted the majority of these overflow crowds that had been coming to the trial every day. And, man, these women do not want to leave the courtroom. They are there for this. And some of them have to be dragged out. Some of them have their clothes ripped in the process. Like, it's a circus. So they get all the women out, they close and lock the doors, and suddenly, the courtroom is so much more quiet than it has been for nearly four weeks.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  And Davis reads these letters aloud. And in the letters, Leonard has recalled to Alice intimate experiences that they had together, in which he performed oral sex on her.

• 30:58Speaker 04

  And just as she talked with pleasure about their intimacy together, he does too. And after the lawyer finishes reading those letters,

• 31:12Speaker 04

  Leonard is absolutely destroyed. His, his reputation.

• 31:19Speaker 04

  Oral sex was a crime at the time. I don't think that many people were prosecuted for it, but it definitely wasn't considered normal. And in fact, everything about the, the letters earns Leonard the label of deviant.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  What was Leonard's reaction?

• 31:43Speaker 04

  The lawyer, her lawyer goads him by saying, you didn't you know this was deviant? Didn't you know this was filth? Didn't, you know, didn't you know this was wrong? This wasn't normal. And Leonard refuses to take the bait. He stands his ground and says, no, I, this was how we loved each other. And I wrote these things because it was a way of, you know, maintaining my connection to Alice and to being true to her. And I gave my word to being true and I was true.

• 32:27Speaker 04

  And I'm, you know, I'm proud of that.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  The same day that the two letters were read, Alice's lawyer made another announcement.

• 32:37Speaker 04

  In the final moments of his cross examination of Leonard, after he's read these damaging letters, he says, I want to have the courtroom cleared because I'm going to bring in Mrs. Rylander and have her show the color of her skin to the jury.

• 32:58Speaker 03

  Leonard's lawyer objected, saying it was indecent. He was overruled.

• 33:03Speaker 04

  And what ends up happening is that the jurors, who are 12 white men, the lawyers, the judge, the court stenographer, and Alice and her mother, and yes, Leonard, go into the jury room. And she goes into the bathroom that adjoins the jury room. She takes off her clothing, puts her coat on, and walks out into the middle of the jury room. First, she lifts her coat so that the jurors can inspect

• 33:45Speaker 04

  her leg up to the thigh. And then she lets her coat fall from her shoulders, revealing her shoulders and her upper back and her chest so that they can inspect those regions of her body as well. And this is, in her lawyer's mind, the strongest evidence that he can present that Leonard had to have known that she had colored blood.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  Newspapers reported that Alice, quote, "became hysterical after leaving the jury room." Alice's lawyer questioned Leonard on the stand. He asked if Alice's skin was the same color as it had been when they'd been together at the Hotel Marie Antoinette. Leonard said yes.

• 34:48Speaker 04

  Essentially, he says to the jury, "Now you've seen what Leonard saw. How could he not have known?"

• 34:58Speaker 03

  Did Alice agree to this? Did she know that this was going to happen?

• 35:04Speaker 04

  She did agree to it. One reporter noted that it had taken several days for Davis and his assistant lawyer to convince her. My strong suspicion is that it was a sacrifice that she made in order to defend the marriage. Even after all these days and weeks of being essentially tortured and destroyed in this trial, she still believes that love will conquer all and that if she can win the case

• 35:49Speaker 04

  and the marriage is upheld, that Leonard will return to her and they can have the life that, you know, they had planned and talked about and written each other about. She still believes that.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  But in his closing arguments, Alice's lawyer said to the jury, "We are not going by our verdict to compel Leonard Rhinelander to live with Alice Rhinelander. You are only called here to decide whether at this juncture, these two should be separated on the ground of fraud." He added, "There is not a chance under heaven for these two human beings being brought together again. They could never live together after what has happened in this courtroom."

• 36:34Speaker 03

  The jury deliberated for 12 hours.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  From the start, 10 of them are in favor of voting for Alice. So 10 of them want to clear her of fraud and they want to uphold the marriage.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  Then, one juror, who had been for Leonard, changed his mind.

• 36:57Speaker 03

  One reporter wrote that persons outside the jury room heard loud argument and the banging of fists on tables.

• 37:06Speaker 04

  The last remaining juror holds out hour after hour. And people thought that this verdict would be decided pretty quickly. But it's getting up around 10 hours, 11 hours. I mean, everyone in the courtroom essentially goes home except the jury. And they're still there late into the night. Finally, they emerge from the jury room with a verdict that's put in a safe until it's revealed the next morning.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  In court the next day, the judge read the verdict aloud.

• 37:46Speaker 03

  Alice had won. Her marriage to Leonard would not be annulled.

• 37:51Speaker 04

  The jurors, several of them later, said, if we voted according to our hearts, we would have voted for Leonard. We don't believe in interracial marriage. But given the evidence we saw, we don't believe that he was defrauded. The black newspapers were really surprised and hailed it as, you know, one of the great moments in justice for, for black people in America.

• 38:26Speaker 04

  Racists thought it was a travesty and set about trying to get legislation passed that would outlaw interracial marriage in states that had never had anti-miscegenation laws.

• 38:46Speaker 03

  In an interview immediately after the trial, Alice was asked by a reporter, "Do you still love your husband?" She hesitated and then said, "I do and I don't." Someone said, "It was a beautiful love affair." And she said, "It certainly was."

• 39:08Speaker 03

  Leonard did end up getting a divorce.

• 39:12Speaker 04

  Yes, he, after several years, when the appeals were over, he moved to Nevada and he was hiding out there under a pseudonym, as he had for the two years since the trial. His family had forbade him from using the Rhinelander name. He built himself a shack in the woods near Reno and set up residency. And this was a thing people did, especially in New York, since it was hard to get a divorce. They would move to Nevada. I think it took just a couple of months to get legal residency and then you could get a divorce.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  When Alice finally agreed to the divorce, she received a settlement, a lump sum of $31,000 and $3,600 annually.

• 40:06Speaker 04

  And she promised that she would never use the Rhinelander name again.

• 40:14Speaker 03

  In 1936, six years after their divorce, Leonard Rhinelander died of pneumonia. He had reconciled with his father and was living with him when he died. Did Alice comment on his death?

• 40:30Speaker 04

  She immediately said, "He didn't die of pneumonia. He died of a broken heart."

• 40:38Speaker 04

  Still believing that he truly loved her. You know, she, she told reporters, "Why didn't they leave us alone? We, we were so happy together. We loved each other. I love him. I'm never going to love anybody else. I'm never going to marry anybody else." And that ended up being what she did.

• 41:06Speaker 03

  Alice lived to be 90 years old. She kept a picture of Leonard on her piano.

• 41:13Speaker 04

  And years before her death, she had purchased her own headstone. And the name she put on it was Alice J. Rhinelander.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  Criminal is created by Lauren Spoor and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajikko, Lilly Clark, and Lena Silison. This episode was fact-checked by Katie Cedarborg. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com, and you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com/newsletter. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal, This is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes.

• 42:16Speaker 03

  These are special episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spoor, talking about everything from how we make our episodes, to the crime stories that caught our attention that week, to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, go to patreon.com/criminal. We're on Facebook at This is Criminal, and Instagram and TikTok at Criminal underscore Podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.