New Release on February 11th, 2025!
When Charlie Met Joan
The Tragedy of the Chaplin Trials and the Failings of American Law
“...the definitive account of the scandal that brought down one of the biggest stars in Hollywood history.”
The Great Charlie Chaplin, icon of Old Hollywood, jumped from the silent screen to the front pages of newspapers around the world – knocking aside news of World War II – with a series of salacious trials involving a young protégé named Joan Barry.
She claimed he was the father of her daughter. He claimed she was a gun-toting stalker. And J. Edgar Hoover, at the height of the Red Scare, saw the chance to claim the scalp of an outspoken liberal actor.
The result was Chaplin’s criminal prosecution and eventual exile from the U.S., an upheaval in the nation's paternity laws, and an early glimpse of powerful movie men behaving badly with star-struck women long before the #MeToo Movement.
about the author
Photo by Tess Steinkolk
Diane Kiesel recently retired after 25 years as a judge on the New York Supreme Court. While on the court she continued her career as a writer of non-fiction that began years before when she was a journalist in Washington, D.C. covering Congress and the Supreme Court for several California newspapers. She is the author of two editions of a textbook on Domestic Violence law (Domestic Violence: Law Policy and Practice) and an award-winning biography (Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, Civil Rights Pioneer, Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press, 2015). Her next book, When Charlie Met Joan: The Tragedy of the Chaplin Trials and the Failings of American Law, will be published in early 2025 by the University of Michigan Press. She is also an adjunct professor of law.
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other works
She Can Bring Us Home
Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, Civil Rights Pioneer
When Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee set off on her 1,000-mile drive from Washington, DC to the Mississippi Delta in the blazing summer of 1935, little did she know she would be heading into history. Continuing for seven summers, she and her all-volunteer team of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sisters delivered desperately needed health care to 15,000 sharecroppers and tenant farmers – one of the most successful public health programs the U.S. has ever known.
Domestic Violence: Law, Policy, and Practice
Second Edition
An accessible, readable, yet scholarly survey of domestic violence in history, literature, the media, popular culture, and law. It includes chapters on criminal, civil, matrimonial, family, and immigration law. Issues involving domestic violence and evidence, expert witnesses, ethics, court procedure and sentencing are also part of the text.