Read on to discover how Italian tenor Enrico Caruso was arrested for sexual assault in New York’s Central Park Zoo…
On the afternoon of 16 November 1906, a middle-aged woman was standing in the monkey house of the Central Park Zoo, New York, when suddenly she ‘felt the knuckles of a hand rub against me’. Turning, she saw a ‘foreign-looking man’ loitering behind her.
The woman (‘Mrs Hannah Graham’, the newspapers reported) screamed, fearing ‘there was no mistaking the insult intended’ – the foreigner was, in the language of the period, a ‘masher’, a sexual predator who ‘annoyed’ women by making unwanted advances on them in public places.
Events quickly escalated in a startling fashion. A plain-clothes policeman, James Caine, stepped forward to intervene in the encounter. Caine was no ordinary bystander, but in fact had 13 years’ experience on the Park Zoo beat, ‘watching for men who annoy women,’ as the New York Times put it. Caine was good at his job, apparently ‘arresting on an average five men every Sunday in the animal houses’.
Celebrity Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, arrested for ‘annoying women’
This time, though, he had truly hit the jackpot – the man whom he arrested that Friday was none other than the famous Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, in town for his first appearance of the season at the Metropolitan Opera. Escorted to a neighbourhood police station, the 33-year-old Caruso indignantly tried intimidating the desk sergeant with his celebrity status.
‘I am Enrico Caruso, tenor of the Metropolitan Opera House,’ he said. ‘I don’t care who you are,’ the hard-nosed sergeant retorted, before proceeding to charge the hapless singer, who was dragged weeping to a holding cell.
When Heinrich Conried, director of the Met, eventually bailed Caruso, he too was quick to play the celebrity card in his star tenor’s defence. ‘A man like Caruso, of the highest honour and dignity, could not have done such a thing,’ Conried argued, before adding – rather ill-advisedly – that Caruso, ‘if he desired it, could have had the acquaintance of many fine women in this country’.
Enrico Caruso appears in court, accused of groping
Conried’s argument did not impress the New York Police Department. Six days later, Caruso appeared in court to answer what had now become a longer list of charges, including at least two other women allegedly touched in the monkey house.
Officer Caine also claimed that he had spotted Caruso ‘several times in the animal houses last winter, trailing women and annoying them as he did on Friday’. Although the tenor’s hands seemed innocuously buried in his pockets, subsequent examination of his overcoat had, it seemed, revealed a secret slit through which he was able to do his groping.
‘He smiled and twirled his moustache’
Caruso affected nonchalance in court, smiling, twirling his moustache and seeming ‘somewhat blasé’. Under questioning, he alleged that Mrs Graham had smiled at him ‘in such a way that I took her for a doubtful character’.
But his deflection of blame – victim shaming, we would now call it – proved unimpressive. The following day he was found guilty of ‘annoying women in the Central Park Zoo’ and given the maximum fine of $10. Caruso did not attend court for the verdict.
Erico Caruso… continued acclaim
‘Almost unanimous approbation’ nonetheless greeted the tenor when he appeared at the Met five days later in Puccini’s La bohème, with just a few hisses signalling disapproval of the tenor’s sex-pest conviction.
He continued to sing to great acclaim at the Met, making 863 appearances in total, until just months before he died at the age of 48 in 1921. Many of his fans doubted the reliability of his conviction, some tried to brush over it, and others simply did not care.