Speaker: Patricia O'Brien, School of History, Australian National University – Academia.edu

Abstract: »This paper explores the layered identities of Australian-born actor Errol Flynn and its complication during World War II, juxtaposed against the progress of US and Australian forces in the Pacific. Despite being rejected for military service by the US early in the conflict, Flynn became a ‘virtual’ war hero through his film roles in the early 1940s, part of his self-fashioning as the epitome of a new kind of man exhibiting super-charged masculinity. In 1943, just after becoming a US citizen, Flynn was charged with the statutory rape of two girls and became the centre of high profile trial shattering his heroic film persona. Though ultimately acquitted, Flynn’s trial prompted massive media coverage rivaling that concerning the military conflict he had so recently personified in film. Moral outrage provoked by the accusations of carnal knowledge against Flynn was one aspect of a greater US struggle over morality at that time. It also became a personal turning point for Flynn who, confronted in the trial with external perspectives on his actions, was forced privately to renegotiate his identity along more conventional lines with questionable success.« (Source: Australian Historical Association)

Wikipedia: History of the Americas: History of the United States / History of the United States (1918–1945) | Sex and the law: Statutory rape / Errol Flynn, Rape in the United States