The Foat Case
Foreman, Ginny Foat with Laura
The Foat Case NEVER GUILTY, NEVER FREE by Ginny Foat with Laura Foreman Random House. 307 pp. $17.95. There are at least two significant ways to assess Ginny Foat's book about her erratic life...
...My optimistic assessment is that the effect is mainly positive...
...How might this book affect readers' attitudes toward feminism...
...Freed, she returned to work even more diligently for NOW and the losing ERA battle...
...Finally she was vindicated and freed by the courts...
...This was reduced to a third-degree burglary charge following his guilty plea...
...as to the second, we can make only an educated guess, affected by our own individual reactions...
...It was apparently following this conflict with her former supporter and friend Shelly Mandell that Mandell phoned Louisiana, reviving the case which had been lying dormant...
...but because of his earlier manslaughter conviction he, as a "predicate felon," could face a long prison term...
...Neither question can be answered with complete accuracy or adequacy, since we have only Foat's word for the first, filtered through her able coauthor Laura Foreman...
...While the Nevada case was dismissed for lack of corroborating evidence after many nightmarish months for Foat, the Louisiana case still hung over her—but it was left in limbo...
...How much of this tale was dramatized and perhaps sanitized by coauthor Laura Foreman...
...All of this rings true, yet small reservations remain...
...Second, what is its effect on readers' perceptions of feminism and the women's movement...
...Soon after, he told police he wanted to talk about some murders...
...Ann Morrissett Davidon (Ann Morrissett Davidon is a free-lance writer and critic...
...now her chance encounters with the National Organization for Women revived that spark...
...Yet Ginny Foat's case is important enough to make the attempt on both counts...
...Breaking away at last BOOKS and redeemed as Ginny Foat, able businesswoman and feminist politico, she is suddenly struck down by the ghostly demon of her past...
...Unfortunately, there was no effective movement to raise men's consciousness that could reach Jack Sidote in time, to rescue him from the macho myths and Rambo mayhem that may finally do us all in...
...After Sidote had served a prison term for manslaughter—during which Foat gradually liberated herself from him psychologically and finally legally—he threatened her with revenge, holding her to blame for all his troubles as he had done throughout their sleazy marriage...
...When he tried to strangle her (the last of his many physical abuses), she fled for her life, at last realizing that "no woman should have to stay with a man who needed to hurt, or even to kill, to prove himself...
...She rose to the presidency of California NOW, but declined to run for the national presidency in 1982 despite the urging of friends...
...She decided to back a woman she thought "better for the job," and to run instead for one of the vice presidential posts...
...But rumors about the old murder charges began to circulate, and Ginny Foat was not elected...
...Was Ginny Foat's power in NOW as benign as it is presented...
...Dramatically arrested in January 1983 as she was taking a NOW colleague to the airport, Ginny Foat was put through the highly publicized trial which forced her to suffer excruciating exposures of her pitiful past...
...Still, as president of California NOW she retained much clout, which—according to her account—she compromised by approving a slate of delegates she did not really agree with for the 1983 California Democratic Convention...
...There are at least two significant ways to assess Ginny Foat's book about her erratic life and notorious murder trial...
...Feminists who may have felt puzzled by or unsympathetic toward Foat's abject and dismal past may gain more compassionate understanding, and readers who haven't yet comprehended or committed themselves to a clear position on feminism might be persuaded to do so...
...First, does it seem to be honest and complete in its essentials...
...She joined NOW with a passion, soon finding that she could be as successful in organizational work as she was in the catering business she had been developing...
...It had also begun to dawn on her that she might be a worthwhile and capable person on her own, Earlier, brief contacts with the civil rights movement had given her a glimmer of the possibility of personally contributing to social change...
...It was then that he implicated Ginny Foat in two murders which he alleged they had committed together in Nevada and Louisiana...
...Certainly the book is a "good read," passionate but rational in its rendering of the life of Virginia Galuzzo, the obedient little Catholic girl who went astray—torn by her family's, particularly her father's, traditional expectations and contradictory ambitions for her—to become a failed housewife, a mother who gave up her illegitimate infant in shame and secrecy, and finally the battered slave of sadistic, psychotic Jack Sidote...
...Adrift in the East while Foat renewed her life in California, Sidote was charged in 1973 with assault and burglary...
...While the case dragged on in New York courts, Sidote was in and out of hospitals for alcoholism, and early in 1977 he made a serious suicide attempt...
...If, as she says in the book, she doesn't remember all that happened when she was with Sidote, then isn't it possible she was at least a passive accomplice to his crimes...
Vol. 50 • February 1986 • No. 2
