In 1942 Australian-born actor Errol Flynn, famous throughout the world for his sexually charged masculinity, was accused of the statutory rape of two girls. The Los Angeles legal proceedings and trial that followed prompted intense media coverage. This paper examines the trial and the myriad of controversies it sparked. As well as focusing on the politics of gender that shaped the outcome of Flynn’s very public trial, this paper asks was bearing Flynn’s acquittal had on Hollywood’s culture of silence about the endemic exploitation of women so recently exposed by the #MeToo movement.

Patricia O’Brien is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of History at the Australian National University. She is the author of Tautai: Sāmoa, World History and the Life and Ta’isi O. F. Nelson (2017).The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (2006) and is co-editor with Joy Damousi of League of Nations: Histories, Legacies and Impact (2018). She has also written numerous other Pacific-focused works on gender, empire, violence and colonial cultural histories. Currently her work focuses on these themes relating to Australia, New Zealand, Sāmoa and New Guinea in the interwar period as well as the life of Errol Flynn.