Officers in early New York didn’t just police the city’s vice economy; they profited from it. But when America’s first professional vice fighter Anthony Comstock strong-arms the NYPD into enforcing his vision of morality, he also transformed how and what we police. 

From Wondery, Crooked Media and PushBlack.

Empire City is made with a commitment to ensure the stories of those who were and are still  impacted by the NYPD are always part of the stories we tell ourselves about the police, about America, and about democracy.

Voices & References:

Amy Werbel https://www.fitnyc.edu/creative-nexus/faculty/directory/werbel-amy.php

Bill Williams, descendant of Clubber Williams

Jennifer Wright https://www.jenashleywright.com/

Lust On Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock https://www.amazon.com/Lust-Trial-Censorship-American-Obscenity/dp/0231175221

Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York’s Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist

https://www.amazon.com/Madame-Restell-Resurrection-Fabulous-Abortionist/dp/0306826798

TRANSCRIPT

Chenjerai Kumanyika: As a parent, I’ve noticed that the world is wild and it resists our attempts to impose order on it. Weeds invade the garden, sprout their wings and choke the tomatoes. Mice build nests in the walls of bedrooms. Children color recklessly outside the lines. Teenagers fight against the labels we give them in the safety we’re training them for because they’re still young enough to remember that they’re as nameless as flowers. And each of us craves the sweet taste of things that we’re not supposed to want. The process of trying to take control of this chaos starts in our minds, in our homes and schools. How we’re taught to police each other and the world around us. When I was a kid, I remember coming across people and messages that were trying to organize my world into strict categories. Teachers rolled old televisions into classrooms with goofy public service videos that would educate us about what to watch out for.

[clip of PSA]: Hello there.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: They would warn us about the dangerous things like cavities or drugs.

[clip of PSA]: A flood tide of filth is engulfing our country in the form of newsstand obscenity and is threatening to pervert an entire generation of our American children.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Or in this case, the dangers of porn. The narrator is a white man standing in a classroom with an American flag hanging from a pole.

[clip of PSA]: Never in the history of the world have the merchants of obscenity had available to them the modern facilities for disseminating this bill.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: It didn’t start with the Internet, folks. Even back in this dude’s day, it wasn’t hard for people to get their hands on porn. And this film has lots of examples, pictures of naked people that we should all be outraged about. But don’t worry. The eyes and nipples have been redacted with black stripes to protect us.

[clip of PSA]: And in this day especially, we must seek to deliver ourselves from this twisting, torturing evil.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And as the narrator explains why we should all be so scared of this, I feel like I’m starting to get a sense of what’s really being policed.

[clip of PSA]: He is even enticed to enter the world of homosexuals, lesbians, sadists, masochists.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And why he’s so afraid of it.

[clip of PSA]: This weakens our resistance to the onslaught of the Communist masters of deceit.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Ah, yes, Communism. But it’s not just the porn to Communist Party pipeline sex.

[clip of PSA]: Sex Mad magazines are helping to create criminals faster than we can build jails to house them.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: When I was younger, I used to just tune this kind of stuff out. But reflecting on it now, what fascinates me is his solution.

[clip of PSA]: The law is our weapon.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: He wants to get the police involved.

[clip of PSA]: And you and I have a constitutional guarantee to police protection of our welfare.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: But what’s interesting is that for him, policing doesn’t start with police departments. It starts with us recognizing the seeds of evil in our own desires. And he’s recruiting us to surveil each other. If you see something, say something.

[clip of PSA]: Report objectionable material to the police. Every arrest and prosecution, every conviction is a step in the education of the public to the solution of the problem.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And he really wants you to know that the law is on your side when you do.

[clip of PSA]: We have a constitutional guarantee of protection against obscenity.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: The narrator is right about that part. There is a law that focuses directly on obscenity. And the guy that created that law sounded a lot like him. He started his crusade all the way back in the 19th century. But back then, the police were not on his side. In fact, they were one of his biggest obstacles. So to win his battle, America’s first professional base fighter would have to completely redefine what policing even is.

[clip of PSA]: Oh God deliver us Americans, from evil.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: From Wondery and Crooked Media. I’m Chenjerai Kumanyika and this is Empire City. Episode Five. The Moral Crusade. If your idea of fun is paying for sexy time then 19th century New York might have been the place for you. After the Civil War, New York’s population has ballooned to over a million people for the first time. And with that explosion of people, there’s also an explosion of sex work. All kinds of folks are selling sex either as their main job or as a side hustle. There’s around 600 brothels and late night spots spread throughout lower Manhattan. Sex is everywhere.

Amy Werbel: There is a brothel that is operating in plain sight with its sex workers hanging out the windows.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Amy Werbel, an expert on this moment in New York history, says that inside that brothel, men are paying $5 each for a particular kind of show.

Amy Werbel: And it was called the busy fleas. Women would strip each other naked. They would kiss and lick each other. And then the men could choose one busy flea to take upstairs. Or you could pay more and you could take more than one busy flea upstairs.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Brothels like these also offer a treasure trove of illicit delights porn, sex toys, homemade aphrodisiacs. And after the invention of the phonograph, dirty records. Now some of these dirty records of poems and songs about sex with names like The Virtues of Raw Oysters, which starts with the words, I’m dying for skin. [clip of record] But there are also records about other things that respectable people aren’t supposed to talk about. And soliloquy like this version of the famous soliloquy from Hamlet, but rewritten to be about syphilis. He starts out to pee and not to pee. That is the question. [clip of record] So people are in this brothel doing their thing, working, playing, listening to the latest hit about venereal disease when suddenly there’s an unusually loud knock on the door. Now, if I was in this situation, I might be panicking like, is this the police? And the madam opens the door. Standing in front of her is a bulldog of a man with big mutton chops. And he’s frowning. The man steps inside instead of choosing a woman. He pulls out a notepad.

Amy Werbel: He meticulously documents the show. He stays to see the entire thing and writes about every horrible thing that he saw.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: The man’s name is Anthony Comstock, and he’s no cop.

Amy Werbel: Anthony comes up. He was like a cartoon caricature of an evangelical vice fighter. And he called himself a soldier of the cross.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Comstock is determined to rescue as many people as he can from the dangers of sexual pleasure, whether they want to be rescued or not. He’s horrified at the unapologetic indulgence in front of him. And his first thought might have been to go to the police. But at this brothel, that’s not going to work.

Amy Werbel: Well, the police are regular customers.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: The brothel is right behind the 15th police precinct. And when Comstock stepped in, there was probably a cop right next to him getting a lap dance. They’re all over the place. And a lot of people will probably stop their crusade right there once they realize they’ll be going up against a whole lot of horny, violent police officers. But Comstock is just getting started and to get why this guy isn’t about to back down. You got to understand how he grew up.

Amy Werbel: Comstock grows up believing that God is constantly watching you. If a person reads even one illicit book or sees one pornographic image, that they would carry the sin of that with them forever.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Comstock was raised in a small religious town in Connecticut that was founded by Puritans, and that’s probably where he learns that if he wants to enter those sweet pearly gates, he has to stay on the straight and narrow.

Amy Werbel: Any aberration from a life of devotion to God is going to land you in the fires of hell. Quite literally. He believes in a hell where the serpents and winged demons and fire.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Comstock has big fundamentalist energy. He’s fueled by religious fervor, and according to his diaries, by his own shame and guilt.

Amy Werbel: He writes about probably masturbating. He is 18 years old and he keeps writing. I sinned again and I, you know, so upset with myself and I need to try harder.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Comstock felt that he had failed God.

Amy Werbel: And he thought that if he could clean up vice, he could make up for his own sins in the eyes of God and be allowed to enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: But for the time being, he was stuck here on Earth, forced to participate in worldly struggles. He fought in the Civil War, but the other soldiers made fun of him for being religious and prude. So when he got out.

Amy Werbel: He decided that he would be a soldier for the Lord and he would go and fight the fiercest battle one could possibly wage.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: A holy war. He had never been to New York City before, but he had heard about all the wicked pleasures on offer here. And when he gets here, he sees it with his own eyes. Smut. Prostitution. Sex for sale everywhere. And it’s not just that people are paying for sex. Something even deeper and more instinctual sets him off.

Amy Werbel: He sees the whole system of arousal as the problem. Like if you could get rid of arousal, then you could get rid of sex outside of marriage.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: So he starts asking around to find someone, anyone to join his crusade.

Amy Werbel: He gets a tip from this police officer that the gentlemen who are the trustees of the Young Men’s Christian Association.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Better known as the YMCA.

Amy Werbel: Have also been concerned about the flood of pornography in New York City.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: I always thought of the YMCA as the people who made the only gym in New York that I can almost afford. And of course, the namesake of a disco classic. What I didn’t know was that during Comstock’s time, the YMCA is a pretty powerful and rich evangelical group. They want to promote Christian values, and they have plenty of that Gilded Age money to do it. So Comstock writes a letter to one of the YMCA bigwigs inviting them to join him in cleaning up the city. And the next day, one of the most powerful people in the YMCA actually shows up at the department store where Comstock works.

Amy Werbel: And says, You’re the person we need.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And so they cut a deal. They’ll unleash Comstock in New York City to hunt down porn anywhere he can find it.

Amy Werbel: We’ll pay you three times your salary. You can quit your job as a clerk. And from that moment, Comstock becomes America’s first professional vice fighter.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Comstock gets to work. He starts spending his nights wandering the streets, seeking out the filthiest, most godless displays of moral turpitude. That’s when he visits that brothel on Green Street and dozens of others. By the time Comstock shows up, the NYPD see sex work as a part of city life that’s not going away. One early police captain is recorded saying that as long as the brothels aren’t bothering anyone, they quote, “It would be better for them to remain than to be removed to a place where they would disturb the public.” So since the police don’t really care. Comstock goes above the police department directly to the district attorney.

Amy Werbel: He goes to the D.A. and he says, You have to do something about this. And then the D.A. is like, Yeah, yeah, sure, I’ll do something about it.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: But the D.A. doesn’t do anything about it. He sends the cops to make a few small arrests of sex workers for show and then lets everybody off.

Amy Werbel: And Comstock is just absolutely outraged.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: You see the problem isn’t that the police don’t see sex work as a crime or even that they’re customers because actually the police aren’t just customers.

Amy Werbel: The brothel madam is just paying the police to protect. They’re basically like a protection service for the brothel.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: They’re making money from the brothel.

Amy Werbel: Absolutely.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: They are participating in it.

Amy Werbel: Absolutely. It’s just part of the ecosystem of sex work in New York City in the 1860s and 1870s.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: This racket was growing all over New York. Comstock is up against a machine, an increasingly violent machine. And if he’s going to save the city from sex and gambling, he isn’t just going to have to go around the NYPD. He’s going to have to find a way to force the police to join his religious agenda. Yeah. It just heats up and just absorbs.

Bill Williams: Okay. I got something for you guys to look at, too.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Wow. It’s the summer of 2023, and I’m sitting inside a house in New Jersey looking at brass knuckles from the 19th century. They look old, brown and thinner than I expected, but they look sharp. Even imagining being punched with these makes me wince.

Bill Williams: Those are his brass knuckles.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: What’s it like to hold those in your hand?

Bill Williams: Quite awesome.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: What do you feel?

Bill Williams: They fit my fingers perfectly.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: The fingers belong to a man named Bill Williams. But those brass knuckles were worn by his great grandfather, Alexander S. Williams, one of the most infamous officers in the history of the NYPD.

Bill Williams: He’d be talking and there’d be a trouble. He probably would slip em on and nobody would notice it and [sound effect] right down you go. Maybe break a cheekbone too.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Right around the same time Anthony Comstock descended on New York. Alexander Williams got transferred to a neighborhood called the Tenderloin. It was a hotbed of brothels and gambling. And by the time he got there, Williams had already built up a legendary reputation for intimidation and violence. According to one account, just two days after he’s assigned to patrol the new jurisdiction, Williams hunts down the two toughest characters in the neighborhood. When he finds them, he raises his club and beats them both unconscious. Then he picks one of them up and hurls them through the plate glass window of a saloon and then does the same thing to the other guy. This is how Williams develops the self-explanatory nickname Clubber.

Bill Williams: He was not afraid of anybody. He could probably, you know, dominate people with his will because he was a cop. And he kind of figured, Well, I’m a cop, so who’s going to mess with me?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: These days, it’s pretty standard to call police law enforcement, but that’s not quite how Clubber Williams sees his job. For him, the rule books don’t matter. He even claimed there’s more law in the end of a nightstick than in a Supreme Court decision. In his new assignment in the Tenderloin, Clubber starts to make the rules as he sees fit. Or to put it more accurately, as it fits his bank account. In fact, Clubber William coins the neighborhood’s nickname while he’s talking about how much money he stands to make from bribes. He says that for most of his early days on the police force, he’s been poor eating chuck steak. But with the number of bribes he stands to make, he says, Now I’m about to have a bit of Tenderloin. Here’s one way it worked. A few days after you opened the doors to a new brothel or saloon, you get a visit from a police officer like Williams, but you ask for an initiation fee, maybe something equivalent to 100 bucks or 200 bucks, or maybe even 500 bucks. Then every month, the police come back for more. If you don’t pay, they arrest you, take you to jail. The NYPD is basically become extortionists, pimps in uniform, and it’s making cops like Williams a lot of money.

Bill Williams: He liked the good things in life. You know, he liked to eat well. Sure, He had like, you know, drank well, he went to nice restaurants. He probably threw good parties.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Bill Williams says that part of Clubber’s legacy is well known in the family.

Bill Williams: He had a couple of yachts. His wife was Eleanor. They call them the Eleanor’s, I believe. He eventually had four of them. You know, Eleanor One. Eleanor Two, Eleanor Three, Eleanor Four.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: In fact, Williams’ control and exploitation of the vice industry become so legendary in New York. Two Black composers named Bob Cole and Billy Johnson recorded a song ridiculing him called Czar of the Tenderloin. [clip of song]  Clubber Williams is an example of all the moral indecency and corruption the Comstock wants to put a stop to. If Comstock is going to take on Clubber Williams and his fellow officers to save all these sinful souls. He’s going to need real power. So he goes over the heads of the police chief and the district attorney and the mayor all the way to the federal government.

Amy Werbel: This is actually a really important moment in American history that almost nobody knows about. They send Comstock to Washington, D.C. to lobby for the first federal law, which will make the circulation of obscenity illegal.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: In 1873, Comstock goes to D.C. He may have been just one guy, but he represented a growing movement of evangelical reformers trying to clean up America’s cities. And Comstock and his allies are able to convince Congress to pass the Comstock Act, a federal law that’s still on the books today. The Comstock Act is the first major federal anti obscenity law in American history. It makes it illegal to send, quote, “Obscene, lewd or lascivious, immoral or indecent materials through the U.S. mail.” The Comstock Act defines obscenity so broadly that it can be used to go after not just people making pornography, but sex workers, brothel owners, activists, journalists and writers.

Amy Werbel: This is the first time that obscenity becomes illegal in federal law with a mechanism for enforcement. So now it is illegal to send obscenity through the U.S. mail. And Comstock is appointed an inspector for the United States Postal Service.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: As an inspector. Comstock isn’t a cop with the NYPD. He’s actually even more influential. He’s a federal inspector with national authority. He’s even allowed to carry a weapon. And he makes it clear that public enemy number one is dildos. I mean, like, not just dildos, but really anything he considers pornographic. Some of his financial backers at the YMCA are like, Wait, is this what we signed up for?

Amy Werbel: The leadership of the YMCA says, You know what? This isn’t really the direction we want to go. We want to build gymnasiums. We want to have libraries. We want to offer all kinds of healthy entertainments for young men to keep them from getting into trouble.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: But this doesn’t stop Comstock. In fact, it presents a new opportunity. Comstock and a few of his backers create a new organization called the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.

Amy Werbel: And it gets incorporated by the New York State legislature. And the Incorporation Act says that one half of all of the fines that are collected will go to the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. And so when someone gets fined $500 for producing, you know, a photograph of a nude woman, $250 goes to the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: So it sounds like there’s a real incentive there to find stuff that goes beyond any kind of ethics or morals. There’s an economic incentive. Is that right?

Amy Werbel: It’s a racket. You know, the more porn he finds, the more money they have to find porn.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: The same way the NYPD has a financial stake in keeping the sex trade going. Comstock and his society now have a financial stake in destroying it. But Comstock has an advantage because of that incorporation act. The police are now legally required to make arrests whenever Comstock orders them to. With Comstock at the wheel. Then why PD is now forced to take on Vice. The cops start confiscating enormous quantities of porn and other sexual objects.

Amy Werbel: He writes such meticulous records. Every book he burned, he weighed. So he’s constantly recording how many pounds of pornographic books he’s burned, how many photographs, how many dildos he’s sent to the incinerator in New Jersey. And all of this is listed. And I feel like who are these account books for? And I thought, you know, they’re really kind of for God.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Shit is getting weird. Under Comstock’s leadership, the NYPD helps him to seize and destroy 134,000 pounds of books, 190,000 dirty photos, 130,000 newspapers, 20,000 letters and 60,000 rubber sex toys. It’s hard for me to imagine a dude like Comstock forcing a thug like Clubber Williams to seize dildos. And let’s be real Clubber’s not going to do anything he doesn’t want to do. Clubber ignores Comstock and let’s a whole stretch of Sixth Avenue run like it’s Vegas with gambling houses all up and down the Strip. But on the whole, Comstock gets better and better at weaponizing the NYPD. And when police try to say no to Comstock, he says, look, I get that you’re police, but I’m the Feds, you got to fall in line.

Amy Werbel: The police really hated Anthony Comstock. He was a snitch. You know, he was sort of forcing them to take on cases they may not have thought were important.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And it’s not all smut mags and sex toys. Comstock forces the police to raid brothels, saloons and even theaters where someone might be in the balcony with an escort getting what they paid for. In one case, Comstock uses the NYPD to shut down a play. Later, when the producers were brought into court.

Amy Werbel: A police officer shows up as a witness for the defense, saying that, you know, this this theatrical production was a lot of fun. I took my family to it several times. So I made the arrest. But I don’t think these people are really guilty of anything.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Even the police start to wonder, where will this end? But Comstock is about to catapult his campaign to a whole other level when he focuses all of his cunning and federal authority on a new enemy women who are determined to make their own reproductive choices. [music plays] After successfully bending the police to his will. Comstock’s emboldened, he’s ready to expand beyond pornographers and brothel keepers. Now he’s setting his sights on abortion providers.

Jennifer Wright: Abortion has always been part of America’s history. The notion that this is something people didn’t do in the past is very, very wrong.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Author Jennifer Wright says the practice of abortion goes far beyond American and even European history.

Jennifer Wright: I promise you, there has never been a society in history without abortion.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And mid-19th century America is no exception. Abortion is considered a folk practice and it’s not heavily policed. If you open the Herald in the early days of sensationalistic journalism, you’d also see the early days of sensationalistic advertising. You’d find a motley crew of exaggerated personalities selling their various potions and wares, making all kinds of outrageous claims. And alongside ads for carriage horses and tooth powders. You’d see listed Madame Restell, female physician.

Jennifer Wright: Madame Restell spent a fortune on advertising.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: The mixtures were crude and dangerous by modern medical standards that were made of things like turpentine and Tansy oil.

Jennifer Wright: This was a time where you could smash any herbs you wanted into a pill and say, okay, this will help with your insomnia, this will help with your headaches. This will help with your heartburn.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: But Restell’s pills effectively ended pregnancy.

Jennifer Wright: And she realized that there was a massive demand for them very quickly. As soon as women started taking these and finding that they were effective.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: She opens an office on Greenwich Street and starts providing surgical abortions. And she adds a boarding house where women can recuperate.

Jennifer Wright: Madame Restell paid really close attention to her patients after they’d had abortions. She would sleep in the same bed with them to make sure that they weren’t running a fever. She would bring them soup and meal three times a day.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And in under a decade, Restell becomes a millionaire.

Jennifer Wright: As soon as Madame Restell started making money. She was riding through town in a gorgeous carriage. She was covered in diamonds. She wore beautiful clothing.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: She starts throwing extravagant parties and riding down Fifth Avenue, decked out in silk and jewels. But she does have haters, moralists and preachers, including the archbishop of New York.

Jennifer Wright: And around the time that he was getting ready to buy plot of land and build his house on it. He said something unpleasant about Madame Restell in one of his sermons. Madame Restell was outraged and she outbid him by over $100,000 for this plot of land.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Wow.

Jennifer Wright: And she built her mansion upon it.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: She really did not give any fucks.

Jennifer Wright: She never gave a fuck about anything.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: The mansion she builds is four stories tall in the style of the Italian Renaissance, with ornate marble columns and a line of mahogany stables along 52nd Street. On the bottom floor, Madame Restell keeps her office, and throughout the day, you see people going in and out, often carrying bottles of pills and chemicals. Always keeping an eye out for the police. By the time Restell becomes famous, new laws had made abortion a minor crime if it’s performed before the quickening. The first time a mother can feel a baby kicking, usually around four months into pregnancy.

Jennifer Wright: Abortion before quickening was still just a misdemeanor. It was never punishable by more than a year in jail if you performed one. And the vast majority of the time, you were just going to be punished with a fine. And the fine would probably be something like $100. And Madame Restell was charging patients up to $100. So it wasn’t considered a terribly serious offense.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: But even though the police mostly leave her alone. Madam Restell’s patients become a target for the NYPD.

Jennifer Wright: There was a police stationed outside of Madame Restell’s mansion for a while, and newspapers said that’s a very good thing for the policeman because he is going to get so many bribes from people going in and out of that mansion.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: As usual, under the guise of protecting women and children, the police are just finding a way to line their pockets. The NYPD has their hands in all kinds of illegal businesses extorting Restell’s patients is just a way for them to add abortion to the list of things they can profit from. And Madame Restell knows exactly what they’re up to.

Jennifer Wright: She despised the police. She hated them because she saw a lot of them as corrupt. When people come to visit me. They have to bring a tip for the police officer.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: But that’s how the NYPD, the regular police are moving.

Jennifer Wright: Everything changes with Anthony Comstock.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: This is a dude who literally weighs the dildos he confiscates. How do you think he’s going to feel about Restell?

Jennifer Wright: Madame Restell flies in the face of everything Anthony Comstock believes.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Comstock hates abortion. He believes that childbearing is a woman’s highest possible purpose. And so he sets out to eliminate the obscenity of abortion in New York City.

Jennifer Wright: Now, what’s considered obscene that’s anything Anthony Comstock says is obscene. So that extends to any pictures of nudes, but it also extends to any information about abortion or certainly sending any birth control pills through the mail or providing anyone with information on how they might find an abortionist in their city or how they might perform an abortion upon themselves.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Madame Restell keeps providing abortions, but she’s forced to do a work more discreetly. She stops using the kind of ad she printed at the beginning of her career, because now those ads will get her thrown in jail. And that’s not all because of Comstock. The Comstock Act plays a huge part, but there’s a broader cultural shift happening as well. You can see it in the way newspapers change how they write about her.

Jennifer Wright: When Madame Restell first started being written about they write about how she’s so pretty, she’s so charming to talk to. She has this really interesting philosophy about people having less children. And then as abortion becomes more taboo, it shifts. And then she starts getting written about as this horrible demon with no respect for the laws of marriage. Then it becomes Mademoiselle is trying to destroy society as we know it, and she has to be ideally burned at the stake, but at least incarcerated.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: The papers start calling her the wickedest woman in New York. Anthony Comstock is determine to stop her. So he comes up with the plan. One night in 1878, Restell hears a knock on her door. She doesn’t recognize the man standing in front of her, but welcomes him into a waiting room. It’s Comstock in a disguise.

Jennifer Wright: Anthony Comstock concocts a story that he has a lady friend who is pregnant and she needs not to meet. She was becoming very old, and this pregnancy might kill her. And Madame Restell gives the pills to Anthony Comstock. She says these aren’t infallible. But have your lady friend take them. If they haven’t worked by later in the week, you bring her back to me and then we’ll proceed from there.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: With that, Comstock walks out the door. Because Restell had provided him with, quote, “obscene information.” He now has the power to put her in jail.

Jennifer Wright: I think this was the highlight of Anthony Comstock’s life [laughs] I think. I think he would have felt like this was a magnificent coup. And maybe he thought like, this is going to be the thing that really shows New York high society that they have to respect me because I can go for the richest person in town.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: The next day. Comstock returns to Madame Restell’s office with the police. They tell her she’s under arrest. Restell says fine, but there’s something I need to do before we leave.

Jennifer Wright: She tells him that she’s going to need to have a lovely oyster lunch first. And she makes them sit and wait while she just delicately eats oysters one by one until she’s ready to go.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Restell is arrested. The judge sets her bail at $10,000. She pays it and goes home. And it’s pretty clear that she’s about to be made an example of. It’s possible she’ll be in prison for years, but that’s not what happens, because on April 1st, 1878, a chambermaid finds her nude body in the bathtub with her throat cut. Her obituary in the New York Times reads, End of a criminal life. Most historians have gone with the coroner’s theory that Madame Restell’s death was a suicide. But what if it was murder? Hear me out. We know she had enemies. The reporting is inconsistent. The New York Times reports that the tub was filled with blood. But the New York Tribune says that there was no blood in the water it had washed away. Reports also say that her house had a burglar alarm. And when the alarm was examined, it was found that the bells had been disconnected. But for me, the thing that seems most shaky about the idea that Madame Restell committed suicide is the nature of the alleged suicide itself. In recent years, one coroner put it this way. Women do not cut their throats when they commit suicide, and they certainly never commit suicide naked. That’s what told me this was a homicide. Of course, there’s no way to know for sure what happened. But whether Madame Restell’s death was a suicide or a murder, it didn’t stop women in New York from continuing to provide abortions. Ten days after Madame Restell’s apparent suicide, the police arrest another woman for providing an abortion. The papers describe her as a disciple of Restell. And the cop that arrests her is Clubber Williams. Comstock uses the larger cultural shift to force cops to target abortion providers and more of the sex and gambling houses that had inspired his crusade. But for the most part, those arrested just for show. Unwittingly, Comstock actually makes smut more fashionable saloons and concert halls more popular. Theater producers actively try to get Comstock to denounce their shows as obscene so they can say, Come see the show Anthony Comstock doesn’t want you to see. And that allows Clubber Williams and his fellow officers to extort even more money from the underground economy. Comstock tries to take Williams down, testifying against him in front of a grand jury in 1883. He takes the stand and presents what seems like damning evidence proof that Clubber knew about various illicit establishments throughout the city and chose to do nothing. But not only is Clubber not disciplined, he’s promoted and eventually he rises to the rank of police inspector. When I look back at how all that has played out, I’m trying to understand who was actually protected by any of this. In some ways, the NYPD were more honest about that than Comstock. For them all, this policing wasn’t about religion or saving the city from sin. It was about making sure that they could dip their beaks in and profit wherever sin was happening. And after all the porn raids and federal policies, corrupt cops like Williams and moral crusaders like Comstock end up more powerful. But sex workers, sex educators, people who provide abortions and the women who need them all wind up in the crosshairs.

Jennifer Wright: Women were still having abortions, but they couldn’t go to anyone for help. They couldn’t even read about how you could effectively perform an abortion on yourself. So you saw so many women just throwing themselves downstairs using any spiky objects they could find, drinking poison, doing anything they could to try to induce an abortion. And and it is truly, truly horrifying. Anthony Comstock has the blood of thousands of women on his hands.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: For an all too brief period between 1973 and 2022. There was some level of federal protection for women seeking abortions and for abortion providers. But since Roe v. Wade was overturned, states have continued to outlaw sending abortion medication and information to the mail, bringing renewed concern about the Comstock Act. Living in a society where our bodies our pleasures and even our survival are constantly surveilled and legislated. Things that were always playing defense while the powerful make a mockery of ethics and justice, we are forced to contort ourselves to fit inside and between boundaries that never made sense and justify the choices we make about our own lives. With so many folks who want to see just once this for those who police us to have to explain their behavior, for them to be put on the stand while we watch and judge. That’s next time on Empire City.  Empire City is a production of Wondery and Crooked Media. I’m your host and executive producer Chenjerai Kumanyika. For Crooked Media. Our senior producer is Peter Bresnan. Our managing producer is Leo Duran. Our senior story editor is Diane Hodson. Our producer is Sam Riddell. Boen Wang and Sydney Rapp are our associate producers. Sound design, mixing and original score by Axel Kacoutié. Our historical consultant and fact, checker is History Studios. Our voice actor is Demetrius Noble for Wondery. Our senior producer is Mandi Gorenstein. Our senior story editor is Phyllis Fletcher. Our coordinating producer is Myrriah Gossett. The executive producer of PushBlack is Lilly Workneh. Executive producers at Crooked Media are Sarah Geismer, Katie Long, Tommy Vietor and Diane Hodson. Executive producers at Wondery are N’Jeri Eaton, George Lavender, Marshall Lewy, and Jen Sargent.