Interesting article.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14640719

Although the repeated court cases finished him as a Box Office Star he continued to work behind the camera. However he made powerful enemies include Will Hays, the man behind the Hays Code. For whatever reason Hays had an obsession with Arbuckle and would not let up. In addition the IRS more or less cleaned out Arbuckle and forced him to take on any work he could get.

He was also a hopeless Drunkard and this accelerated his fate.

As regards the original case, it was very much the sort of prurient media coverage that we are so familiar with today. The so-called moral panic was accompanied by salacious revelations. The " rape with a bottle" myth was so ingrained in popular culture that i remember hearing it as a kid in the 1960's!

However a lot of the modern books on the subject cement the idea that the victim was suffering from an infection and probably would have survived with competent medical assistance.

A tale of moral outrage that ruined a nice guy.

Read about this,he was indeed a press victim.
Nowadays they'd make a documentary and screen his downward spiral on MTV!

an amazing tale and no wonder he was an alcoholic !

I confess I always thought he was found guilty and the bottle story was true.

Don't forget the studio bosses were then all powerful and thuggish which is why they also hated Chaplin as his own boss.

Why hasn't here been a tele-movie ??.. amazing story. Arbuckle deserves to have his reputation restored.

It's a pretty well-known story. If his work was actually better than it actually is, and not in grainy black and white, I'm sure there would be mainstream documentaries on the subject. It would be easier to cover it in a more general documentary on how Hollywood sacrificed so many of its inhabitants when it suited the studios (e.g. Rory Calhoun in exchange for protecting Rock Hudson's image).