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  FAMOUS TRIALS LITE SERIES



Cover of Confidential's July 1957 issue and star prosecution witness, Howard Rushmore, testifying in the 1957 criminal libel case against the magazine.  
The Confidential Magazine Trial (1957)
by Douglas O. Linder (2010)
Thomas Wolfe called Confidential (1952-58) "the most scandalous scandal magazine in the history of the world."  Today, that statement may no longer be true, but in the relatively tame decade of the 1950s, Confidential went where no publication had gone before in exposing to a curious public the private lives of celebrities.  In so doing, the magazine earned the wrath of powerful Hollywood figures who persuaded California's attorney general to file an array of criminal charges that, it was hoped, would silence Confidential and its flamboyant publisher, Robert Harrison....

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