Liberty_4All (@Liberty_4All)

The History Drop In a California hotel room in June 1972, the wife of the Attorney General of the United States was forcibly sedated to stop her from exposing the Watergate conspiracy. It would take years, and the ruin of powerful men, before history admitted she was telling the truth. Martha Mitchell was born in 1918 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. She was outspoken by nature, charming by reputation, and by 1972 she was one of the most recognizable political wives in Washington. Reporters loved her. She called them directly, sometimes late at night, with things she was not supposed to say. That habit would almost get her killed. On June 17, 1972, the night of the Watergate break-in, Martha was at the Waterfront Hotel in Newport Beach with her husband John Mitchell, who was then running Nixon's reelection campaign. When she heard about the arrests, she called Helen Thomas, the veteran wire reporter, and told her that Nixon's people were behind it. She was going to go public. She never got the chance to finish the call. Her security detail, acting on orders, physically restrained her. She was held against her will, injected with tranquilizers, and prevented from speaking to anyone for days. She suffered a laceration on her hand during the struggle. When she finally resurfaced, her husband and the White House did what they had already been doing: they called her unstable. They said she was drinking. They implied, and sometimes stated outright, that she was not to be believed. It worked, for a while. John Mitchell denied her account. The press, much of it, went along with the framing. Martha was cast as the volatile wife of a serious man, someone whose calls to reporters were a source of embarrassment rather than intelligence. The coverup held, and Martha's credibility was the price it extracted. But the Watergate investigation continued. Reporters kept digging. Tapes surfaced. Testimony accumulated. And piece by piece, what Martha had said in that interrupted phone call turned out to be exactly correct. John Mitchell was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury. He served around 19 months in federal prison, released in 1979. Martha and John had divorced in 1973. She died in 1976, before the full weight of her vindication had settled. She never saw herself properly acknowledged. In the decades since, something quieter happened. Psychiatrists and researchers began to document a pattern they were seeing in clinical settings: patients who reported real events, correctly, but were disbelieved and pathologized for it. The tendency of institutions, families, and authorities to gaslight accurate witnesses into doubting themselves. They named it the Martha Mitchell Effect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDpOOT-H7-U