The winner of the UK’s most prestigious literary award for non-fiction has hit out at the media, singling out their “appalling” coverage of Anastasia Yeshchenko’s recent murder.
Hallie Rubenhold, who won the Baillie Gifford prize for her study of the women murdered by Jack the Ripper, said that today’s media continue to focus on murderers and the gory details of their crimes, disregarding their victims’ lives. “We can see this pattern occurring over and over again,” said Rubenhold.
Speaking the morning after her book The Five won the £50,000 award, the author suggested that the media were almost “going for the comical side” in their coverage of Yeshchenko’s killing in Russia.
“Here’s this crazy mad professor of Napoleonic studies who dresses like Napoleon, who was found wading in a frozen river in St Petersburg trying to dispose of a bag of body parts of his lover,” she said. “Then it goes on and on about who he is – I’m not even going to mention his name. I was literally just going through everything I could find in the English language press and I found nothing about her and I couldn’t believe it. I thought: ‘Here it is again, this is what’s happening again.’”
The historian said her next book would look at Dr Crippen’s notorious 1910 murder of his wife Cora from the latter’s point of view. “Especially with women, reports go in for the salacious angle – how was she carved up, how was she disposed of, how did he kill her?” she said. “What about: ‘Who was she? What effect did her death have on her family and her community?’ That’s a much more important story. We have to start asking those questions. At the moment we’re just following the narrative of the murderer; it’s a whodunnit rather than a whydunnit.”
In The Five, Rubenhold shows how, despite popular belief to the contrary, “there is no hard evidence to suggest that three of [the Ripper’s] five victims were prostitutes at all”. The chair of the Baillie Gifford judges, Stig Abell, hailed the book as a “great moral act, reclaiming the voices of these women”.
Rubenhold said her approach has led to a swathe of attacks on her and her book from people interested in the Ripper murders.
“In spite of the fact my book is footnoted,” she said, “in spite of the fact there are so many Victorianists and experts in the history of prostitution and women’s history who have read my book and said it absolutely stands up, there are a hardcore group … who say what I have done is to doctor documents … They say I lied, that I suppressed evidence, redacted evidence.”
People who are interested in the murders care about the women’s occupations, she explained, “because they have built their egos on the back of trying to figure out who Jack the Ripper was.”
“The one thing the Ripperology community can agree on among themselves is that he killed prostitutes,” she said. “I’m pulling a thread out of something and everything comes unravelled. In effect what I’m doing is saying Ripperology is unviable because we will never solve these murders … if you look at it from a historian’s point of view, there isn’t evidence.”
Rubenhold added that to have experts and academics validate her work with the prize felt like vindication, after so much abuse. “I’m sure [my critics] are going to be going absolutely mental when they find out,” she said.
