She warned the white slave owner that the rapes had to stop. Celia, 19, had endured five years of assaults by Robert Newsom, the Missouri widower in his 70s who’d purchased her when she was 14. She’d borne two of her predator’s children.
Now she was being courted by an enslaved black man named George. When she became pregnant a third time, George told her the farmer’s abuse could not continue.
Celia warned Newsom that she would hurt him if he came to her cabin again. She also asked his two adult daughters for help keeping their father away.
But on the night of June 23, 1855, Newsom crept into her cabin and tried to force her to have sex with him. Celia took a stick and bashed his head with it, killing him, according to court documents. Then she pushed his body into a roaring fire in her cabin’s fireplace. The next day, his bones were carried out in the embers.
What followed was her arrest and a groundbreaking legal case known as the State of Missouri vs. Celia, a Slave — a dispute that played out long before #MeToo hashtags on Twitter and the explosive sexual assault and harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Bill Cosby and other powerful men.