Entrancing Trial

Unruffled as always, British justice, is the person of periwigged Sir Reginald Powell Croom-Johnson, peered over the rims of its half-moon spectacles and remarked with acerbity: "This is a very ordinary case." But to the ruddy-cheeked Sussex countrymen who jammed a Lewes courtroorn last week, the air seemed charged with mysterious mesmeric forces. There was, for example, the plea of plaintiff's counsel that the defendant "should not sit anywhere in sight" of his client. "You are asking," inquired Justice Croom-Johnson, "that he should not hypnotize her?" Barrister John Flowers, Queen's Counsel, replied only that "it would be better if he is not too close." "The jury," warned the Court, "will observe the defendant as they will observe the plaintiff. If there is danger of anything untoward happening, I also shall not be asleep."

With security measures thus complete, the trial got under way. It was an action by a Brighton shopgirl named Diana Grace Rains-Bath against Russian-born U.S. Hypnotist Ralph Slater (real name Joseph Bolsky) for damage incurred during a music-hall show three years ago. Slater, Diana charged, had not only hypnotized her in the course of his act as he intended, but sent her home in a psychological depression that lasted almost three years. It took, she said, 23 visits to Australian-born Dr. Sydney Van Pelt, president of the British Society of Medical Hypnotists and avowed foe of stage hypnotism, to dehypnotize her.

On the second day of the trial, Slater's counsel, plainly beyond his depth in the occult seas, quit the case and the dapper vaudevillian took over his own defense. Testifying for himself, he said he had hypnotized 25,000 people, and earned up to $15,000 a week doing it, without ever having had such a complaint before. Then, as his own lawyer, he asked Dr. Van Pelt: Is it not true that an anxiety neurosis such as Diana's could have come from an unhappy love affair? It could be, began Van Pelt, but at that point Justice Croom-Johnson chose to interrupt. "A typical example of anxiety neurosis," he remarked, "is the anxiety of the plaintiff in this case, who wants to recover damages." The courtroom rocked in laughter. "Do not use Americanisms in this court," the judge warned Slater as the vaudevillian warmed to a climax in the best U.S. gangster-film mouthpiece style.

After 62 minutes' deliberation, the Sussex jury, immune to Americanisms and the evil eye alike, assessed Slater $8,490 for entrancing Diana. "Obviously," said the defeated defendant, "I am not so dangerous a hypnotist as I have been made out to be."

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