Cleveland's sex scandal was well buried, but I found the long-forgotten affidavit from Maria Halpin, about the violent sexual assault that resulted in the birth of Cleveland's illegitimate child.

Their meal together was a pleasant one. Cleveland escorted Halpin back to her room at a downtown boarding house. What happened next, according to Halpin's affidavit, would in another era be classified as date rape. Cleveland sexually assaulted her "[b]y use of force and violence and without my consent," Halpin reported, adding that when she threatened to notify the authorities, Cleveland "told me he was determined to ruin me if it cost him $10,000, if he was hanged by the neck for it. I then and there told him that I never wanted to see him again [and] commanded him to leave my room, which he did."

Cleveland won election as mayor of Buffalo on a clean-government platform in 1881. A year later, he became governor of New York. As "Grover the Good," he won the Democratic nomination for president in 1884. Once he was named to the national ticket, it didn't take long for the media to expose the existence of his illegitimate son. What followed next was a malicious smear campaign: Cleveland's people got the word out that Halpin was a sexual plaything who drank to excess and was intimate with at least three (and possibly four) married men, all of them cronies of Cleveland. Cleveland, it was said, took responsibility for the child's conception because he was the only bachelor among Maria Halpin's gentlemen callers. Cleveland saw the matter through in the most "courageous way," the PR spin went, explaining that his indifference to the boy was due to "doubts about his fatherhood."