Stanford White's assault on the sixteen-year-old Evelyn Nesbit in 1901 was described in specific, credible detail under oath during the 1907 murder trial. It was the stated justification for everything that followed. Yet no criminal investigation into White's conduct was ever opened — not in 1901 when it occurred, not in 1907 when it was described in open court, not in the decades afterward. What structural feature of the American legal system in that era made prosecuting a wealthy, socially prominent man for sexual assault on a teenage model effectively impossible — a feature that also shaped the entire defensive architecture of the Thaw trial?