This article appeared in the November 18, 1995 issue of TV Guide. Can a rapist be a romantic hero? by Michael Logan

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Todd Lord, the redeemed rapist played on One Life To Live by Roger Howarth, got married last week to the town sexpot. This week, the Emmy-winning actor, who has been openly critical of the erotic-hero turn Todd has taken, will be permanently written off the show. But the issues will remain.

"By portraying Todd as a rapist turned Samaritan, [OLTL] is inadvertantly keeping battered-women fans in dangerous, possibly fatal relationships," says Deena Stewart, a domestic-violence educator in Phoenix who has watched the soap since the 1970s. "A well-established characteristic of battered women is their persistent fantasy that the batterer will change if only they love him enough or provide him with a sense of power and security. [OLTL] is reinforcing this fantasy."

California state assembly member Sheila Kuehl (who, as Sheila James, played Zelda on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis) is a longtime advocate for battered women. "The [OLTL] storyline," Kuehl says, "is yet one more message that rape is a trivial matter, that women are just making too much of it. We are trivializing a serious sexual assault in order to pander to an audience. It is unconscionable." Kuehl adds that "it can be far worse to send this message out [via] a soap. People identify deeply with these characters. They are very real to them - much more so than the characters in a movie or people on a talk show."

But are fans really falling for it? Sociology professor Denise Bielby, co-author of the intriguing new study Soap Fans (Temple University Press), says, "Some viewers do see Todd as a heartthrob or hero, but to lump all fans into this category is insulting. It buys right into the myth that they can't think for themselves, that they are not critical or discerning, that they don't know right from wrong, that they think what they see on TV is real."

Counters Kuehl: "One thing we learned in the Vietnam era about TV is that there is enormous confusion between fact and fiction. People tend to simply, passively accept the images and messages coming to them off the screen. And there's always a message. There is never a neutral show. Even the most trivial comedies present ideas - good or bad. A responsible network never would say, "Oh, it's just fiction."

ABC programming chiefs chose not to comment on the Todd controversy. But OLTL headwriter Michael Malone comes to the show's defense: "Todd's journey is not a statistic, it's a story," he says. "To say he can never love or find love, that he can never ask his victim for forgiveness - or that his victim should not forgive in order to release her fear and anger and get on with her life - is to say that there can never be charity or forgiveness. All I can say is, go read the Sermon on the Mount."