We have for you today the classic tabloid Confidential, and it happens to be one of the most notable of its issues ever published. The magazine had been hit with a bombshell indictment from a California grand jury for various alleged crimes, including libel, obscenity, and conspiracy to disseminate information about abortion. Inside this September 1957 issue publisher Robert Harrison answers those charges in a two-page essay, taking his case to the public in response to negative publicity. The thrust of his response is simply that Confidential published the truth and the truth can never be libelous, obscene, or conspiratorial.

The case had been launched by California’s attorney general, and was later joined by celebrities who had been angered by Confidential‘s stories, among them Maureen O’Hara, Errol Flynn, Dorothy Dandridge, and especially Liberace, who the magazine had outed as gay in a slanderous and sneering July 1957 exposé. The jury eventually ended up deadlocked, necessitating a whole new round of proceedings, but Harrison didn’t want to go through it, so he made a deal with the attorney general that his magazines (he also published Whisper) would stop their muckraking.

We don’t want to cast Harrison as a noble victim here. Free speech lightning rods often aren’t, as the nature of pushing the envelope usually means upsetting the status quo. Think Larry Flynt and Hustler. We can’t be sure who Harrison was as a person. His magazine, sort of like today’s social media, traded in shock and outrage, for example stirring up homophobes by portraying the U.S. as rife with gay men who controlled Hollywood, and were security threats in Washington, D.C.

But in other areas Confidential often sided with the marginalized. We’ve seen no issues that were deliberately insulting toward blacks. While hostile toward gay men, the magazine’s coverage of the trans and cross-dressing communities was generally neutral, though it sometimes saw such people as useful tools to thumb the noses of Hollywood he-men. There’s an example in this issue in the form of a story about Victor Mature spending an evening trying to romance a beautiful woman who he didn’t know was a man in drag.

These mid-1950s issues are perfect examples why Hollywood loathed the magazine. A claim that Ava Gardner tried to pick up a Latin American maraca player in London comes to mind. What proof could possibly exist to support a story like that? How did Harrison manage to keep a straight face while writing an essay claiming he merely told the truth? We guess he wasn’t familiar with the concept of hearsay. But that’s okay. Today Confidential is a priceless historical document, not because it was 100% true, but because it reveals Hollywood gossip that would otherwise be lost to time. We have forty-plus scans below.

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