Do You Remember: The Teen Marriage and Cultural Humiliation of Courtney Stodden

A victim of a predator became a public joke. Why?

(Content warning: this issue discusses grooming, abuse, and sexualization of children. Approach with caution.)

Author note: Courtney Stodden is non-binary and uses she/they pronouns. For consistency, I have stuck with “they.”

Did you know that only 13 states in America have completely banned child marriage? The vast majority of this "great" nation have bylaws, exemptions, and straight-up predatory rules that empower and incentivize predators to force children to marry them. Child marriage is legal in 37 states. There are more places across America where minors can get married than can't, where they can legally wed another person of any age before they can vote or buy a lottery ticket. In many states, statutory rape is not a crime within marriage.

This is one of those issues where you’d think that everyone would be on the same side. It’s abhorrent that children can be legally abused in the name of marriage. There are, of course, dissenters who dress up their support of child grooming as traditionalism, which is why so many of these state laws are still on the books. But culturally, one would like to imagine that, if a famous adult man married an adolescent in an obviously destructive act, we’d all call it out for what it was. And then you remember how we all treated the young person it happened to and you wonder why our species is even allowed to survive.

On May 20, 2011, actor Doug Hutchison got married again. The character actor was a familiar face on film and TV, from projects like The Green Mile and The X-Files. He had first met his new bride, Courtney Stodden, when they attended one of his acting classes. On their wedding day, Hutchison was 51. Stodden was 16. Courtney’s mother Krista had to give her parental consent so that the pair could marry in Las Vegas.

(Image via YouTube.)

The headlines were, shockingly, not positive. ABC News wrote, "May-December romances aren't unusual. But when the bride can't yet vote and the groom is eligible to join AARP? That's extreme, even for Hollywood." That didn’t mean that they were necessarily 100% condemnatory of Hutchison either. There was still a scramble for exclusive headlines regarding the pair. E! published their wedding album, with the smug line, "Interested? You know you are." ABC did a sit-down interview with the pair that quickly went viral.