It's a misdemeanor as well in Virginia, Maryland and more than 20 other states, and a felony in Idaho, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oklahoma and Wisconsin.Īnd though the law is rarely enforced, it's not never enforced: As recently as 1980, a Massachusetts couple were spotted having sex in a van and, when they admitted they were married but not to each other, arrested for adultery. Berra's student's instincts were inarguably right: An 'extramarital affair' is illegal in the District of Columbia, where adultery is a misdemeanor with a maximum penalty of $500 or 180 days in jail. The only trouble is, the declarations are wrong.īecause - just for the record - adultery is, in fact, a crime. The declarations gathered the force of absolute truth, and so it's hardly surprising that Berra would have shared them with her students. is not illegal.' NBC correspondent Pete Williams made the same point the next day, reporting that 'unsavory as the sexual accusations are, the potential violations of law involve only what he may have said, not what he may have done.' CNN legal commentator Greta Van Susteren was one of the first to parse the niceties, saying that any crime the president might have committed would consist of perjury or suborning perjury or obstructing justice, and that an 'extramarital affair. The same point - that adultery isn't a crime but lying under oath is - had been made repeatedly in the commentary-sodden days since the scandal broke. 'I felt I had crushed his innocence, which was something I didn't want to do.' Adultery, she said, is a moral offense, but not a criminal one. 'Isn't that illegal?'īerra tried to break the news gently. But an affair is adultery, he pointed out. It wouldn't consist of having a sexual affair with a woman not his wife. If the president were to be impeached, she explained, the crime would consist of lying under oath or encouraging Lewinsky to do so.

Officially the day's topic was 'impeachment,' but by necessity, the discussion also included talk of adultery, and one of Berra's students predicted that the president 'is going to be impeached because he had an affair with that woman.'īerra corrected him. It was a delicate task - trying to help her kids understand the facts and issues involved, without utterly destroying any idealism they might have about America and its leaders. In the early, dizzying days of the Clinton-Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, Sally Berra, an Arlington social studies teacher, courageously took it upon herself to sort through the situation with her eighth-grade American history class. Special Report: Clinton AccusedĪdultery in America Is an Unfinished History of Morals and Misdemeanors

Washington law infadelity