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Historically, General Hospital is known to generate controversial storylines. But the most heinous arc was turning the Luke and Laura r*pe scene in 1979 into a Forced seduction theme from romance novels where sexual assault morphs into a love affair. Abigail De Kosnik, author of The Survival of Soap Opera, would later reveal that the r*pe storyline was a last-ditch effort by producers to save General Hospital from cancellation.
Luke Spencer (Anthony Geary) and Laura Webber (Genie Francis) of General Hospital are arguably one of the most beloved and complicated couples in daytime drama. For the unversed, the story of Luke and Laura, who married on screen 40 years ago, started with sexual assault.
The story of Luke and Laura began in a 1979 episode, where Luke Spencer forced himself on Laura Webber late at night at a closed disco.
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In the ensuing years, the r*pe scene was turned into a forced seduction story arc where viewers witnessed the victim (Laura) falling in love with the perpetrator(Luke). The storyline culminated in Luke and Laura walking down the aisle in 1981, watched by 30 million viewers—a record audience at the time. It appears at the time the audiences romanticised the r*pe as forced seduction. The onscreen couple became popular despite the sexual assault.
Decades later, Abigail De Kosnik, author of The Survival of Soap Opera, revealed that the r*pe storyline was hail Mary from the show producers to save General Hospital from cancellation.
In a 2020 interview with People, Abigail De Kosnik said in the late 1970s, Gloria Monty, [then] the executive producer of General Hospital, was warned: “She had two weeks to save the show, and ABC was going to cancel it if she couldn’t bring ratings up in that time.”
In Luke and Laura, Monty reportedly saw an opportunity to “maybe make things happen that shouldn’t happen, and that was electric.”
General Hospital then later branded the R*pe story as “seduction.” De Kosnik noted, “The question became, ‘Why did Luke do that?’ And the answer the show’s writers gave was that Luke did it for love. They became popular not despite the rape, but partly because of it.”
In the decades that followed, the rape scene was completely wiped from viewers’ memory, who idolised the TV couple as one of the best love stories in soap opera history.
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