Blackmail trials revealed that one's sexual reputation - that vague entity - had, in an increasingly commercial age, a definite monetary value. And as middle-class notions of sexual respectability emerged, so in tandem did sexual blackmail. Chronicling the emergence of this parasitic form of crime casts a fresh light on the history of sexual assault, prostitution, divorce, abortion, and homosexuality and provides striking evidence that when morality was made the law's business it often became the criminal's business as well.