"Mary Phipps also only entered the historical record after a crime. In 1689 the unmarried nineteen-year-old granddaughter of Thomas Danforth (the judge of the Salem witch trials) of Charlestown, Massachusetts, gave birth to a child. Phipps twice named John Walker, a forty-nine-year-old bricklayer, the father. He had, she told the midwife, 'took several opportunities to abuse her body in his wicked lustfull manner' while preventing her from crying out by covering her mouth. Servant Hannah Gilson described Walker as 'so nasty & his language so base that she would not have been alone in a house with him for all the world hee was so wicked.' Mary's father reported that she had been 'enslaved … with fear that if she did tell anybody he [Walker] would kill her.'
Though clearly Phipps had been raped, she and her child came to the courts only because the child was a bastard. The courts sought to determine fiscal responsibility and found John Walker responsible. Perhaps the legal situation was made worse by Phipps's idiocy and palsy. She was, court depositions stated, 'void of common reason and understanding that is in other children of her age, not capable of discerning between good and evil or any morality … but she knows persons and remembers persons. She is next to a mere naturall in her intellectuals … She is incapable of resisting a rape hav[ing] one side quite palsied … [we] have to help her as a meer child." Walker's punishment was to provide for the child financially. When the baby died, Walker had no more involvement. Phipps's famous grandfather later died in 1699 and left her a portion of his estate, but what happened to Phipps is unclear."
