Melissa Gilbert Says She Now Feels “Nauseated” By Age Gap With Her ‘Little House’ on the Prairie Husband
https://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/idolchatter/2025/11/melissa-gilbert-says-she-now-feels-nauseated-by-age-gap-with-her-little-house-on-the-prairie-husband.html
When filming began, Gilbert was 15 and Butler was 23 — an age gap that didn’t strike her as odd at the time but feels very different to her now.*
Let's check.
Before we compare anything to Epstein, let's recall, what went on were romances or worse that were not meant to last.
In a sense, due to the film industry, this was kind of the case with yourself and Dean too. But what you were playing was a story of love preparing for marriage.
In that case, there are clearly other parallels than Epstein that deserve mention.
I made three posts on the ancestry of Francis Joseph and Sissi. Two on that of the ancestry of the Count of Chambord and Maria Theresa of Modena.
Franz Joseph und Sissi, Lebensalter und Heiratsalter der Ahnen · Eine Generation zuvor · Und noch eine Generation davor
Après François-Joseph et Sissi, pourquoi pas le comte de Chambord et princesse Marie Thérèse ? · Encore une génération ou deux ?
Now, the posts of this type, I've done more of them, have two types of statistics, separately per gender, and that's when they died and when they married. In some of them I go out of my way to rework to take into account first marriages rather than the marriages concerned with the ancestry. Which brings in more people.
Now, you were 15. I've just taken the number of women whose marriage was at 15 or younger (down to 12), and this in comparison with the whole set of women in the post:
8/48
12/72
5/31
3/27
7/50
8 + 12 + 5 + 3 + 7 = 35
48 + 72 + 31 + 27 + 50 = 228
35/228 = 15.3~15.4 %.
A little less than 1 in 6. This was also not always what some lawyers refer to as "Romeo and Juliet exceptions" for small age gap. Nope. Romeo and Juliet as per the play arguably had a similar age gap, she was 14 and Romeo big enough to kill a man in duel. That fact was the reason their love was banned by her parents. Ximena might similarily not have got El Cid, if her father had been alive to step her from marrying someone having killed a kinsman of hers, but in that case the kinsman was precisely her father. Juliet's age was absolutely not the decisive factor against the match, her mother speaks to her about herself having been married already at 12.
St. Francis of Sales was the son of a somewhat poor nobleman (prior to his marriage) and an upward match. His father, Francis of Sales and Thonon, also referred to as de Boisy, had him the year after his marriage to a fourteen year old girl. He was born in 1567, and his father recalled seeing the Protestant Reformation (presumably in France, not its precursors in Germany or Switzerland).
There is no indication from the life of the saint that his parents, either of them, ever felt bad about it.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Sexagesima LD
7—8.II.2026
* I take "didn't feel odd at the time" from the article on BeliefNet here quoted. If it's true as another source said she actually felt discomfort at the time, that's a very different story. No virgin should be forced to kiss, especially someone she doesn't fancy that way.
Was she aware, when applying for the role, that the girl she played would marry an 8 years older man, who started courting her when he was 23? See Laura Ingalls Wilder and Almanzo Wilder on wikipedia.
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