How ‘GH’ Fans, Actors & More Feel About Luke and Laura’s Origin Story Now
Warning: The following post contains discussion of sexual assault.
The wedding of Luke Spencer (Anthony Geary) and Laura Webber (Genie Francis) remains one of the most iconic soap moments of all time. Forty five years ago, over the course of November 16 and 17, 1981, Luke and Laura said “I do” in a General Hospital wedding watched by 30 million viewers.
However, their love story didn’t have a fairy tale start. Of the many controversies daytime TV has accumulated over the years, at least one is still top of mind for fans: the 1979 General Hospital episode in which Luke Spencer (Anthony Geary) rapes Laura Webber (Genie Francis).
And adding insult to Laura’s physical, mental, and emotional injury, the ABC soap’s writers then had Luke and Laura fall in love and get married in a much-hyped wedding. The production also tried to pass off the rape as a “seduction.” In the decades since, the show’s fans, actors, and former staff members have been speaking out about the pair’s controversial start.
Some fans call the storyline and the subsequent Luke–Laura romance ‘a mistake’
On Reddit, General Hospital fans are still discussing the rape, four decades later. “I remember when it first happened, and I was disgusted they were making them a romantic couple after rape,” one user said in a 2025 thread. “I don’t know how anyone accepted it, but I never could.”
Another person wrote: “I saw the episode live, and my first thought was that the show runners had massively underestimated the popularity of Luke and Laura as a couple because there was no coming back from a rape. I still believe it was a mistake they tried to recover from and [that powers that be] should have just admitted that and tried to find a better way to deal with the situation than gloss over the reality of rape.”
Curt Gunther / TV Guide / ABC / Everett Collection
In a thread on the topic this June, one fan said, “I’ve always hated the whole victim falls for her attacker trope.” A second commenter added, “Them becoming a couple was so gross.”
And the topic came up again on Reddit just last month. “Disgusting,” one commenter wrote in that thread. “How this became a romance that millions of people watched I will never know.”
Another said, “The fact that they later tried to say it was a ‘seduction’ was crazy. That is not what was shown on-screen and it certainly wasn’t what was written.”
How Anthony Geary and Genie Francis reacted to Luke and Laura’s beginning
Geary, who died last year at age 78, reflected on Luke and Laura’s origins in 1998, when the couple’s son, Lucky (Jonathan Jackson), found out that his father raped his mother.
“My first reaction was that it was a big can of worms that could eat us alive,” Geary told Associated Press at the time, thinking back to his feelings about the rape storyline. “I was terrified, basically.”
Francis condemned the storyline in the 2020 documentary special The Story of Soaps. “It was such a big deal in the media, and it took the country by storm,” she said in the special. “I’ve had to justify it for so many years, and I have to say, it feels good to sit here and say I won’t justify it. It’s awful. They shouldn’t have done it.”
Francis also set the record straight about what happened that night at the Campus Disco. “The term now would be date rape,” she said. “The night of the rape, Luke’s last request was to dance with him, and the dance became very seductive. He took her down to the floor, and that is the rape.”
Craig Sjodin / ABC / Everett Collection
Executive producer Wendy Riche said the storyline ‘was not acceptable’
In 1998, then-General Hospital executive producer Wendy Riche told the AP that the Lucky storyline was “a great opportunity” to revisit Luke and Laura’s origins. “We didn’t approach it as ‘let’s make amends.’ We didn’t feel guilty or felt like we had to,” she said.
But Riche added that the 1998 plot development with Lucky was sending a message to longtime viewers: “It was not acceptable then, no matter what the town said or the press said,” she said. “It is not acceptable to take control over another person’s body under any circumstance.”
Sheri Anderson, who penned the controversial 1979 episode, opened up about the rape storyline in a Michael Fairman TV interview this June. She said idea came from Jacqueline Smith, who led ABC Entertainment’s daytime programming at the time and gave the edict for the rape storyline to Pat Falken Smith, then General Hospital’s head writer.
“We were like, ‘What? We can’t do that!’” Anderson said of the writing staff’s reactions.
Faced with that job, though, Anderson wrote a 110-page script, explaining to Fairman that she would often send scripts to a therapist to make sure they were “emotionally correct.” And she thought General Hospital handed the storyline “extremely well” but regretted how the show later dubbed the rape a seduction.
“In retrospect, and I believe Michele Val Jean [the former General Hospital writer who later created Beyond the Gates] once said that it upset her that we would say it was really a ‘seduction’ and all of those things, because it was not,” Anderson said. “It was rape, and [back then] I would try to, in a sense, defend it, and frankly, I was wrong.”
If you or someone you know is the victim of sexual assault, contact RAINN’s National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or text HOPE to 64673. If you or a loved one is in immediate danger, call 911.
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