As a news story, “Jogger” was understood to turn on the demonstrable “difference” between the victim and her accused assailants, four of whom lived in Schomburg Plaza, a federally subsidized apartment complex at the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 110th Street in East Harlem, and the rest of whom lived in the projects and rehabilitated tenements just to the north and west of Schomburg Plaza. Some twenty-five teenagers were brought in for questioning; eight were held. The six who were finally indicted ranged in age from fourteen to sixteen. That none of the six had previous police records passed, in this context, for achievement; beyond that, one was recalled by his classmates to have taken pride in his expensive basketball shoes, another to have been “a follower.” I’m a smooth type of fellow, cool, calm, and mellow, one of the six, Yusef Salaam, would say in the rap he presented as part of his statement before sentencing.
I’m kind of laid back, but now I’m speaking so that you know
I got used and abused and even was put on the news
….
I’m not dissing them all, but the some that I called
.
They tried to dis me like I was an inch small, like a midget, a
mouse, something less than a man
.
The victim, by contrast, was a leader, part of what the Times would describe as “the wave of young professionals who took over New York in the 1980s,” one of those who were “handsome and pretty and educated and white,” who, according to the Times, not only “believed they owned the world” but “had reason to.” She was from a Pittsburgh suburb, Upper St. Clair, the daughter of a retired Westinghouse senior manager. She had been Phi Beta Kappa at Wellesley, a graduate of the Yale School of Management, a congressional intern, nominated for a Rhodes Scholarship, remembered by the chairman of her department at Wellesley as “probably one of the top four or five students of the decade.” She was reported to be a vegetarian, and “fun-loving,” although only “when time permitted,” and also to have had (these were the Times’ details) “concerns about the ethics of the American business world.”
In other words she was wrenched, even as she hung between death and life and later between insentience and sentience, into New York’s ideal sister, daughter, Bacharach bride: a young woman of conventional middle-class privilege and promise whose situation was such that many people tended to overlook the fact that the state’s case against the accused was not invulnerable. The state could implicate most of the defendants in the assault and rape in their own videotaped words, but had none of the incontrovertible forensic evidence — no matching semen, no matching fingernail scrapings, no matching blood — commonly produced in this kind of case. Despite the fact that jurors in the second trial would eventually mention physical evidence as having been crucial in their bringing guilty verdicts against one defendant, Kevin Richardson, there was not actually much physical evidence at hand. Fragments of hair “similar [to] and consistent” with that of the victim were found on Kevin Richardson’s clothing and underwear, but the state’s own criminologist had testified that hair samples were necessarily inconclusive since, unlike fingerprints, they could not be traced to a single person. Dirt samples found on the defendants’ clothing were, again, similar to dirt found in that part of the park where the attack took place, but the state’s criminologist allowed that the samples were also similar to dirt found in other uncultivated areas of the park. To suggest, however, that this minimal physical evidence could open the case to an aggressive defense — to, say, the kind of defense that such celebrated New York criminal lawyers as Jack Litman and Barry Slotnick typically present — would come to be construed, during the weeks and months to come, as a further attack on the victim.
She would be Lady Courage to the New York Post, she would be A Profile in Courage to the Daily News and New York Newsday. She would become for Anna Quindlen in the New York Times the figure of “New York rising above the dirt, the New Yorker who has known the best, and the worst, and has stayed on, living somewhere in the middle.” She would become for David Dinkins, the first black mayor of New York, the emblem of his apparently fragile hopes for the city itself: “I hope the city will be able to learn a lesson from this event and be inspired by the young woman who was assaulted in the case,” he said. “Despite tremendous odds, she is rebuilding her life. What a human life can do, a human society can do as well.” She was even then for John Gutfreund, at that time the chairman and chief executive officer of Salomon Brothers, the personification of “what makes this city so vibrant and so great,” now “struck down by a side of our city that is as awful and terrifying as the creative side is wonderful.” It was precisely in this conflation of victim and city, this confusion of personal woe with public distress, that the crime’s “story” would be found, its lesson, its encouraging promise of narrative resolution.
One reason the victim in this case could be so readily abstracted, and her situation so readily made to stand for that of the city itself, was that she remained, as a victim of rape, unnamed in most press reports. Although the American and English press convention of not naming victims of rape (adult rape victims are named in French papers) derives from the understandable wish to protect the victim, the rationalization of this special protection rests on a number of doubtful, even magical, assumptions. The convention assumes, by providing a protection for victims of rape not afforded victims of other assaults, that rape involves a violation absent from other kinds of assault. The convention assumes that this violation is of a nature best kept secret, that the rape victim feels, and would feel still more strongly were she identified, a shame and self-loathing unique to this form of assault; in other words that she has been in an unspecified way party to her own assault, that a special contract exists between this one kind of victim and her assailant. The convention assumes, finally, that the victim would be, were this special contract revealed, the natural object of prurient interest; that the act of male penetration involves such potent mysteries that the woman so penetrated (as opposed, say, to having her face crushed with a brick or her brain penetrated with a length of pipe) is permanently marked, “different,” even — especially if there is a perceived racial or social “difference” between victim and assailant, as in nineteenth-century stories featuring white women taken by Indians—“ruined.”
These quite specifically masculine assumptions (women do not want to be raped, nor do they want to have their brains smashed, but very few mystify the difference between the two) tend in general to be self-fulfilling, guiding the victim to define her assault as her protectors do. “Ultimately we’re doing women a disservice by separating rape from other violent crimes,” Deni Elliott, the director of Dartmouth’s Ethics Institute, suggested in a discussion of this custom in Time. “We are participating in the stigma of rape by treating victims of this crime differently,” Geneva Overholser, the editor of the Des Moines Register, said about her decision to publish in February of 1990 a five-part piece about a rape victim who agreed to be named. “When we as a society refuse to talk openly about rape, I think we weaken our ability to deal with it.” Susan Estrich, a professor of criminal law at Harvard Law School and the manager of Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign, discussed, in Real Rape, the conflicting emotions that followed her own 1974 rape: