by Joan Didion
Nor was the idea of rape the only potentially treacherous undercurrent in this case. There has historically been, for American blacks, an entire complex of loaded references around the question of “naming”: slave names, masters’ names, African names, call me by my rightful name, nobody knows my name; stories, in which the specific gravity of naming locked directly into that of rape, of black men whipped for addressing white women by their given names. That, in this case, just such an inter-locking of references could work to fuel resentments and inchoate hatreds seemed clear, and it seemed equally clear that some of what ultimately occurred—the repeated references to lynchings, the identification of the defendants with the Scottsboro boys, the insistently provocative repetition of the victim’s name, the weird and self-defeating insistence that no rape had taken place and little harm been done the victim—derived momentum from this historical freight. “Years ago, if a white woman said a Black man looked at her lustfully, he could be hung higher than a magnolia tree in bloom, while a white mob watched joyfully sipping tea and eating cookies,” Yusef Salaam’s mother reminded readers of the Amsterdam News. “The first thing you do in the United States of America when a white woman is raped is round up a bunch of black youths, and I think that’s what happened here,” the Reverend Calvin O. Butts III of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem told the New York Times. “You going to arrest me now because I said the jogger’s name?” Gary Byrd asked rhetorically on his WLIB show, and was quoted by Edwin Diamond in New York magazine:
I mean, she’s obviously a public figure, and a very mysterious one, I might add. Well, it’s a funny place we live in called America, and should we be surprised that they’re up to their usual tricks? It was a trick that got us here in the first place.
This reflected one of the problems with not naming this victim: she was in fact named all the time. Everyone in the courthouse, everyone who worked for a paper or a television station or who followed the case for whatever professional reason, knew her name. She was referred to by name in all court records and in all court proceedings. She was named, in the days immediately following the attack, on some local television stations. She was also routinely named—and this was part of the difficulty, part of what led to a damaging self-righteousness among those who did not name her and to an equally damaging embattlement among those who did—in Manhattan’s black-owned newspapers, the Amsterdam News and the City Sun, and she was named as well on WLIB, the Manhattan radio station owned by a black partnership that included Percy Sutton and, until 1985, when he transferred his stock to his son, Mayor Dinkins.
That the victim in this case was identified on Centre Street and north of 96th Street but not in between made for a certain cognitive dissonance, especially since the names of even the juvenile suspects had been released by the police and the press before any suspect had been arraigned, let alone indicted. “The police normally withhold the names of minors who are accused of crimes,” the Times explained (actually the police normally withhold the names of accused “juveniles,” or minors under age sixteen, but not of minors sixteen or seventeen), “but officials said they made public the names of the youths charged in the attack on the woman because of the seriousness of the incident.” There seemed a debatable point here, the question of whether “the seriousness of the incident” might not have in fact seemed a compelling reason to avoid any appearance of a rush to judgment by preserving the anonymity of a juvenile suspect; one of the names released by the police and published in the Times was of a fourteen-year-old who was ultimately not indicted.
There were, early on, certain aspects of this case that seemed not well handled by the police and prosecutors, and others that seemed not well handled by the press. It would seem to have been tactically unwise, since New York State law requires that a parent or guardian be present when children under sixteen are questioned, for police to continue the interrogation of Yusef Salaam, then fifteen, on the grounds that his Transit Authority bus pass said he was sixteen, while his mother was kept waiting outside. It would seem to have been unwise for Linda Fairstein, the assistant district attorney in charge of Manhattan sex crimes, to ignore, at the precinct house, the mother’s assertion that the son was fifteen, and later to suggest, in court, that the boy’s age had been unclear to her because the mother had used the word “minor.”
It would also seem to have been unwise for Linda Fairstein to tell David Nocenti, the assistant U.S. Attorney who was paired with Yusef Salaam in a “Big Brother” program and who had come to the precinct house at the mother’s request, that he had “no legal standing” there and that she would file a complaint with his supervisors. It would seem in this volatile a case imprudent of the police to follow their normal procedure by presenting Raymond Santana’s initial statement in their own words, cop phrases that would predictably seem to some in the courtroom, as the expression of a fourteen-year-old held overnight and into the next afternoon for interrogation, unconvincing:
On April 19, 1989, at approximately 20:30 hours, I was at the Taft Projects in the vicinity of 113th St. and Madison Avenue. I was there with numerous friends…. At approximately 21:00 hours, we all (myself and approximately 15 others) walked south on Madison Avenue to E. 110th Street, then walked westbound to Fifth Avenue. At Fifth Avenue and 110th Street, we met up with an additional group of approximately 15 other males, who also entered Central Park with us at that location with the intent to rob cyclists and joggers…
In a case in which most of the defendants had made videotaped statements admitting at least some role in the assault and rape, this less than meticulous attitude toward the gathering and dissemination of information seemed peculiar and self-defeating, the kind of pressured or unthinking standard procedure that could not only exacerbate the fears and angers and suspicions of conspiracy shared by many blacks but open what seemed, on the basis of the confessions, a conclusive case to the kind of doubt that would eventually keep juries out, in the trial of the first three defendants, ten days, and, in the trial of the next two defendants, twelve days. One of the reasons the jury in the first trial could not agree, Manhattan Lawyer reported in its October 1990 issue, was that one juror, Ronald Gold, remained “deeply troubled by the discrepancies between the story [Antron] McCray tells on his videotaped statement and the prosecution’s scenario”:
Why did McCray place the rape at the reservoir, Gold demanded, when all evidence indicated it happened at the 102nd Street crossdrive? Why did McCray say the jogger was raped where she fell, when the prosecution said she’d been dragged 300 feet into the woods first? Why did McCray talk about having to hold her arms down, if she was found bound and gagged?
The debate raged for the last two days, with jurors dropping in and out of Gold’s acquittal [for McCray] camp….
After the jurors watched McCray’s video for the fifth time, Miranda [Rafael Miranda, another juror] knew it well enough to cite the time-code numbers imprinted at the bottom of the videotape as her rebuffed Gold’s arguments with specific statements from McCray’s own lips. [McCray, on the videotape, after admitting that he had held the victim by her left arm as her clothes were pulled off, volunteered that he had “got on top” of her, and said that he had rubbed against her without an erection “so everybody would … just know I did it.”] The pressure on Gold was mounting. Three jurors agree that it was evident Gold, worn down perhaps by his own displays of temper as much as anything else, capitulated out of exhaustion. While a bitter Gold told other jurors he felt terrible about ultimately giving in, Brueland [Harold Brueland, another juror who had for a time favored acquittal for McCray] believes it was all part of the process.
“I’d like to tell Ronnie someday that nervous exhaustion is an element built into the court system. They know that,” Brueland says of court officials. “They know we’re only going to be able to take it for so long. It’s just a matter of, you know, who’s got the guts to stick with it.”
So fixed were the emotions provoked by this case that the idea tha
t there could have been, for even one juror, even a moment’s doubt in the state’s case, let alone the kind of doubt that could be sustained over ten days, seemed, to many in the city, bewildering, almost unthinkable: the attack on the jogger had by then passed into narrative, and the narrative was about confrontation, about what Governor Cuomo had called “the ultimate shriek of alarm,” about what was wrong with the city and about its solution. What was wrong with the city had been identified, and its names were Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Kharey Wise, Kevin Richardson, and Steve Lopez. “They never could have thought of it as they raged through Central Park, tormenting and ruining people,” Bob Herbert wrote in the News after the verdicts came in on the first three defendants.
There was no way it could have crossed their vicious minds. Running with the pack, they would have scoffed at the very idea. They would have laughed.
And yet it happened. In the end, Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray and Raymond Santana were nailed by a woman.
Elizabeth Lederer stood in the courtroom and watched Saturday night as the three were hauled off to jail…. At times during the trial, she looked about half the height of the long and lanky Salaam, who sneered at her from the witness stand. Salaam was apparently to dumb to realize that Lederer—this petite, soft-spoken, curly-haired prosecutor—was the jogger’s avenger….
You could tell that her thoughts were elsewhere, that she was thinking about the jogger.
You could tell that she was thinking: I did it.
I did it for you.
Do this in remembrance of me: the solution, then, or so such pervasive fantasies suggested, was to partake of the symbolic body and blood of The Jogger, whose idealization was by this point complete, and was rendered, significantly, in details stressing her “difference,” or superior class. The Jogger was someone who wore, according to Newsday, “a light gold chain around her slender neck” as well as, according to the News, a “modest” gold ring and “a thin sheen” of lipstick. The Jogger was someone who would not, according to the Post, “even dignify her alleged attackers with a glance.” The Jogger was someone who spoke, according to the News, in accents “suited to boardrooms,” accents that might therefore seem “foreign to many native New Yorkers.” In her first appearance on the witness stand she had been subjected, the Times noted, “to questions that most people do not have to answer publicly during their lifetimes,” principally about her use of a diaphragm on the Sunday preceding the attack, and had answered these questions, according to an editorial in the News, with an “indomitable dignity” that had taught the city a lesson “about courage and class.”
This emphasis on perceived refinements of character and of manner and of taste tended to distort and to flatten, and ultimately to suggest not the actual victim of an actual crime but a fictional character of a slightly earlier period, the well-brought-up virgin who briefly graces the city with her presence and receives in turn a taste of “real life.” The defendants, by contrast, were seen as incapable of appreciating these marginal distinctions, ignorant of both the norms and accoutrements of middle-class life. “Did you have jogging clothes on?” Elizabeth Lederer asked Yusef Salaam, by way of trying to discredit his statement that he had gone into the park that night only to “walk around.” Did he have “jogging clothes,” did he have “sports equipment,” did he have “a bicycle.” A pernicious nostalgia had come to permeate the case, a longing for the New York that had seemed for a while to be about “sports equipment,” about getting and spending rather than about having and not having: the reason that this victim must not be named was so that she could go unrecognized, it was astonishingly said, by Jerry Nachman, the editor of the New York Post, and then by others who seemed to find in this a particular resonance, to Bloomingdale’s.
Some New York stories involving young middle-class white women do not make it to the editorial pages, or even necessarily to the front pages. In April 1990, a young middle-class white woman named Laurie Sue Rosenthal, raised in an Orthodox Jewish household and at age twenty-nine still living with her parents in Jamaica, Queens, happened to die, according to the coroner’s report, from the accidental toxicity of Darvocet in combination with alcohol, in an apartment at 36 East 68th Street in Manhattan. The apartment belonged to the man she had been, according to her parents, seeing for about a year, a minor city assistant commissioner named Peter Franconeri. Peter Franconeri, who was at the time in charge of elevator and boiler inspections for the Building Department and married to someone else, wrapped Laurie Sue Rosenthal’s body in a blanket; placed it, along with her handbag and ID, outside the building with the trash; and went to his office at 60 Hudson Street. At some point an anonymous call was made to 911. Franconeri was identified only after Laurie Sue Rosenthal’s parents gave the police his beeper number, which they found in her address book. According to Newsday, which covered the story more extensively than the News, the Post, or the Times,
Initial police reports indicated that there were no visible wounds on Rosenthal’s body. But Rosenthal’s mother, Ceil, said yesterday that the family was told the autopsy revealed two “unexplained bruises” on her daughter’s body.
Larry and Ceil Rosenthal said those findings seemed to support their suspicions that their daughter was upset because they received a call from their daughter at 3 A.M. Thursday “saying that he had beaten her up.” The family reported the conversation to police.
“I told her to get into a cab and get home,” Larry Rosenthal said yesterday. “The next I heard was two detectives telling me terrible things.”
“The ME [medical examiner] said the bruises did not constitute a beating but they were going to examine them further,” Ceil Rosenthal said.
“There were some minor bruises,” a spokeswoman for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner told Newsday a few days later, but the bruises “did not in any way contribute to her death.” This is worth rerunning: A young woman calls her parents at three in the morning, “distraught.” She says that she has been beaten up. A few hours later, on East 68th Street between Madison and Park avenues, a few steps from Porthault and Pratesi and Armani and Saint Laurent and the Westbury Hotel, at a time of day in this part of New York 10021 when Jim Buck’s dog trainers are assembling their morning packs and Henry Kravis’s Bentley is idling outside his Park Avenue apartment and the construction crews are clocking in over near the Frick at the multimillion-dollar houses under reconstruction for Bill Cosby and for the owner of The Limited, this young middle-class white woman’s body, showing bruises, gets put out with the trash.
“Everybody got upside down because of who he was,” an unidentified police officer later told Jim Dwyer of Newsday, referring to the man who put the young woman out with the trash. “If it had happened to anyone else, nothing would have come of it. A summons would have been issued and that would have been the end of it.” In fact nothing did come of the death of Laurie Sue Rosenthal, which might have seemed a natural tabloid story but failed, on several levels, to catch the local imagination. For one thing she could not be trimmed into the role of the preferred tabloid victim, who is conventionally presented as fate’s random choice (Laurie Sue Rosenthal had, for whatever reason, taken the Darvocet instead of a taxi home, her parents reported treatment for a previous Valium dependency, she could be presumed to have known over the course of a year that Franconeri was married and yet continued to see him); for another, she seemed not to have attended an expensive school or to have been employed in a glamour industry (no Ivy Grad, no Wall Street Exec), which made it hard to cast her as part of “what makes this city so vibrant and so great.”
In August 1990, Peter Franconeri pled guilty to a misdemeanor, the unlawful removal of a body, and was sentenced by Criminal Court Judge Peter Benitez to seventy-five hours of community service. This was neither surprising nor much of a story (only twenty-three lines even in Newsday, on page twenty-nine of the city edition), and the case’s lenient resolution was for many people a kind of relief. The district att
orney’s office had asked for “some incarceration,” the amount usually described as a “touch,” but no one wanted, it was said, to crucify the guy: Peter Franconeri was somebody who knew a lot of people, understood how to live in the city, who had for example not only the apartment on East 68th Street between Madison and Park but a house in Southampton and who also understood that putting a body outside with the trash was nothing to get upside down about, if it was handled right. Such understandings may in fact have been the city’s true “ultimate shriek of alarm,” but it was not a shriek the city wanted to recognize.
2
Perhaps the most arresting collateral news to surface, during the first few days after the attack on the Central Park jogger, was that a significant number of New Yorkers apparently believed the city sufficiently well-ordered to incorporate Central Park into their evening fitness schedules. “Prudence” was defined, even after the attack, as “staying south of 90th Street,” or having “an awareness that you need to think about planning your routes,” or, in the case of one woman interviewed by the Times, deciding to quit her daytime job (she was a lawyer) because she was “tired of being stuck out there, running later and later at night.” “I don’t think there’s a runner who couldn’t describe the silky, gliding feeling you get running at night,” an editor of Runner’s World told the Times. “You see less of what’s around you and you become centered on your running.”