Obsession (22 page)

As Linda Fairstein sadly sums up, “There are so many people in whom we place our trust and we are betrayed because we placed it wrongly. And Jennifer is the most tragic extreme of that.”

O
n March 25, 1931, on an eighty-car freight train passing through Alabama on its way to Memphis, Tennessee, a fight broke out between some blacks and whites. They were all in their teens—except one who was twenty—and all had hopped the train as hoboes, the older ones looking to find work in one of the towns along the way, a common practice in the Depression years. The blacks “won” the fight, largely through force of numbers, and ended up tossing their white adversaries off the train. When the train made a stop in Paint Rock, Alabama, a sheriff’s posse was waiting and arrested nine of the blacks, which essentially represented the number they could catch and control. Apparently, as the white losers of the fight had walked back along the railroad tracks, they were fearful of being picked up for vagrancy so they told the authorities they had been attacked and thrown off the train by this pack of Negroes to deflect attention from their own situation.

Things only got more complicated from there. On the train, sheriff’s deputies also found two white women dressed in overalls. They were Victoria Price, nineteen, and her seventeen-year-old friend Ruby
Bates. Afraid they were about to be arrested for vagrancy or worse, the young women stated that they had been gang-raped by twelve black men, including all of the nine who had just been arrested. Price said that the other three must have jumped off the train before it pulled into Paint Rock.

The defendants hadn’t even all known each other before they were rounded up. Of the nine, only four were traveling together: eighteen-year-old Haywood Patterson, his nineteen-year-old friend Andrew Wright (both from Chattanooga), Wright’s brother Leroy, and Leroy’s friend Eugene Williams, both thirteen. They were taken to the jail in the nearby town of Scottsboro, where, that night, they were nearly lynched by an outraged citizenry. So began the story of perhaps the most notorious case of false allegation of rape in American history.

The trial of the nine “Scottsboro Boys,” as they soon became known throughout the nation, began less than two weeks later. Victoria Price, who had already been married twice, testified that she and Ruby Bates had each been raped six times on the floor of a freight car. Both women had been given medical examinations, which did indicate that both had had sexual intercourse, but not recently enough to have happened while they were on the train. Also, there were no wounds, bruises, or other marks on either woman’s body corresponding to the force they claimed had been used in assaulting them. After a three-day trial, all but one of the nine Scottsboro boys were sentenced to death; the youngest was sentenced to life in prison. The trial transcript records the prosecutor summing up to the all-white jury with the words, “Guilty or not, let’s get rid of these niggers.”

The Scottsboro case quickly became a national and international cause célèbre. Organizations as diverse as the NAACP and the American Communist Party
became involved. So did such celebrities as Albert Einstein and writers Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Mann. Ruby Bates recanted her testimony. So egregious was the lack of fairness and due process in the trial that the Supreme Court granted a new trial. This time, in April of 1933, at a courthouse in Decatur, Alabama, the nine were defended by an experienced New York trial lawyer named Samuel Leibowitz, who put on the stand Bates’s boyfriend, Lester Carter, who had accompanied her on the train ride and also denied that a rape had taken place. This time the prosecution’s summation to another all-white jury included the exhortation, “Show them that Alabama justice can’t be bought and sold with Jew money from New York!”

Again the verdict was guilty for all defendants. But this time, the judge was an incredibly courageous man named James E. Horton, who overturned the verdict, declaring that he had heard nothing during the trial that pointed to the guilt of the defendants. In the next election, Judge Horton was overwhelmingly defeated.

In a third trial with a new judge and jury, the Scottsboro Boys were again found guilty, and again the case found its way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the systematic exclusion of blacks from juries was grounds for reversal. In the fourth trial, in 1937, four of the defendants were found not guilty and the other five were convicted in a behind-the-scenes deal wherein the Northerners agreed to stop protesting and stay out of it if Southern authorities would gradually and quietly release the five from prison. But by the time the last defendant, Andrew Wright, was actually freed in 1950, the nine Scottsboro Boys had served a total of more than a hundred years in custody for a crime they not only did not commit, but that never happened in the first place!

In the Scottsboro case, a charge of rape became not
only a weapon for one human being to use against another, but a metaphor for the entire bleak state of race relations in the American South of the 1930s and 1940s. And it pointed up a perception and fear that had already been prominent for centuries: that any woman could accuse any man of sexually assaulting her and it would be her word against his. The resulting conclusion, that false allegations might be plentiful and the credibility of the accusing woman could always be suspect, continues to haunt some rape cases even today.

Recently, not too far from where I live, a woman charged that she was abducted from the parking area of a fashionable suburban shopping mall one afternoon, carjacked some distance away, raped, and returned to the mall. The story was covered heavily in the local media that same evening. Since I am always warning women, beginning with my own family members, about being careful and alert in shopping mall parking lots, this story grabbed my interest and I began looking into it.

Understand that I do not enter into the analysis of any crime—rape included—with any particular bias. To do my job effectively, I must be as objective at the outset as I can be. But with this case, as soon as I started thinking about the facts as they were reported, a couple of things didn’t square. To begin, whenever we analyze a violent crime in my unit, we evaluate whether the victim is high risk, low risk, or somewhere in between for this particular incident. Despite the fact that this woman was alone, her situation struck me as low risk. The crime occurred during the afternoon, when the parking structure was well-populated. I knew there were security guards patrolling the area. She said she did not know her attacker, so what made her his specific target? They drove away in her own car, yet this mall is accessible only by car or bus, so how did
he get there? Did an accomplice drop him off? The victim said there was no evidence of anyone else helping him. Did he take a bus with the idea that he would rob or rape someone, but then give her back her car, walk over to the bus stop, and wait for the bus while police would undoubtedly be combing the area for a man of his description? And they’d surely have his description, since the victim said he’d made no attempt to disguise himself.

All things considered, the facts just didn’t add up or correspond to any combination of the rapist typologies my colleagues and I had developed over the years. This doesn’t mean the crime did not happen; it just means you have to investigate scrupulously to see why a particular scenario or detail is out of the ordinary.

As it turned out, this case was later proven a false allegation, a complete fabrication. The motive? The likely one would have been to shake down the shopping mall for damages resulting from negligent security. But in this particular case, it was a simple, misguided plea for attention from a woman who felt lonely and out of place.

Why was this case so easy to crack? The main reason is that the alleged victim constructed her story to conform to what she thought an abduction-rape by a stranger would be like. She ran into the same problems offenders encounter when they try to stage a crime scene: she didn’t have enough experience or common sense to realize that the police have seen enough of the real thing to be able to detect her amateurish attempts at deceiving them.

In point of fact, false allegations are relatively rare, estimated to be about 5 percent of all reported rapes, which corresponds to the statistic for the false reporting of other types of crime in general. But rape false reports are destructive in vast disproportion to their numbers. First, because anytime someone is intentionally
accused of a crime he did not commit, the collective sense of fairness and justice is perverted. Second, the small number of false allegations call into question the veracity of the overwhelming number of genuine claims. And third, that 5 percent figure is somewhat inflated by the fact that rape is a vastly underreported crime to begin with—as all the “silent victims” I’ve met at public appearances and received mail from attest.

For trained investigators and prosecutors, there are ways of cutting through bogus accusations to the truth. It’s worthwhile examining them both to underscore that these lies are difficult to sustain—and if you’re caught, the false report is a crime in itself—and to stress that the cases good detectives and district attorneys bring to trial are legitimate.

What are some of the more common motives behind false rape allegations? Extortion, as we originally suspected in the shopping mall case, is clearly one of them, or similarly attempting to blackmail a politician, a celebrity, or a wealthy person. Another motive is retribution—wanting to get back at someone and destroy his reputation. A woman might falsely allege rape to explain her presence where she shouldn’t have been, such as with a man other than her husband. A variation of this is lying to avoid punishment—from the law or parents or other authorities—for having broken curfew, for example, or to explain away sex with a boy you’ve been forbidden to see.

These false allegations are all pretty unusual, and the only reason we’re considering them here is because of the effect they have on true allegations. What we do see more often, and what is more complex to deal with, is an essentially true story that has been exaggerated or embellished, often for a similar set of motives.

Linda Fairstein tells the story of a sixteen-year-old
high school student who actually was raped, but not under the circumstances she ìnìtìally claimed. She reported that she had come in to Washington Square Park in Manhattan from her home in the suburbs for an afternoon rally staged by some NYU students in support of the legalization of marijuana. From there she was abducted at knifepoint by a homeless man, who forced her onto the subway, to the Upper West Side, where he then took her to his “home” among a large outcropping of rocks in Riverside Park. That was where he assaulted her, still threatening her with the knife. A uniformed police officer found her wandering around dazed, with her clothing dirty and torn. She identified her attacker, who was picked up almost immediately at the site of the attack. He did not deny that he had had sex with her, but claimed it was consensual and that he and she were actually friends—a common defense.

The medical examination indicated that the young woman had indeed had sexual intercourse and that it had been brutal. There was enough terror in her rendition and a sufficient level of detail to make Fairstein’s associate believe that she had been raped in a life-threatening situation.

But as with the story of the woman at the suburban shopping mall, certain things were troublesome. For one, the abduction would have to have taken place in broad daylight, in a crowded park with a lot of police present. When the stated purpose of the rally has to do with marijuana, how difficult is it to figure out that in addition to all the uniforms, there are going to be a bunch of undercover cops hanging around, too? Are you going to take a chance on abducting someone at knifepoint in that setting when it would be so much easier in any number of venues just a few blocks away? Then there is the subway ride, which covered a hundred city blocks. Because of the concerns for
violence, New York subway trains are pretty well patrolled. What are the chances no officer or passenger would notice anything unusual during the entire trip uptown?

Fairstein decided to question the victim herself. She told the young woman they all believed she had been raped, but if any part of her story was shown to be untrue, even a part that seemed inconsequential to her, it would undermine the entire account in the jury’s mind and the rapist would end up looking like the victim.

Then it came out. Not surprisingly, her parents were against her attending this rally. She had met the defendant there, and over several hours, they had struck up an acquaintanceship. He told her he had some marijuana stashed at his place uptown, and if she accompanied him there, he’d give her some and they could share the profits from selling the rest. He promised to get her back to Grand Central Station in time for her train back home. So she left the park with him voluntarily, got on the subway with him voluntarily, and went into Riverside Park with him voluntarily. Once they were amidst the large rocks, away from other people for the first time, she saw the knife. He threatened her with it for the next hour as he brutalized her.

Unquestionably, this young woman had been the victim of a violent sex crime. Underlying her entire fabricated story was the fear of her parents’ reaction—that she would lose their trust and they would severely punish or restrict her because of her actual behavior and poor judgment. If she could convince them that she hadn’t done anything “wrong,” that everything that had happened was forced upon her, then the only thing they could blame her for was going to the rally in the first place.

Fairstein tried to convince her that her mother and
father were overwhelmingly relieved she was alive and safe, that any punishment they might impose would be meaningless compared to what she’d already suffered. Fairstein also told her client she would break the news of what had actually happened to them and make sure there were no lasting recriminations.

Don’t think it is just naive teenagers hoping to avoid their parents’ anger who get themselves into these kinds of situations. We’ve seen more than one case of a mature man and woman, having an affair in a hotel room, being accosted by an intruder who then ties up the man and rapes the woman. You can imagine the impulse to fabricate extra details to that story to get yourself where you need to be with your spouse—or your children. But like a totally false allegation, it is likely to blow up in the face of the perpetrator, and at the worst possible moment.