I didn't stay for the panel discussion, but I did find the film to be riveting. Directed by Ken Burns, the film documents how detectives in the New York Police Department more or less coerced a false confession out of five teenaged boys in 1989 of raping the woman who has come to be known as the Central Park jogger. (The five are pictured above in a 2012 photo taken by Michael Nagle for The New York Times. A link to a story about the lingering effects of the case and the film is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/11/19/justice-and-the-central-park-jogger-case)
Watching the film sent a series of flashback memories racing through my head. I was a staff writer for The Seattle Times in 1989, and remember feeling a little queasy about how the press coverage of the New York dailies I had so deeply admired unfolded. The police said the boys were guilty and so the press quoted the police, without further ado. That was standard journalistic practice. I was quite young then, as a journalist, a writer, and a person. So I accepted what the New York daily writers did as standard practice. But it didn't feel quite like the story.
I also was reading the novel Eva Luna by Isabel Allende around that time. The basic story line involves a girl who grows up to become a mystical, magical realist storyteller who, living in a police state, uses magical realism to create stories about the truth that contest the truth being delivered by a heavily censored press. While it was never explicitly stated, the novel's narration implied that most of the public -- without actually admitting it -- knew how to separate fact from fiction. I sort of thought, maybe naively believed, that most American readers could make the same distinctions when they read the decisively certain truths being presented about the alleged Central Park jogger's rapists in the oddly inconsistent reports from the boys, if nothing else.
Other memories conjoined in my head, savoring the benefit of historical hindsight: Spike Lee's film "Do the Right Thing" was released in 1989, and many mainstream movie theatres were afraid to screen it, out of a fear that a fictional story that seemed so potentially jarringly real would generate race riots. An African American liberal was running for mayor of Seattle, as was an African American liberal in New York City. Yet, African Americans were seen popularly as whiners responsible for their own lower socioeconomic status in life, or as fitting the widely circulated Reaganesque prototype of the welfare queen.
Later that year, both Norman Rice and David Dinkins were elected the first African American mayors of their respective cities. And, in Seattle, a white-dominant coalition of parents managed to get a referendum on ballots that kept the inner-city -- well, not racially divided because Seattle is remarkably interracial but racially un-mingled at the basic elementary and secondary educational sense. Just another year later, an amateur videomaker captured footage of Rodney King being beaten by Los Angeles police. A year after that, riots erupted across the country after a white-dominant jury held that the police acted in an acceptable manner. And, one year after that, scores of minority youth cheered O.J. Simpson as he eluded police following his alleged involvement in the death of his estranged wife.
Most of these stories are true, even if they seem to be the stuff of fiction. Allowing them to come into a conversation with each other in my own head reminded me of the value of writing and storytelling. The tales that are not going to be told by the mainstream will not ever be told -- unless we tell them ourselves.
The boys all spent time in their late teens and twenties in maximum security prisons. In 2001, the "real rapist" confessed. Public pressure mounted, and the convictions were vacated, restoring to the boys who were now men a sense of personal integrity but not the years of life they had lost. A civil suit against the City of New York remains unresolved.
"It could happen here," muttered my husband, as we left the theatre.
Of course, it could. If there's anything, however, that might forestall that possibility, it might be the power of story.
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