The Washington Post

Morning Mix

Police and a big-time columnist called a woman’s 1994 rape a

‘hoax.’ Here’s why police are now apologizing.

By Meagan Flynn
October 30 at 6:35 AM

She was carrying two bags of groceries and walking through Brooklyn’s Prospect Park during rush
hour one evening when, from behind, she heard a man whisper into her ear. She felt an arm wrap
around her neck. She felt her body being dragged 20 feet up a grassy slope. And then, behind a tree,
just out of view of passersby on the footpath below, she was raped.

The 27-year-old woman, a Yale University graduate and social justice activist, immediately went
searching for police, according to multiple April 1994 accounts in the New York Times and elsewhere.
She managed to flag down a patrol car and report the attack to the officers inside, describing the
assailant as a heavyset, bearded black man wearing a black hat and a leather jacket.

The reported rape had fanned fears in Brooklyn that a serial rapist was on the loose, as the Times
reported; another woman had just been raped on the streets of Manhattan 15 hours earlier.

But two days later, in the pages of the New York Daily News, a hotshot columnist told a much
different story. There was no need for any alarm, columnist Mike McAlary insisted, citing anonymous
police sources. Because the real story, he wrote, was that the rape never happened.

Under the headline “Rape hoax the real crime,” McAlary described the woman as “kind of vocal about
being a lesbian” and said that “all we really know about her is that she has an active imagination.” He
charged that she had made up the rape for attention: It was all part of her plan to give a speech about
being raped at an anti-violence rally organized by the gay community, at least according to
anonymous police.

“The woman, who probably will wind up arrested herself, invented the crime, they said, to promote
her rally,” McAlary wrote.

The rape victim read it. She read the next column, too, in which McAlary again branded her a
“hoaxer.” And she read the one after that, in which McAlary declared in a headline, in the face of
mounting evidence that he was wrong, “I’m right, but that’s no reason to cheer” — still while citing
unnamed police sources.

“She told me then, she was raped twice,” the woman’s attorney, Martin Garbus, told The Washington
Post on Tuesday.
Now, 24 years after Garbus and the woman demanded police apologize for publicly sowing doubt
about her rape in the press and damaging her life and her reputation, the apology has finally come.

On Sunday, New York Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill issued a public apology addressed
directly to the rape survivor. It came months after DNA evidence from semen discovered on her
shorts led to the suspect — a serial rapist who had preyed on at least 10 known victims in New York,
O’Neill said. At the time, the woman, who has remained unidentified as a rape victim, specifically
requested apologies from all those who hurt her reputation in a written statement published by the
Times in January. As she wrote in her statement then: “I paid a terrible, terrible price for my
#MeToo.”

“We know the damage that sexual assaults inflict on survivors,” O’Neill wrote in the apology.
“Compounding that damage with insensitive comments and wild conspiracy theories only further
amplifies the cruelty and injustice of the initial crime itself. For that, I am deeply and profoundly
sorry."

Back in 1994, McAlary’s columns caused outrage from the LGBTQ groups aligned with the victim and
general confusion as police said one thing in public and something else entirely as anonymous
sources in McAlary’s columns.

At the time, McAlary was a boisterous, no-holds-barred columnist known for playing hardball with
sources but maintaining chummy relationships with NYPD’s top brass, dining with them on red meat
at swanky Manhattan joints, New York magazine reported in 1994. During a contract dispute with the
News and the New York Post, he once admitted in court that his ego was “sort of out of control,” the
magazine reported. His editors were so confident in his reporting, the magazine reported, that they
comfortably allowed him to publish columns based entirely on unnamed sources without thinking
twice.

But the 1994 columns presented an unparalleled controversy in his career — so much that writer
Nora Ephron would later feature the controversy in a Broadway play she wrote about McAlary’s life.

The police sources were reportedly telling McAlary that there was no physical evidence or witnesses
to corroborate any of the victim’s claims. No semen, no scratches on her back or bruises around her
neck, no groceries strewn about the crime scene. But just one day after his first column published,
forensic analysts at the crime lab said traces of semen had been found.

Concerned the controversy would deter rape victims from coming forward, then-Police
Commissioner William Bratton called a news conference. He said he was sorry that police leaked
“some thoughts” about the case to reporters, which he described as “unfortunate,” the News reported.
But Bratton said nothing about whether he believed the rape victim’s story — something McAlary
described as “wise” in his next column.

“Stand your ground,” McAlary reported police sources telling him. “The lab is wrong.”
McAlary’s editors stood by his reporting, the News reported — despite a petition from more than 30
News journalists demanding the paper apologize.

Maligned in public, the rape victim sought justice in court, suing the News and McAlary for libel. But
in 1997, a judge sided with the tabloid, finding that McAlary had not acted maliciously or recklessly —
key requirements for libel — because he was only reporting what his sources told him.

“She could have appealed, but she chose not to,” Garbus told The Post. “She just couldn’t live with it
any longer.”

Years went by, and while Garbus said the case had always haunted him, it wasn’t until 2013 that it
seemed to come back to life. He saw an ad for the Broadway play “Lucky Guy” by Ephron, which
followed McAlary’s career in tabloid journalism from the early 1980s up to his 1998 Pulitzer Prize in
commentary, the same year he died of cancer. Garbus went to go see it. Ephron died in 2012 of
complications from the blood disorder myelodysplasia.

“We can all revisit Mike McAlary’s life and death on Broadway thanks to Ephron’s play,” he wrote in a
column for the New York Times the next week. “But who will tell us Jane Doe’s story? . . . I can still
think only of the unlucky woman behind that lucky man."

Garbus said Tuesday that among his readers was a detective at the New York Police Department.
Suddenly, he said, it seemed investigators were interested in the case again — armed this time with
advancements in DNA testing.

Finally, in January of this year, NYPD announced that it had completed the testing on the semen
found on Jane Doe’s shorts. The results showed it belonged to a convicted serial rapist, James
Edward Webb — now serving 75 years to life in New York’s Sing Sing prison.

“I am grateful . . . for the improved forensic technology that, in the intervening years, has allowed us
to affirm — at long last, and beyond the shadow of a doubt — that the Prospect Park survivor
absolutely told the truth,” O’Neill said in his Sunday statement.

“I am deeply saddened by the rift this case created between law enforcement, brave survivors of
sexual assault, and the LGBTQ community, with whom we work so closely each day,” he continued.
“And I want to be clear: We take what happened to the victim of the brutal assault that night in
Prospect Park, and to others every year, extremely seriously. But in this case, we fell short in an
important area: Simple humanity.”

In January, the Daily News editorial board acknowledged that McAlary had “amplified” attacks from
police officials, “causing her further pain."

Webb was arrested for at least 10 sex crimes from 1968 to 1995, the Times reported. In 1995, he was
convicted of raping four women and attempting to rape a fifth. He will not be indicted in this case
because the statute of limitations has expired.
In her statement to the Times in January, the victim wrote, “I’m grateful that someone believed the
four women James Webb raped after he raped me.”

More from Morning Mix:

Honoring Pittsburgh synagogue victims, Mike Pence appears with ‘rabbi’ who preaches, ‘Jesus is the
Messiah’

‘Check your soul’: Matt Drudge slams Fox News hosts over segment on political violence

Police and a big-time columnist called a woman’s 1994 rape a ‘hoax.’ Here’s why police are now
apologizing.

Meagan Flynn
Meagan Flynn is a reporter on The Washington Post's Morning Mix team. She was previously a reporter
at the Houston Chronicle and the Houston Press. Follow 

Be the first to know.

Our award-winning journalists are there when the news breaks.

Try 1 month for $10 $1

Send me this offer

Inside 'Trump Revealed'

Read stories based on reporting for “Trump Revealed,” a
broad, comprehensive biography of the life of the 45th
president.
• Reporting archive: Trump’s financial records,
depositions and interview transcripts