The truth about that March night is known only to the two people who were there, the woman and the man she has accused of rape, William Kennedy Smith. As of last week, Palm Beach officials had yet to bring charges; their slowness raised new questions about the thoroughness of the investigation (page 32). Whatever the eventual outcome, the Kennedy case has already focused public attention on a mounting controversy over privacy in rape cases. It is a deeply emotional issue that divides journalists, law-enforcement officials, feminists and rape victims themselves. Says University of Texas sociologist E. Mark Warr: “Ultimately what you have here is a conflict between two worthy goals–protecting personal privacy and changing social attitudes.”
Rape is the most intimate of crimes; it is the dark terror in a woman’s heart as she crosses an empty parking lot. It is also the only violent crime that tarnishes the victim as well as the criminal. “There is a historical tradition that victims are viewed as damaged goods,” says Mary Koss, a University of Arizona psychologist. “Rape first became a crime to protect the property rights of the father whose daughter had been raped.” And there is still a widespread belief that the victims may have asked for it. “If a man is mugged, they don’t talk about what he was wearing,” says Mitzi Vorachek of the Houston Area Women’s Center. Women say they are made to feel guilty until proven innocent, as though they have somehow encouraged their attackers by looking attractive–or perhaps by just being female.
Those who oppose naming names say that honoring a victim’s privacy avoids the potential stigma of public exposure. With only a few exceptions, news organizations have kept names secret–a position that has wide public support. A NEWSWEEK POII found that 77 percent of those surveyed think the media should not disclose rape victims’ names. And 86 percent believe that disclosure would discourage women from reporting the crimes. But even before the Palm Beach case, there was a growing movement to push aside the shroud of secrecy as a way of removing the stigma of rape. Last year, when The Des Moines Register published the story of a rape victim with her consent, the paper earned professional praise (and, earlier this month, a Pulitzer Prize) for bringing the subject out into the open. A few other news organizations saw the Register series as a catalyst for rethinking their own policies, and rape was discussed at editors’ conventions. The massive publicity surrounding the Central Park jogger trial tempted some news executives to break with tradition. But in the end only a couple of small newspapers published her name. Mainstream newspapers and television stations maintained her anonymity.
The Palm Beach story elevated the issue to the front page. In the last few weeks, the newsstand allure of the Kennedy name and the decadent upper-crust backdrop have sharpened the public appetite for information on the case. The first American paper to disclose the woman’s name, the racy tabloid the Globe, explained its decision by referring to earlier reports in sensational British papers like the Sunday Mirror. Then editors of establishment news organizations (including The Des Moines Register) started playing follow-the-leader, even though the leader was a scandal sheet from a supermarket checkout rack (page 28). NBC began its report with a story on the Globe, and the Times said it was weighing in because of NBC. This prompted one rape victim, University of Southern California law professor Susan Estrich, to compare the media to toddlers misbehaving because their sandbox buddies had done so. NBC News president Michael G. Gartner said his decision was based in part on the greater good of removing rape’s stigma. The short-term consequences will be “extraordinarily difficult for this generation,” he conceded, “but it may perhaps help their daughters and granddaughters.”
Most news organizations, including NEWSWEEK, decided to withhold the woman’s identity. At WBZ-TV, NBC’s Boston affiliate, station officials blotted the report out of the network news, in keeping with its “longstanding policy not to use the names of rape victims and to protect them from any unnecessary publicity,” explained spokesperson Kim Harbin. But Boston viewers of NBC heard the whole story the next morning on the “Today” show, which is broadcast live and can’t be edited.
Women’s groups are split on the wisdom of invading a victim’s privacy. Some agree that secrecy adds to the shame. “It would probably be better to identify the victim regularly in all cases,” says Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, director of the Women’s Studies Program at Emory University in Atlanta. “What we’re talking about is a crime of violence,” just like murder. Some say if the accused rapist is identified (as Smith was, almost from the start), then, in fairness, the victim should be named as well.
Other feminists think disclosure has a chilling effect. “What is happening to this alleged victim is a feminist nightmare,” says Los Angeles attorney Gloria Allred. “It is what we feared would happen if names were disclosed. It’s the survivor being placed on trial. . . I think it’s enough to put fear in the hearts of other rape survivors, to make them think about proceeding with charges if their names will end up in the newspapers.” There is justification for her concern. A recent study by the Senate Judiciary Committee found that fewer than one in 10 rapes is reported to the police. A committee aide predicted that if victims were routinely identified, that percentage would drop to one in 200.
Law-enforcement officials say the Palm Beach case may have already had repercussions. A key witness in an Oakland, Calif., trial threatens that if her name or picture is published, she will drop charges against a man she alleges had sex with her without telling her he was HIV-positive. The man, William Lucas Barker, is an exconvict who police said had vowed to “take all the women I can with me before I die.” Though Barker is thought to have infected other women, the 22-year-old witness is the only one who has agreed to testify. But now she’s having second thoughts. “She doesn’t want her mother or friends to know,” says Lt. Craig Stewart of the Oakland police. If her identity becomes public, “she’ll drop the whole thing and he will walk out and do it again.”
People who oppose printing names say that a victim’s emotional state is fragile for months, even years, after the attack. Experts say that 60 percent of rape victims experience posttraumatic stress syndrome, the highest percentage of any crime victims. A Baltimore study found that rape victims suffered more nervous breakdowns than victims of any other crime; 20 percent tried to commit suicide. Forced public exposure can make a woman feel violated a second time. “You’re re-creating the trauma of the rape,” says Veronica Ryback, director of the Rape Crisis Center at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital. “You’re taking away that person’s control of the situation. That reincites the feelings of helplessness and powerlessness that essentially mirror how she felt during the rape.”
In one of the most notorious rape cases of the past decade, a woman was assaulted by four men at a New Bedford, Mass., bar called Big Dan’s. The movie “The Accused” was loosely based on the 1983 attack. A local talk-show host disclosed the victim’s name. Although that was the only public disclosure, the consequences for her were disastrous, says Debra Robbin, executive director of the New Bedford Women’s Center. The victim moved to Florida, where she died in a car crash that friends believe was actually a suicide. “She felt very maligned, very discredited and very unprotected,” says Robbin. “It greatly increased the stress trauma on her and her family.”
As a matter of law, there isn’t much protection for rape victims outside the courtroom. Rarely can the defense disclose some potentially damaging details of a victim’s life. Newspapers and television operate without such restrictions; only Florida, South Carolina and Georgia have laws preventing the media from disclosing victims’ names. “There is this awful almost compulsion … to discredit the victim,” says Fredrica Gray, executive director of Connecticut’s Permanent Commission on the Status of Women and a rape victim herself. “That’s why victims don’t come forward. That’s why it’s a crime of silence. "
Complaints about The New York Times profile of the Palm Beach woman focused on the tone of the piece as well as the disclosure of her name. The story discussed the accuser’s “wild streak” in high school, her mother’s divorce and remarriage, and her barhopping in Palm Beach. A reporter even peeked into the window of her daughter’s bedroom to discover that one of the volumes on the bookshelf was “Two-Minute Bible Stories.” Such Peeping Tomism is generally considered the province of more freewheeling publications. Even National Enquirer editor Iain Calder chose not to publish the name. “If she had been a former Nazi prison guard or a happy hooker, I could see it,” he says. “This was just gossip.”
Some critics suggest that if the Palm Beach woman’s background had been a little less colorful, she might have been spared such tawdry scrutiny. The Central Park jogger–who had degrees from Wellesley and Yale and a job in investment banking–was consistently portrayed as beyond reproach. In contrast, the Palm Beach woman is perceived as “some sort of arriviste, " says Martha Howell, director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University. “It’s possible to imagine she’s using her sexuality for social advancement.”
The nature of the attack also plays a role in how the victim is perceived. The Central Park jogger was assaulted by a gang of strangers; the Palm Beach woman willingly went back to the Kennedy compound after midnight. Victims of “acquaintance rape” are often viewed less sympathetically than victims of stranger rape, although their psychic wounds are just as profound. “The victim in this case is viewed as the victimizer,” says Katha Pollitt, a New York feminist writer. “A lot of people think that if you go back to a man’s house after meeting in a bar, you’re on your own.”
Colleges have taken the lead in countering that misperception. “Ten years ago people wouldn’t have thought of turning in an assailant they knew,” says University of Maryland associate professor Shirley Damrosch, who has studied rape. “But on university campuses, there’s a new consciousness that this is a crime and the assailant should not escape unscathed.” Schools around the country now routinely include discussions of acquaintance rape in their orientation sessions and have set up special procedures for helping victims.
In both acquaintance and stranger rape, psychiatrists say confidentiality is a key to recovery. Dr. Nada Stotland, chairman of the American Psychiatric Association’s committee on women, compares disclosure to organ donations. “We have the highest regard for people who donate organs,” she says. “Yet we have the most absolute rules against forcing anyone to do it … We shouldn’t be coercing anyone to make their identity public.” Because of the stigma of rape, forced disclosure is comparable to the recent practice of “outing” closet homosexuals by gay activists. “Both are things nobody should have to hide,” says Carol Sternhell, director of women’s studies at New York University. “But you can’t just drag somebody out.”
Rape victims who choose to go public-often with the help of counseling–say openness helps their healing process. Kim McSherry of Houston was raped last year in her apartment. When her assailant returned to her home and started leaving messages on her window (“You snitched, but I still love you”), she fought back by plastering thousands of posters with a police composite around her neighborhood. Within 24 hours the 22-year-old man was arrested. “You have to report the crime and overcome the trauma and the unbelievable depravity that comes with the crime,” McSherry says. “It makes you feel like a worm. It’s so important to stand up and say, ‘I’m not a worm. I’m a human being with integrity and I will fight back’.”
In some cases, victims who “come out” of their own volition turn into activists. The woman in The Des Moines Register series, Nancy Ziegenmeyer, has become an advocate for rape victims’ rights. She believes that going public should always be the victim’s choice, not the media’s. She is currently lobbying in the Iowa Legislature for a bill that would prevent police from releasing names of alleged victims until formal charges are filed. “All it is,” says Ziegenmeyer, “is a little bit of time [for the victim] to tell her husband, her family and to get the help she desperately needs.” Time helps, Ziegenmeyer says, but recovery is a slow, continuing process and hers is not yet complete. She was attacked in 1988 while sitting in her car outside a Des Moines community college where she was cramming for a real-estate license exam. She told her story after reading a column by Register editor Geneva Overholser encouraging rape victims to speak out. “I have gotten over the physical trauma that Bobby Lee Smith did tome,” she says. “But I live everyday with the emotional trauma.”
Women willing to speak out, like Ziegenmeyer, remain the exception. “It takes some courage to change social attitudes,” says Warr, the University of Texas sociologist. “It will take the courage of some women who have been raped to reduce the social stigma of that crime.” Victims can become survivors-and it’s more than just a change in terminology. “It can be a very empowering and liberating experience,” says Judith Herman of the Victim of Violence Program at Cambridge Hospital in Massachusetts. “We see survivors drafting legislation, volunteering at the rape-crisis centers, doing public speaking.”
After her story appeared in the Register, Ziegenmeyer became a beacon for other women. “I received letters from women who had been raped 30, 40 years ago and had never told anyone,” she says. One woman wrote her once, and then, months later, wrote again. The second time, she found the courage to sign her name.
The good gray lady turned a little yellow last week, in more ways than one. Reasonable people can differ over naming rape victims in print, but virtually everyone in American journalism now agrees that the nation’s most highly regarded newspaper has egg on its face. The New York Times’s April 17 story about the background of the Palm Beach accuser was criticized as lurid and irrelevant by scores of staffers at a rambunctious in-house meeting. Even worse was the paper’s official explanation of its decision to print the woman’s name-“that NBC’s nationwide broadcast took the matter of her privacy out of their [the editors’] hands.” That looked like a cowardly cop-out. NBC, in turn, had based its decision partly on the use of the name by The Globe, a seamy supermarket tabloid, which itself was trying to match the London Sunday Mirror.
Journalists from around the country flung rotten tomatoes. “The fact that another media organization runs a name is the worst of all reasons for doing it yourself,” said Tim McGuire, managing editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “What we have is a case where a supermarket tabloid edited the most influential paper in America,” charged William Woo, editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko, noting that the Times and NBC News make frequent use of anonymous sources in other situations, called their decision “galloping journalistic idiocy.”
Unfortunately, the coverage of Kitty Kelley’s book and the Kennedy scandal are only the most recent examples of how the very structure of American journalism is being turned on its head. Obviously, some elements of these and similar stories deserve to be reported; others don’t. The judgments can be complex, especially under the pressure of deadlines. It’s the process by which the news itself is defined that seems to have been warped. In the great media food chain, the lower links are now often determining what everyone else will eat.
At the bottom of that chain, of course, lie the tabloids, which provide camouflage for more reputable news organizations. In its first story on April 5, NBC used the tabloid wars as its excuse for reporting about the Kennedy scandal. Slipping juicy details into print dressed up as media-circus stories is an old and slightly cynical tradition (NEWSWEEK is not immune). The difference today is that the tabloids are not just a shroud for motives but almost a seal of approval. In an era where the marketplace is king, their huge circulations often speak louder than their reputations. The message is: ignore the dirt and end up in the dust.
In a narrow sense, naming names is not about selling. “This is going to hurt us,” says Tom Brokaw, and the polis bear him out. Instead, the issue is about accountability for one’s own decisions. Here, NBC News is on half-solid ground and the Times in deeper water. Michael Gartner, president of NBC News and a First Amendment purist, makes several arguments for naming the woman. Right or wrong, the main one is at least based on principle: “I’m in the business of disseminating information, not withholding it. Names add credibility; they round out a story.”
By contrast, Gartner’s other major argument–that “the woman’s name was known in the community”–is totally irrelevant to the national viewership of NBC News, which didn’t know and didn’t necessarily want to know. Reporters, local gossips and supermarket tabloids are aware of lots of things that have no business on the nightly news. But Gartner, who has been arguing for disclosing the names of rape victims for years, felt so strongly that he even mentioned the woman’s name when appearing on ABC’s “Nightline.” ABC, which has not identified the woman, replaced her name with the word “unintelligible” in the transcript of the broadcast.
Feelings ran high inside both NBC and the Times. More than 100 Times staffers signed a petition expressing “outrage” over the naming of the woman, the tone of the article and the paper’s failure (until now) to gear up a comparable story on William Smith. But most troublesome of all is the Times’s policy, which seems to be to protect the privacy of the victims of sex crimes unless others are violating it. As assistant managing editor Allan M. Siegal explains it, “Every single day we asked how much privacy does that person have left. Could she move to another city? She still could after the British [tabloid] and the Globe, but we decided after NBC used her picture that she no longer had that possibility.”
That is ridiculous. Did viewers sit at home and write down her name? Print has a permanence that TV does not, which means that the Times was actually contributing mightily to the invasion of privacy that its policy is meant to avoid. Arguments about “honesty,” “credibility” “stigma”–anything is better than claiming peer pressure as a reason for printing names. For days the paper was lambasted by critics who compared it to a child. And it responded like one. In classic Times form, executive editor Max Frankel, who made the decision, was unavailable for interviews, while the reporter on the story, Fox Butterfield, was prevented by management from defending his own work.
At some point soon, a critical mass of coverage could be reached where large numbers of news organizations use the accuser’s name and picture. Then Siegal’s argument that “the horse is out of the barn” might make some sense. Unfortunately, the Times made its decision far in advance of the woman becoming a household name. For now, anyway, she could move to another city, unrecognized by either the public or the pawing press.
JONATHAN ALTER
RIGHT TO PRIVACY
Most Americans believe that news organizations shouldn’t print the names of rape victims.
Should the names of rape victims be reported by the news media like the names of other crime victims?
19 % Yes 77% No
Do people tend to think negatively of a woman if they know she has been raped?
57% Yes 38% No
Does reporting the names of women who have been raped show that society does not attach special shame to being a rape victim, and treats male and female victims of crime equally? Or does it make a special hardship for women?
9% Equal treatment 86% Special hardship
Do you think that a woman is more likely or less likely to report being raped if she knows her name will be made public, or doesn’t it make much difference?
4% More likely to report 86% Less likely to report 8% Doesn’t make much difference
Is a rape victim partly to blame if she was provocative with a man or went off with him? Or doesn’t this matter if the woman finally says no to sexual relations?
26% Partly to blame 68% Doesn’t matter
From the NEWSEEK Poll of April 18-19,1991
