Five boys (let’s call them boys, an interpretive term but more accurate than “wolf pack,” which they were called at the time) were eventually interrogated, coerced into confessing, tried and formally convicted for the attack on Meili. The sixteen-year-old, Korey Wise, had not been arrested but simply accompanied his friend to the police station. He was interrogated anyway, and said blandly to police and prosecutors on videotape, “This was my first rape. This … I never did this before. This will be the last time doing it.” The words are startling, at once horrific and so remote from the most elementary understanding of the world of crime and consequences that they ought to have provoked skepticism among at least some substantial segment of the professional journalists who were focused on these dreadful events. Who is this kid, and what causes him to speak this way? As a class, journalists were not skeptical. Even when it was known that Wise was developmentally disabled, that he had made the statement after spending many hours in the station alone under pressure by authorities, they were not skeptical. They had effectively tried and convicted Korey Wise and the others before they knew their names. Pete Hamill of the New York Post, a dean of big-city column writing, wrote the prosecution’s opening statement promptly after the attack:
They were coming downtown from a world of crack, welfare, guns, knives, indifference and ignorance. They were coming from a land with no fathers. … They were coming from the anarchic province of the poor. And driven by a collective fury, brimming with the rippling energies of youth, their minds teeming with the violent images of the streets and the movies, they had only one goal: to smash, hurt, rob, stomp, rape. The enemies were rich. The enemies were white.
The Central Park Five, as they came to be known, were vindicated in 2002, after a man doing time for rape and murder called Matias Reyes confessed to being the sole perpetrator and matched the DNA found at the scene. (None of the five had.) It would be ten years, following a book by Sarah Burns in 2011 and a TV documentary in 2012, before the mass public met the record of trampled justice. In 2014 the city settled a civil rights lawsuit with the five for $41 million. Not until DuVernay’s dramatic series, though, did the public really see the boys who became men in captivity, their families before the storm, their fathers and mothers, and the human dimensions of what happened to them—especially to Korey Wise, who alone was charged as an adult, tried as an adult and punished in multiple terrible ways in adult jails and prisons for almost fourteen years. The same institutional media that formerly had aped the police and prosecution, scornful of defense, now, thirty years later, embraced the emotional power of DuVernay’s theatrical recreation.
They could not, however, sit with the weight of damaged life left by the storm and take its full measure. Editorialists evaded their own profession’s responsibility and turned their fire on a former assistant district attorney, the police and Donald Trump, deserving but easy targets. What had been a moral panic—“the ultimate shriek of alarm,” as then-governor Mario Cuomo put it, by institutions, individuals and social forces (overwhelmingly white) over crime (typed as black)—was being resolved in the stock manner of moral panics: with enemies and a pointing of fingers by the righteous pure. Former ADA-turned-novelist Linda Fairstein, whose zealotry as head of the sex crimes unit had fueled her to abandon prosecutorial ethics in persecuting the boys, and who maintains that she, her office and the police did nothing wrong, has been denounced, shunned and marked for silencing, primitive forms of social discipline now deemed progressive. Although DuVernay has stated that her objective was to reveal the many impacts of structures of injustice, the review site Roger Ebert conveyed the tenor of much of the crowd’s political response: “eliciting empathy and a desire for justice, [the drama] demonizes the right people and demands your fury.” The storm, the scandal, has yet to be fully comprehended.
The next two stories lie outside the borders of critical historical assessment. Unfolding in the present, they exist in the region of raw emotion, the region of danger and fury. Here be demons.
Between January and the end of June 2019, a defense attorney was the subject of a public row over not only the presumed guilt of a notorious defendant but, in particular, his own guilt by association. In January, Ronald Sullivan, a Harvard Law School professor and celebrated attorney in both high-profile and obscure cases, joined the legal team representing Harvey Weinstein in a pending trial on charges of sexual assault and rape in New York City. Soon after, a group of Harvard students, along with their newspaper, the Crimson, erupted in protest—among other things, spray-painting “Down w Sullivan!” on Winthrop House, where Sullivan and his wife, Stephanie Robinson, lived with their family and served as faculty deans since 2009. More than 300 students signed a petition calling for their removal; supporters gathered 1,000 signatures for them to stay, which was rarely mentioned. In March, the dean of Harvard College announced a “climate review,” an investigation typically initiated in Title IX sexual harassment cases, to determine if Sullivan and Robinson’s continued presence at Winthrop endangered or otherwise harmed students. Anyone providing information was guaranteed anonymity. Fifty-two members of the Law School faculty wrote an open letter supporting their colleagues. The Black Law Students Association stated that Harvard should be capable of addressing sexual violence and supporting victims without “scapegoat[ing] Professor Sullivan.” The Association of Black Harvard Women denounced him. In May, protests escalated, as did the language of alarm. An article in the Crimson alleged that a “culture of fear” had pervaded the house over much of Sullivan and Robinson’s tenure as deans. Seven former and current Winthrop staff spoke of a “climate of hostility and suspicion,” a “threatening environment,” a “toxic culture.” “We’re all obviously terrified,” said Madeleine Woods.
No complaint had ever been lodged against the deans for failure to care for students, or inattention to sexual violence, or condoning threats or violence. Such a complaint is not required under Title IX, which governs relations on US campuses today, and upon which federal funding may depend. The case was complicated by the traditional role of house master (the old name for faculty dean) and the roles of professor and lawyer—the expectation of nurturance versus the expectation of intellectual challenge versus the expectation of vigorous defense, and the question of whether those expectations must conflict. It was complicated by old complaints against Sullivan and Robinson by former staff at the house—that they acted like bosses, and not very nice ones. Some Harvard faculty insist the specter of Weinstein was mainly a coincidence. In the white heat of the moment, though, the specter predominated, and complaints took on the coloration of horror. On May 10, Sullivan withdrew from Weinstein’s defense, citing scheduling conflicts; the next day, he and Robinson were sacked as faculty deans effective June 30. The Crimson described student activists as “shocked and excited” over what one characterized as a victory “against rape culture.”
Weinstein had not faced criminal prosecution for the accusations by Hollywood actresses that sparked the #MeToo phenomenon in 2017, so the New York case invariably symbolized a reckoning for all his alleged bad acts. It became a symbolic substitute as well for all the actions never taken against all the accused whose names have tumbled through public space since #MeToo emerged, including and maybe especially Donald Trump. This substitution effect typifies cases involving public demons. Since Weinstein is a public demon, his case raises a challenge that is central to the case of every hated defendant, a challenge that should have been decisively met in 1989 in New York but was not, and to which Sullivan adverted when he told students, “It is particularly important for this category of unpopular defendant”—one who is seen as “guilty, … vile or undesirable”—“to receive the same process as everyone else, perhaps even more important.”
Sullivan was being a teacher in that moment. His statement was an attorney’s affirmation of the principle of equality under the law, but as a former public defender and a longtime advocate winning freedom for the wrongfully convicted, he knows that in practice “everyone else” is not an undifferentiated category, and the accused don’t all “receive the same process.”