Remembering the Central Park Jogger

Trisha Meili, better known as the "Central Park Jogger" 

The Central Park Five as teenagers: Heinous, conscienceless criminals, not “victims”: Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Antron McCray
 

By Nicholas Stix

FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, July 13, 2000

Toogood Reports/A Different Drummer/Front Page Mag

July 12, 2000

"I love black women," said a white comedienne recently at an Upper West Side Manhattan comedy club. "You're all so confident. You know what you think and what you want ... and Lordy, Lordy, do you hate me!"

The comic told of how she had once had a black boyfriend. Black women who saw the two together on the subway would shoot looks of unadulterated hatred the woman's way.

The comic spoke a truth that is typically censored by New York's mainstream media. Journalists perpetuate the myth that white and black women are natural allies. But as any New Yorker knows, the majority of American black women hate white women. And so, it would seem, do many black men.

When the news broke of the June 11 "wilding" attacks in Central Park following this year's Puerto Rican Day parade, everyone who was old enough immediately thought of another "wilding" attack in 1989, which had had left a 28-year-old Wall Street executive, known ever since as "the Central Park Jogger," near death.

The two attacks were intimately connected.

On April 19, 1989, a group of up to 50 black and Hispanic Harlem teenagers had planned to go "wilding" in Central Park. Detectives had never heard the term before, which meant going out in wolfpacks and assaulting, and generally terrorizing whites. In the park, the gang split into three separate groups, each of which would lay in wait for, and ambush, white joggers and bicyclists.

One group of eight to twelve 14 and 15-year-old boys chased down the Jogger, who fought furiously. The boys dragged her 200 yards to a secluded place, where they fractured her skull with a plastic-wrapped, four-foot lead pipe, and some large rocks. The boys ripped the Jogger's clothes off of her, tying her hands behind her back with her sweatshirt, gagging her, and taking turns beating, stomping, and raping the unconscious woman, as 75 per cent of her blood oozed into the Central Park grass. They left her with bruises, welts, and wounds literally from head to toe, for dead.

A Nexis search revealed that only one lengthy article following this year's June 11 attack was devoted to recalling the events of that long-ago April night. That article, by Heidi Evans in the June 18 Daily News, was as notable for its omissions, and for one glaring falsehood, as for what it actually recounted.

Evans' article was largely a positive one, focusing on the Jogger's miraculous recovery, her participation in the New York Marathon, her 1997 wedding, and on the charitable foundation she has set up and runs.

It contained one glaring falsehood: "The woman's real name has never been disclosed..." In fact, the Jogger's name was "disclosed" ... and disclosed ... and disclosed.

During her attackers' trial, the Jogger's real name was shouted on busy Manhattan streets, and on live, network TV. Virtually every one of New York City's 1.8 million black residents knew the Jogger's name. Almost none of New York's over four million non-Hispanic white residents knew it.

New York's black newspapers had published the Jogger's name every week, in every single article they ran about the case. White New Yorkers didn't know her name, because mainstream, white-owned newspapers and TV stations refused to divulge it.

The white victim was the object of a relentless, black campaign of lynch mob-style hatred. No matter that her remorseless attackers had all confessed to police, in their parents' presence.

The rapists were perversely turned into victims, and even folk heroes, by American blacks from all walks of life. This was not because blacks believed the boys had been "framed," but because - as would later be the case regarding O.J. Simpson - they were convinced that the boys had committed the heinous acts with which they were charged.

Meanwhile, media and police denied that the attacks had been racially motivated. The mainstream media's non-reporting of blacks' embrace of the rapists and hatred towards the Jogger was duplicated by the academic "race experts" who wrote on the case, most notably Queens College Distinguished Professor of Political Science Andrew Hacker.

The corruption in the treatment and coverage of the Jogger case represented a turning point. People in positions of responsibility and power had been derelict in their duties. We have been paying the price ever since.

Central Park II cannot be properly understood without coming to grips with the story of Central Park I.