I have been wanting to post about the recent story in The New Yorker, A Call for Help, for quite some time. I remember learning about the "Kitty Genovese story" as a kid growing up in suburbia and it had a great impact on me—it really colored my view for quite some time about what it is like to live in the "Big City," where people don't care about each other, where they even turn a deaf ear to the pleas for help from their neighbors in the dark of night when they are fighting for their lives.
Except, it was all a lie. The New York Times got the story completely wrong. According to new accounts of what happened that night, as detailed in The New Yorker article:
Except, it was all a lie. The New York Times got the story completely wrong. According to new accounts of what happened that night, as detailed in The New Yorker article:
The Times story was inaccurate in a number of significant ways. There were two attacks, not three. Only a handful of people saw the first clearly and only one saw the second, because it took place indoors, within the vestibule. The reason there were two attacks was that Robert Mozer, far from being a “silent witness,” yelled at Moseley when he heard Genovese’s screams and drove him away. Two people called the police. When the ambulance arrived at the scene—precisely because neighbors had called for help—Genovese, still alive, lay in the arms of a neighbor named Sophia Farrar, who had courageously left her apartment to go to the crime scene, even though she had no way of knowing that the murderer had fled.And the story goes on and on. Excellent reading and by God a long time in coming. What a travesty to disparage the reputation of an entire neighborhood—our neighbor to the east, Kew Gardens—and our entire City, and just because of the incompetence of one newspaper editor.
The Kitty Genovese murder influenced Alan Moore to write The Watchmen and he depicted the most ludicrous illustration of how he pictured the event going down....I mean he has people standing on balconies (that don't exist in that area) watching it all go down but doing nothing. It always infuriated me since knowing the time the murder took place and the fact that the people on that street often heard commotion due to the bar that's still there, it doesn't surprise me that no one acted on her behalf, they didn't hear it or they thought it was regular spillover activity from the bar.
ReplyDeleteBut they did act on her behalf, that's the whole point. The original account was false.
DeleteIn either case it's all speculation.
Delete"all speculation" ?? You are missing the point. The original speculation off the Times story led to false assumptions and became folk law.
ReplyDeleteI agree it's a lot of speculation. There were inaccuracies that were pointed out in the Times story and no one has come forward to give an accurate first hand account of what happened. In other words, so far no ones knows if people just sat there and didn't react or if people just didn't know what was going on or something in between.
DeleteWell put. No one knows for sure what happened that night. There may have been some truth to how the incident was reported but it was undermined by other parts of the story that didn't add up.
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