CRY RAPE: THE TRUE STORY OF ONE WOMAN’S HARROWING QUEST FOR JUSTICE BILL LUEDERS (TERRACE BOOKS/UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS)
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Lueders, the news editor for the Madison newsweekly Isthmus, spent six years reporting on Patty’s ensuing odyssey through the justice system. (For eight months in the early 1990s I worked as an intern and writer under Lueders, and some of my first reporting was edited by him.) His first article ran in February 1998. “It was one of the few times in my career that I expected a piece of writing to have a dramatic impact,” he writes. “Police and prosecutors would see what I had found…and reverse course. They would realize…that an actual rape victim was being charged with a crime.” Instead, nothing. He went on to write more than a dozen articles on Patty’s ordeal.
Chicagoans are used to associating the police force with insensitivity and worse. We’ve seen the scars left by alligator clips, read about black boxes, suffocation, electric shock to genitals. And we’re used to the false confessions these tactics produce–false confessions that led to a moratorium on capital punishment in Illinois. Most cops aren’t brutal, but “sensitive” isn’t the first word that comes to mind when speaking of Chicago’s finest. But Madison? Lueders describes the progressive city’s view of itself: “Its schools are better, its politics cleaner, its institutions of justice more just, its response to crime victims more compassionate.” Madison’s reformer police chief adorned his office with portraits of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. If this town can’t put together a good police force, who can?
Three days after its October 1 release date, Cry Rape inspired a Madison city council member to introduce a resolution that would force police to change policies regarding rape victims and have the city pay Patty $35,000 in compensation. The resolution could be voted on later this month. On October 17, due to mounting public pressure, Madison’s current police chief read a formal apology to Patty, nine years after the rape.
