On a balmy night in June 1989, Bernard
Lefkowitz, an investigative journalist and
associate professor in the writing program at
Columbia University, attended the graduation of
the Class of '89 in Glen Ridge, N.J. Less than a
month before, the manicured, upper-middle-class
town had made news when four of its popular
athletes were accused of raping a 17-year-old
retarded girl. The boys, all high school seniors,
lured the girl into the basement of one of their
homes with the promise that if she joined them,
she would be able to go out on a date with their
friend, a boy she idolized. Once there, they
raped her with a broomstick, a baseball bat and
another stick while several other boys cheered
them on. Six in the group eventually left the
basement, but not one tried to stop their friends
or intervene. The next day, a group of 30 boys
tried to convince her to return to the basement
for a repeat performance, but she refused.

The girl -- who had no friends, attended a special
school for retarded children and had long been
the target of jokes and pranks -- did not actively
resist the boys and was reluctant to report the
assault because she regarded them as her friends
and desperately sought their approval. But when
the story finally emerged, many people found the
leafy town's reaction to the rape as stunning as
the attack itself.

"It's such a tragedy," remarked one of the
parents at a graduation party Lefkowitz attended
after the ceremony. It took Lefkowitz a moment
to realize that the man was not talking about the
victim, but about the boys who had raped her.
"They're such beautiful boys and this will scar
them forever."

Eight years and 250 interviews later, Lefkowitz's
book, "Our Guys: The Glen Ridge Rape and the
Secret Life of the Perfect Suburb," is a chilling
examination of the character of the boys and
their town. Lefkowtiz writes that the gang rape --
which town residents euphemistically called the
boys' "alleged misconduct" -- provoked no
community introspection in Glen Ridge. Instead,
adults and fellow students rallied around the
accused athletes -- twins Kevin and Kyle
Scherzer, Christopher Archer and Bryant Grober
-- and dismissed the victim, who had the mental
age of an 8-year-old, as a slut. During the
five-month trial, neighbors donated over $30,000
to the families of the defendants to defray their
legal bills. Rather than exploring the incident with
students, the staff at Glen Ridge High urged
them "not to be judgmental"; the female
superintendent of schools went further and asked
them to "stand by our boys."

Lefkowitz paints a portrait of a town willing to
go to almost any extreme to keep the image of its
community and its favorite sons untarnished. It is
a town that had paid little heed to a 1941 Yale
University study that declared the local high
school placed "too great emphasis on producing
winning teams at the expense of important social
values." In Lefkowitz's surreal picture, parents
seem like mere spectators on the sidelines,
closing their eyes as the behavior of their
"beautiful boys" grows increasingly disturbing
and brutal. Horrible events go ignored and
unpunished by both the boys' own parents and
those of the numerous girls they mistreat along
the way.

The boys' torture of the victim, whom Lefkowitz
calls Leslie Faber, began at the age of 5, when
they convinced her to lick the point of a ballpoint
pen that had been coated in dog feces; by the
time she was 16 and knocked on the door at one
of their homes while selling Girl Scout cookies,
they talked her into letting them stick a hot dog
in her vagina. Students recall one of the boys
openly masturbating through his sweat pants in
class and occasionally fondling his penis openly,
tapping on the shoulders of girls sitting nearby to
make sure they saw. ("There's Kevin, with his
hands down his pants again," sighs a teacher on
one occasion.)

After Lefkowitz piles up enough shocking stories
to convince the reader that these boys and this
town must be an aberration, he produces a
battery of statistics and studies intended to
demonstrate just how much the Glen Ridge story
fits into the classic pattern of gang rape: that elite
groups who tend to be above suspicion --
football and basketball players and fraternity
brothers -- are most likely to be involved in
college rapes, that football and basketball players
are reported for sexual assault 38 percent more
often than the average male college students, that
81 percent of female public school students
report that they have been sexually harassed. Not
only could it happen elsewhere, says Lefkowitz,
it probably has.

The final outrage in the Glen Ridge story came
when justice was at last handed down. Although
three of the four young men were found guilty of
first-degree rape, they were allowed to go free
for years while their cases were appealed. Just
six weeks ago, they received relatively light
sentences. This didn't surprise prosecutor Robert
Laurino, who remarks in the book that sexual
offenders usually receive lighter sentences when
the victim is retarded. Even the judge seemed to
feel that that the damage done to the lives of the
boys outweighed that done to their victim. "If it
hadn't been for that horrible day," writes
Lefkowitz, "they would have been someone's
all-American boys."

Salon spoke recently with Lefkowitz in New
York.

Why were you interested in writing this
book?

One reason was the large number of young men
who were involved in one way or another in this
crime. There were 13 boys in the basement and
seven of them stayed throughout the rape. On
the day after the rape, some 30 boys gathered in
front of the house where the rape had taken
place and passed around the bat and broomstick
that had been used to violate this retarded young
woman as if they were trophies after a sporting
game. And it seemed to me that with such large
numbers of young men involved -- we're talking
about 30 to 40 percent of the males in the high
school graduating class -- this was part of the
larger culture. It wasn't a case of one or two
young men who turned out to be bad apples, but
it was something that reflected the values
embedded in the larger culture.

A second thing was the amount of support that
the defendants of the case, the boys who were
accused, received from the community at large. I
wanted to know why so many people in the
community felt it necessary to support the young
men. And what's important to realize is that
regardless of whether this was a crime, there was
no question about the moral transgression that
had taken place; it wasn't as if this was a gray
area subject to ambiguity. We were talking about
someone with a 49 IQ, someone who had been
targeted for a long time by these young men. So
I wanted to understand something about the
culture that had produced these young men.

And of course, when I began to examine that
culture, I realized that Glen Ridge was not
atypical but reflected the values of communities
across the country. Since the book has been
published, I've gotten hundreds of letters and
phone calls from people who've had similar
experiences with young men who were lionized
in their high schools and communities when they
were growing up. But I saw it as a crucible for
understanding events that occur later such as the
sexual offenses we read about every day in the
papers that are committed by commanders of
military bases, young men at the Citadel,
professional athletes and fraternity members. I
think that when we try to respond to men who
commit crimes when they're in their 20s and 30s,
we're way too late. Their values have been
shaped when they were 12, 13 and 14 years old.
Clearly that was the case with these young men.

You attended the graduation ceremony. What
was it like?

It was in the early evening, and the first thing I
was struck by was what they were wearing. The
young men were dressed in tuxedos and the
young women were dressed in evening gowns
that must have cost $1,000. And a significant
number of them, nearly half the women, were
wearing yellow ribbons on their dresses. I asked
them what they were for, and I was told that
they were in memory of the four young men
who had been arrested a few weeks before on
the charge of rape and had not been allowed to
attend the graduation. This was their way of
recognizing these young men and proclaiming
their loyalty to them.

Another thing that was striking about the
graduation was that there were three
African-American graduates, and one of them
was Charles Figueroa, the only young man in the
school who told his teacher what he had heard
about what had occurred in the basement on
March 1. And when he was called up to receive
his diploma, you could hear the shouts of
"snitch, snitch" go through the audience. He had
broken the code of loyalty -- or, I should say, the
code of silence -- that distinguished this town. He
had done the honorable thing when so many
other young men had not, and yet he was
chastised. There were parties that were held after
the graduation and he decided not to attend any
of them. He was a massive kid, maybe 300
pounds, a football player and a wrestler. In the
book I've written about how he went home and
started to cry. For a long time he was the villain
in the community.

http://www.salon.com/aug97/mothers/guys970813.html