NEW YORK CITY: Cops Solve 1994 Rape Of Lesbian Who Had Been Smeared As A Liar By Press And NYPD

The Daily Beast reports:

On an afternoon in late April 1994, a young woman was raped in broad daylight in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Two days later, the biggest columnist in New York City’s biggest newspaper called her a liar.

The woman—black, a lesbian, and an activist—became the target of a vicious smear campaign by a Daily News columnist and sources within the NYPD, who charged that she had made up a “hoax” to advance a political agenda. “I have had the misfortune of being raped twice—once in the park and again in the media,” she told her lawyer, Martin Garbus, after the attack.

Twenty-four years years later, her rapist was identified through DNA evidence, according to the NYPD. On Jan. 8, police told Jane Doe they had a match, with James Webb, a career criminal who’d been sentenced to prison for rape before Jane Doe’s assault. He was arrested and imprisoned again in 1995, for still more sexual assaults and is presently serving 75 years to life in prison.

The false accusations against the victim were featured in Lucky Guy, a Nora Ephron play about that Daily News columnist, Mike McAlary, who went on to win a Pulitzer for his reporting on the NYPD’s brutal assault of Abner Louima. McAlary died of cancer in 1998.