False Witness (6 page)

In point of fact, Sanderalee’s political savvy was very shallow and could not stand the test of intelligent interrogation. That makes more astonishing the fact of her tremendous popularity not only with the public, who loved her fresh, daring, what-the-hell-do-I-care attitude, but the lineup of eager potential guests who ranged from Secretary of State to hopeful candidates for the state assembly. An appearance on Sanderalee’s
Let’s Take a Stand,
11:15 to midnight, five nights a week, guaranteed more public exposure and more followup press and weekly magazine coverage than any publicist could possibly arrange.

During the last six to eight months, Sanderalee’s interests had veered sharply toward a fascination with terrorism as a viable weapon against intolerable conditions of life affecting vast numbers of people.

Her guide, instructor, mentor, was a fully qualified Ph.D. in Education: Dr. Regg Morris, a highly visible, clearly vocal, outspokenly determined advocate of the aims, policies and methods of the PLO. Although he kept carefully in the background, and was glimpsed only rarely on the subsequent TV special, it was public knowledge that the force behind Sanderalee Dawson’s highly publicized, filmed, photographed, magazined and editorialized trip into Arafat-land had been set up, guided, managed and arranged by Dr. Regg Morris.

On her ninety-minute TV special,
Search for Peace in the Mid-East,
we were treated to the sight of Sanderalee Dawson, radiant in the hot dusty sunlight, carelessly dressed in her chic Ralph Lauren western outfits, dancing and gun-waving joyously with Arafat and his band of forty machine-gun–armed thieves; slinging an unwelcome, unholy arm around semiveiled women, probably damning them forever into unimaginable hells for being photographed over and over again with this strangely vibrant, highly excited American woman with pale green eyes. Willing male teachers, grinning boyishly—they were mostly teenagers—instructed her in marksmanship and helped her to sight her automatic rifle. Painted on the targets were the familiar, graspingly evil, large-nosed, Zionist-Jew thugs, and as she fired her weapon, jumping with the kick to her shoulder, as she slaughtered the enemy of the peoples, there was great joy among the Palestinians.

On the basis of her ten-day visit, spent hopping, dancing, shooting, embracing, cheering, being photographed touching and singing with groups of dirty little children with runny noses, and seething at the refusal of the Israeli government to grant her status other than that of a visiting tourist or working journalist (she felt herself to be an ambassador-at-large, at least), Sanderalee Dawson was metamorphosed into a full-bodied, strong-voiced advocate of Palestinian rights.

She sat and listened, indifferently, to representatives of our government explaining the delicate situation, the balance of rights, emotions, the quiet, unpublicized talks that were continuously going on; the Camp David accords; the tremendous difficulties and subtleties involved. Finally her eyes hardened into glass that sparkled with passion and fury at her startled guest as she reverted to Sanderalee-perfect, bell-ringing oratory that by its force and delivery, if not by its content, devastated her victim. She managed it all with a superb sense of timing. After all, the television studio was her home ground and she knew how to get the final word in, the unanswerable accusation, the cutting remark that destroyed all that had gone before. As soon as the cameras were off, a good-natured, smiling, gracefully light-handed Sanderalee would help her furiously impotent, insulted, besmirched guest to disengage himself from wire and microphone.

She had one or two bad days, even with the control she was able to exert. One of her most controversial shows, which had brought forth the most mail, the highest ratings, the most anger, the most vicious amusement, had been her straight forty-five-minute interview with a former newsman who had written a book documenting Arab-Israeli relationships over a period of twenty years.

The newsman tried to draw parallels and to explain differences between the two peoples. He was earnest and seemingly nonpartisan except for his abhorrence of terrorism.

Sanderalee Dawson seemed hardly to listen to him; failed to respond to any of his gentle questions. She played with the rings on her fingers and the bracelets on her arm, with the scarf around her neck, with the long silk of her shoulder-length hair. She waited. At the last possible moment, when even her crew thought Sanderalee had been bested and silenced at last by a kindly, well-informed, eminently qualified and universally respected journalist, Sanderalee smiled at her guest, and everyone who knew her tensed and waited. Her producer, in the control room, bit down on his thumb, hard.

“Tell me something, Philip,” Sanderalee spoke softly, turned directly to her guest, leaned forward as he regarded her politely,
“you’re a Jew,
aren’t you?”

There was a split second left. Sanderalee turned full-face into the camera, shrugged expressively and in a hard, cold, deadly tone she said,
“I rest my case.”

Cut to black.

A followup to this incident was carried in the
New York Post
and was also acknowledged by the journalist himself. As soon as the screen went dead, there was a stunned silence in the studio, a total lack of sound or movement. Sanderalee looked up, startled, to see the stricken face of her guest, the deathly white complexion of her director, the frozen positions of the crew.

“Oh, my God,” Sanderalee had said, rushing to her guest’s side, “oh my God, Philip, I’m so sorry how that came out. It was just the ... the absolutely theatrically
perfect
thing to say. You know I love and respect you, my dear.”

The funny part was, the journalist believed her and later stated that she was a woman totally innocent of the possible effects of what she said or did.

J
AMESON WHITNEY HALE LACED
his long white fingers over his long flat stomach. His custom-made three-piece suit hiked up slightly at the ankle as he stretched his basketball player’s legs, then repositioned himself thoughtfully. He was an aristocratic-looking man; genes did, indeed, tell. Fifty-eight years of good clean living and earnest dedication to the task at hand had carved themselves on his classic features: in another time and place, he’d have made a nifty king.

“Do you think,” he asked me carefully, “there is a possibility that this attack was politically motivated? Or do you think that it’s just a case of out-and-out sexual assault?”

Automatically the response rushed from my lips. “Sexual assault, in and of itself, has been a politically motivated act throughout all of history.”

He frowned at my lapse into the semantics of the women’s movement. Surely, we were far beyond that; his arched eyebrows, his intelligent light brown eyes, showed disappointment.

“Well, you asked me.”

“Really, Ms. Jacobi. I am merely asking you for
an informed guess
in this
specific
case. Are we dealing with a political matter or with a lunatic nut?”

“We are dealing
either
with a politically motivated act
or
with the act of a depraved lunatic nut.”

“Thank you. We’ll see if events justify your initial guess.” He gestured to the neat, systematically stacked case folders on his desk with a shake of his head. He went over to his memo pad and made a check mark, probably next to my name; consulted his wristwatch and then his appointment calendar. “Keep me closely informed. I assume you of course have someone at the woman’s bedside.” I nodded. He walked around his beautiful antique desk, avoiding his genuine leather chairs, stepped lightly on his Oriental rug and led me to the door. “Lynne, good morning.” He peered down at me, frowned. He was a very attentive, critical man. “You should get more sleep, Lynne. You’ve circles under your eyes. Shame about this Dawson woman. Very beautiful, judging from her pictures. Lives it up pretty good, according to the
News.
If one is to believe the
News.
I’ll await your word on her condition.”

I heard the door close softly behind me and found myself in the long marble-floored corridor that led to his assistant’s and his secretary’s offices. It was a softly lit, portrait-lined walk past the former District Attorneys of New York County. Their faces all looked very stern, very masculine and very self-righteous. Some of them had been low-down crooks. Most of them had been honest and decent. I could feel their cold eyes slide over me, then glance at one another in indignation: how dare she aspire to join us? Is there no end to their ambitions?

I thought about Mr. Hale’s remark, “Lives it up pretty good, according to the
News.”
That reminded me of my bone-marrow belief that somewhere engraved in the deepest, darkest recesses of Jameson Whitney Hale’s psyche exists the unalterable conviction impressed on male children the day they are told about female children:
She asked for it.

It is what is in the minds of most male jurors and too often in the conditioned response of female jurors when we deal with rape or sexual assault.

It is not just a street-common, uneducated belief. My gynecologist once gave me, gratis, a physiologically oriented lecture on the impossibility of such a thing as rape (barring a dead or unconscious woman). At some crucial moment,
he told me,
the woman makes a conscious decision to the effect that What the hell, it isn’t worth losing your life over. At that crucial moment,
he told me,
she becomes an active participant in a sexual act, so how the hell could this be rape?
he asked me.

As a Legal Aid attorney for one less than shining and glorious year, I defended against the charge of rape in the ludicrous days when corroboration by a third person was required. So tell me, Johnny, was there anyone else in the dark alley where you took the girl, or were there any windows facing into the clump of bushes, did anybody see what the hell you were doing to her, was there a possible witness? Thank God, then you’ve got nothing to worry about.

Every now and then—not often, but every now and then—to the consternation of my colleagues (after all, a guilty plea is a conviction, is a loss-column item), I would advise the perpetrator, the alleged perpetrator, the defendant, my client, to cop a plea. Say, Yeah, I did
something
to her; we’ll work out what it was later; we’ll bargain it out so you won’t have to spend too much time at Riker’s or upstate; so you won’t be out of action in your alley/park/subway/stairwell for too long. Do you think I really ought to do this, counselor, I mean, after all, if you really look at this in a certain way, it was almost like, ya know, like what the hell was she doing on the street at that time of day/night/morning or on that particular street at any time, day or night, or going into that elevator or that park or that building or that subway station and dressed like she was in a long/short/loose/tight/dress-skirt-slacks, what
right
did she have? It was almost like, you know,
she asked for it.

I was well schooled in the traditional male response to any and all sex crimes against and perpetrated on the female body. Except, of course, where tiny little girls were concerned: they hadn’t yet learned to
ask for it.

I had used the Legal Aid experience the way most young attorneys did: to gain experience, insight, savvy—rather than to serve justice. I applied for a position in the District Attorney’s office when I had learned all there was for me to know on the loser’s side of the fence. My one year among the rapists and the smug, nearly universally defensive reaction of all the men with whom they came in contact, from the arresting officer to attorney to court clerk to judge, taught me that there was an underlying leer and brotherhood summed up in those immortal words:
She asked for it.

T
HE NAME ON BOBBY
Jones’ birth certificate was Michael Bobby Jones; the father’s name: William Arthur Jones; mother’s name: Mary Anne Bobby. Since there were two other boys named Michael Jones at the grammar school he attended, one already called Mike and the other Michael, and since he did not want to end up a Mickey, he opted for the use of his mother’s maiden name. Hence: Bobby Jones.

Bobby Jones grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, doing all those things only Gentile kids in the Midwest did. He played on his high-school baseball team. He marched with his high-school marching band, playing a trumpet as he high-stepped in his school’s uniform. He went skiing in the winter with a bunch of his blond, blue-eyed, well-adjusted pals; went off shooting up deer and rabbits with his dad and big brother, and they actually
ate
what they killed. They had a real fireplace in their small two-story house; a real live Sis who played the piano for them so they could sing Christmas carols and “Onward Christian Soldiers.” He also had a kid brother. Bobby’s father was a small-town “doc”; his uncle was an Assistant State Attorney General. Both men had been decorated heroes in World War II and one of Bobby’s oldest cousins had been killed in Korea.

Bobby’s older brother, Billy Jones, enlisted in the Marines and was sent off to Vietnam even though no one in the family could quite figure out what Vietnam was all about. Two weeks after his family was notified of Billy’s death, Bobby received his last letter ever from his brother. In a cramped and hard to read P.S., his brother told him “Don’t let them get you into this fucking war; it sucks.”

Bobby Jones served in Vietnam for two years and then he came home with his long hair, his captain’s bars, his changed eyes, his foul mouth, his hardened heart, his air of puzzled displacement and hardly contained anguish.

Why did you come to New York, Bobby Jones?

“My hair; my language; my general appearance; my attitudes; my recreational habits. I ... was no longer able to cope with the innocence of Lincoln, Nebraska.”

“And so you went to Columbia Law School?”

“And so I went to Columbia.”

“And so you made the
Law Review.
And then spent a year and a half at a church-funded counseling service for Vietnam vets.”