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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. NEXT PAGE | Masturbating in class |
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