The issues that arose in reporting on rape and other sex crimes were especially difficult for journalists because of competing privacy and fairness concerns. Like its network counterparts, ABC News had struggled its way to a set of policies with respect to rape coverage over a period of many years; but in the larger journalism world, there was still uneasiness, inconsistency, and controversy over these policies.

Until the 1970s and 1980s, rape victims were commonly named in press reports—their reputations, lifestyles, and sexual tastes laid out for discussion and appraisal. As a result, many rape victims—fearing ruin in the press—kept silent about their attacks. In her 1992 book, Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes , Helen Benedict argues that in these years, reporters fundamentally misunderstood rape and fell into the trap of viewing rape victims either as paragons of chastity or as promiscuous manipulators who invited assault. ^[9]

In the 1970s, the women’s movement fought to change the general understanding of rape. Studies emerged showing that—contrary to the commonly-held view—women seldom fabricated rape charges. Gradually, most print and broadcast media agreed, most of the time, to protect the anonymity of rape victims and to refrain from reporting the details of their personal histories. A rape was a rape, under the new understanding, and had nothing to do with the past conduct of the victim.

New Bedford case. But there were a number of messy cases along the way to this weak and tentative consensus. In 1983, for example, a woman in New Bedford, Massachusetts, reported that she had been gang raped by a group of men in a pool hall while others stood by watching and cheering. Initial press coverage was sympathetic to the accuser, but by the time the case went to trial, the tide had turned. One local paper identified the accused rapists as Portuguese, triggering anti-Portuguese sentiment in the New Bedford area. This, in turn, set off a backlash in the Portuguese community, which rallied around the accused men, blaming the woman for the incident. Portuguese newspapers began naming the victim and reported that she was a drug user, welfare cheat, and promiscuous partygoer who had been “asking for it” the night of the rape. Other papers began to echo this line. Although the trial ended in convictions, the rape victim fled to Florida three days afterward and changed her name, reportedly hounded by violent threats from defenders of the accused. ^[10]

In the wake of this incident, many journalists agreed that the New Bedford victim had been badly served by the press. But high profile cases continued to push the boundaries of policies intended to protect rape accusers. In 1991, when a Florida woman accused William Kennedy Smith, Senator Edward Kennedy’s nephew, of rape, the press initially withheld the woman’s name. But when NBC broke rank and named her, others, including the New York Times, followed suit. NBC News President Michael Gartner explained to his staff in a memo that he allowed the network to name the victim because “names and facts are news.” ^[11] The New York Times told readers it ordinarily shielded the “identities of complainants in sex crimes,” but that “NBC’s nationwide broadcast took the matter of her privacy out of their hands.” ^[12]

Name the victim? What’s more, some journalists objected on principle to the practice of shielding the accuser while naming the accused. What about women who made false accusations? Rape charges were often ruinous to the accused. Both should be named—or neither should be named, they argued. Geneva Overholser, former editor of the Des Moines Register and distinguished journalist, was a particularly outspoken advocate of naming rape victims . Overholser had been editor of the Register in 1991 when it won a Pulitzer Prize for a story about a local rape. In that case, the victim had agreed to go public. During the 2003 rape trial of basketball star Kobe Bryant, however, Overholser named the accuser in a weekly column for the Poynter Institute, a respected journalism education organization, without the woman’s consent. Overholser resigned on principle from the Poynter board when institute leaders pressured her to stop using the woman’s name. ^[13] “The media cannot have the wisdom to decide who to protect where there has been no determination of guilt or innocence,” she told a women’s magazine. ^[14]

When the Durham rape case became a major national story, ABC News’ policy with respect to rape coverage was conventional and well-established. For more than 20 years, ABC had consistently withheld the names of alleged rape victims and refrained from reporting details of their lives. ABC had never named the New Bedford victim, and only named Kennedy Smith’s accuser when she went public herself, seven months after trial, to give her side of the story. (At that point, the woman gave ABC News an exclusive interview on “Primetime Live.”)