A victim's journey offers hope for battered women

Trisha Meili should go to India. She is an American who may be able to give hope to women who despair about the savagery traditionally inflicted by men on women there.

This thought springs to mind because of the recent atrocity in New Delhi in which a young woman was gang-raped and died from her injuries. The general outrage in India, and in many parts of the world, recalls the 1989 attack on the then 28-year-old Meili as she jogged in Central Park one spring evening. Left for dead after the gang rape and beating, she was found a few hours later.

Unlike the Indian victim, Meili survived.

It didn't take long for New York City police to pinpoint four African Americans and one Latino, some of whom confessed to the crime. The teenagers were picked up by the police for perpetrating a string of assaults and other crimes in Central Park that night. They were believed to have been Meili's attackers. The five suspects were tried and sentenced to jail terms of up to 13 years.

There was a huge outcry from the general public about the rampant crime in the city, as well as from the suspects' families who claimed the boys were innocent and accused the authorities of racial discrimination. A Baptist pastor charged the police with the knee-jerk reaction of targeting blacks whenever white victims were involved.

It was not until 2002 when a man serving a life sentence for various crimes confessed to being Meili's attacker. DNA tests confirmed this. The five suspects, who had all completed their jail terms by that time, saw their convictions overturned. The five and their families later sued New York City authorities, seeking damages.