Vintage Didion by Joan Didion Page B

top” of her, and said that he had rubbed against her without an erection “so everybody would … just know I did it.”] The pressure on Gold was mounting. Three jurors agree that it was evident Gold, worn down perhaps by his own displays of temper as much as anything else, capitulated out of exhaustion. While a bitter Gold told other jurors he felt terrible about ultimately giving in, Brueland [Harold Brueland, another juror who had for a time favored acquittal for McCray] believes it was all part of the process.
“I’d like to tell Ronnie someday that nervous exhaustion is an element built into the court system. They know that,” Brueland says of court officials. “They know we’re only going to be able to take it for so long. It’s just a matter of, you know, who’s got the guts to stick with it.”
    So fixed were the emotions provoked by this case that the idea that there could have been, for even one juror, even a moment’s doubt in the state’s case, let alone the kind of doubt that could be sustained over ten days, seemed, to many in the city, bewildering, almost unthinkable: the attack on the jogger had by then passed into narrative, and the narrative was about confrontation, about what Governor Cuomo had called “the ultimate shriek of alarm,” about what was wrong with the city and about its solution. What was wrong with the city had been identified, and its names were Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Kharey Wise, Kevin Richardson, and Steve Lopez. “They never could have thought of it as they raged through Central Park, tormenting and ruining people,” Bob Herbert wrote in the News after the verdicts came in on the first three defendants.
There was no way it could have crossed their vicious minds. Running with the pack, they would have scoffed at the very idea. They would have laughed.
And yet it happened. In the end, Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray and Raymond Santana were nailed by a woman.
Elizabeth Lederer stood in the courtroom and watched Saturday night as the three were hauled off to jail…. At times during the trial, she looked about half the height of the long and lanky Salaam, who sneered at her from the witness stand. Salaam was apparently to dumb to realize that Lederer—this petite, soft-spoken, curly-haired prosecutor—was the jogger’s avenger….
You could tell that her thoughts were elsewhere, that she was thinking about the jogger.
You could tell that she was thinking: I did it.
I did it for you.
    Do this in remembrance of me: the solution, then, or so such pervasive fantasies suggested, was to partake of the symbolic body and blood of The Jogger, whose idealization was by this point complete, and was rendered, significantly, in details stressing her “difference,” or superior class. The Jogger was someone who wore, according to Newsday , “a light gold chain around her slender neck” as well as, according to the News , a “modest” gold ring and “a thin sheen” of lipstick. The Jogger was someone who would not, according to the Post , “even dignify her alleged attackers with a glance.” The Jogger was someone who spoke, according to the News , in accents “suited to boardrooms,” accents that might therefore seem “foreign to many native New Yorkers.” In her first appearance on the witness stand she had been subjected, the Times noted, “to questions that most people do not have to answer publicly during their lifetimes,” principally about her use of a diaphragm on the Sunday preceding the attack, and had answered these questions, according to an editorial in the News , with an “indomitable dignity” that had taught the city a lesson “about courage and class.”
    This emphasis on perceived refinements of character and of manner and of taste tended to distort and to flatten, and ultimately to suggest not the actual victim of an actual crime but a fictional character of a slightly earlier period, the well-brought-up virgin who briefly graces