Untangling a Rape Case in Crown Heights
The New York Times’ Alan Feuer and Colin Moynihan profile the ongoing racial and religious tension in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, where black and Orthodox Jewish residents live in an uneasy peace, often broken by periods of violent unrest. At the center of the community’s latest controversy is a rape case. “On one side is the [Jewish] girl,” writes Feuer and Moynihan, “who is now a woman of 22 and says that for the better part of a decade, a group of local thugs forced her into prostitution, ensuring her submissiveness with a steady diet of beatings, threats and rapes. On the other side are the accused—four older black men—who deny the woman’s charges and contend that she herself was a kind of predator: a troubled teenager who crossed Crown Heights’s racial divide with an appetite for sex.”