Rape Cases Reveal Media Activism
Is the anti-police movement guiding Chicago reporters in coverage of sex crimes?
In July, Sun-Times reporter Tom Schuba authored a chilling story suggesting egregious misconduct by Chicago police officers.
Schuba announced that “officials” in the City of Chicago were investigating allegations of sexual misconduct by Chicago police officers against an immigrant housed at a Chicago police station.
What exactly were the allegations?
“An officer assigned to the Ogden district, covering Lawndale and Little Village, has been accused of impregnating a teenage girl, law enforcement sources have said. Multiple other officers also have been accused of engaging in sexual misconduct,” Schuba wrote in his article.
Schuba did quote the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, John Catanzara, who denied the allegations in a video.
Moving on from whether the allegations were true, Schuba went into great detail about them, even quoting a trauma therapist who “said she and hundreds of other volunteers sent a letter to the mayor’s office on June 7 that raised several issues concerning immigrants staying in police stations, including the potential for child sexual abuse.”
What exactly does this mean? These experts knew such criminal behavior by the cops was likely, so much so they even wrote a letter about it?
Media coverage of the allegations had its predicable impact. Newly elected Mayor Brandon Johnson stated he was “deeply troubled” about the news reports.
“A story which spread at the speed of light, when the allegations of CPD misconduct were aired in public, it inspired predictable results: Chicago media lost its collective mind, the anti-police movement mobilized and deluged CPD with searing rebukes, and community groups staged protests outside the 10th District building,” the Chicago Contrarian wrote.
Despite the hysteria, the story went cold as fast as it was suddenly splashed across the media.
Andrea Kersten, head of the city’s civilian oversight agency COPA, finally admitted that her agency could not even locate a victim. If there is no victim, what, then, was COPA investigating and what were the reporters reporting?
Some might argue that sex crimes, particularly those committed by members of law enforcement, are so offensive and cruel that even the mere allegation of them, even without a victim, is justified news coverage.
But such an opinion would ignore the larger and more dire landscape of Chicago journalism, one that suggests a shocking depravity and corruption in the Chicago media where the coverage of sex crimes appears to be guided not by the evidence of crimes, but by their use as weapons in Chicago’s thriving anti-police movement.
Consider this.
In 2018, a collection of former journalism students came forward and accused a journalism professor, Alec Klein, of sexually harassing students. So many students eventually signed letters of complaint that Klein resigned. He eventually wrote a book denying the allegations.
The articles covering the Klein matter were written by Maya Dukmasova when she worked at the Chicago Reader, a news outlet that has championed police misconduct narratives for decades. Now Dukmasova works for another outlet that specializes in police corruption stories, Injustice Watch.
Dukmasova was all over the allegations against Klein, writing several articles about it. Eventually Northwestern issued a statement, which Dukmasova cited in her articles.
“Northwestern University apologizes to our current and former students and former employees for the experiences that they went through,” wrote spokesman Alan Cubbage.
Let’s take a look at Schuba’s and Dukmasova’s reporting in these two cases in the context of another horrific rape case against a man named Stanley Wrice.
Wrice was originally convicted for his role in the 1983 gang rape of Karen Byron, who was raped over the course of several hours in the attic of Wrice’s residence. Wrice was also accused of heating several implements on the gas stove of the house and using them to severely burn Byron, who ended up enduring several painful operations at the Loyola Hospital burn unit.
Despite the horrific crime, Wrice was ultimately released from his 100-year sentence on allegations of misconduct against the detectives who worked the case. After his conviction was tossed, the Cook County judge presiding over the decision to grant Wrice a certificate of innocence denied it, saying he didn’t believe Wrice’s claims of innocence.
Rejecting a certificate of innocence was actually big news around the prosecutor’s office and among attorneys throughout the city, but the news media initiated no deep dive into why the judge would rule against granting it. After all, the judge’s ruling suggested that a potential vicious rapist was being released into the public. Isn’t that worth investigation by journalists?
There is another reason to be suspicious about the lack of deep investigation by the media into the Wrice case. It is rooted in statements by attorneys representing accused detectives in Wrice’s lawsuit against the police and about the manner in which a former Northwestern University journalism professor, David Protess, obtained recanted witness statements. City attorneys cited allegations of a disturbing patterns of suspicious witness recantations involving Protess:
“Defendants also claim that ‘a substantial body of information has surfaced in the past several years concerning illegal and coercive tactics that were routinely utilized by Protess and his designees to obtain information and recantations from witnesses in several cases, including Plaintiff’s case.’ According to Defendants, ‘Witnesses from whom Protess procured recantations in other criminal cases have since come forward alleging that Protess and his team of investigators used coercion in various forms—dangling young female college students as sexual bait, impersonating movie producers, promising book/movie deals, making cash payments, and promising convicted murderers their freedom from prison—to procure false recantations from them.’ ”
Whoa. Dangling young female college students as sexual bait in vicious murder cases? Here was a story crying out for the Chicago media to review it, to answer the question of why, if a judge denied the certificate of innocence, why was Wrice let out? Protess’s record of claiming wrongful convictions at the hands of supposedly corrupt detectives had once been a media obsession, his claims echoed far and wide in the Chicago press. But the allegations about students used as “sexual bait” went nowhere, initiated little to no investigation.
Keep in mind that even the allegation against a Chicago police officer for a sex crime, an allegation in which there wasn’t even a victim identified, initiated the interest of the media like wolves setting upon a fresh carcass.
Guess how much coverage those allegations about Wrice not getting a certificate of innocence from a judge who reviewed the case got from Tom Schuba and the Sun-Times compared to coverage of allegations against cops where there wasn’t even a victim? Compare the allegations against Protess in the Wrice case with the coverage from Dukmasova on the allegations of sexual harassment against Alec Klein.
It gets worse. The Wrice case is significant for a level of media activism on a far greater magnitude. Even more chilling than the allegations that dangling coeds as “sexual bait” in front of witnesses was the testimony of another victim of Wrice who was deposed in connection with Wrice’s civil lawsuit. In that deposition, Jennifer Scott stated that Wrice began raping her over the course of several years beginning when she was fourteen. Wrice impregnated Scott three times.
While the media “lost its collective mind,” according to the Chicago Contrarian, over the sexual abuse allegations against a Chicago cop even though there wasn’t even an identified victim, the testimony of Scott in the Wrice case was not covered at all, a woman claiming she was raped beginning when she was fourteen by a guy suing the city for millions.
It was an ominous silence by the Chicago media, betraying the lengths to which the media would go in maintaining their anti-police narratives, for the testimony of Scott is only one of many examples in which the media ignored evidence that would undermine narratives in legal cases against cops. The federal courts are filled with such evidence that are now wholly ignored by the Chicago media, particularly the Sun-Times, the Chicago Reader, and Injustice Watch.
As the media ignored Scott’s testimony, an ominous ruling was made in the civil case by the federal Judge Harry D. Leinenweber. The judge refused to let the jury hear about Scott’s abuse at the hands of Wrice, a ruling that is only now receiving criticism from the media, but certainly not Chicago’s mainstream media.
In an article earlier this week, Chicago City Wire cited an expert, Jane Manning, the director of Women’s Equal Justice, who told Chicago City Wire that “the restriction on such testimony, the degree of which varies from state to state, hampers the prosecution of alleged sex offenders.”
“Manning said that a jury should be able to consider a defendant’s history of similar crimes as one factor, as long as it doesn’t overwhelm the case at hand,” the article stated.
Chicago City Wire pointed out that Wrice is not the only one to benefit from “from a controversial legal doctrine that restricts testimony demonstrating a pattern of abuse by a defendant.”
The New York Court of Appeals recently tossed the 2020 convictions against Harvey Weinstein on similar grounds.
As it was, Wrice ultimately prevailed in a trial against the police officers, a trial in which the jurors never heard what Jennifer Scott endured at the hands of Stanley Wrice, just as the Chicago public also never heard about it.
Thanks to the Chicago media.
Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.