Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman's Harrowing Quest for Justice: With a New Afterword by Bill Lueders

From the Publisher

Cry Rape dramatically exposes the criminal justice system’s capacity for error as it recounts one woman’s courageous battle in the face of adversity. In September 1997, a visually impaired woman named Patty was raped by an intruder in her home in Madison, Wisconsin. The rookie detective assigned to her case came to doubt Patty’s account and focused the investigation on her. Using pressure and lies, he got her to recant, then had her charged with falsely reporting a crime. The charges were eventually dropped, but Patty continued to demand justice, filing complaints and a federal lawsuit against the police. All were rebuffed. But later, as the result of her perseverance, a startling discovery was made. Even then, Patty’s ordeal was far from over.
Other books have dealt with how police and prosecutors bend and break the law in their zeal to prevail. This one focuses instead on how the gravest injustice can be committed with the best of intentions, and how one woman’s bravery and persistence finally triumphed.

Publishers Weekly

Lueders, news editor of a weekly Madison, Wis., paper, opens this real-life drama in the wee hours of Sept. 4, 1997, when Patty, a 38-year-old legally blind single mother sharing an apartment with her pregnant daughter, was raped in her bedroom by an intruder who held a knife to her neck. The rape was the beginning of a seven-year nightmare in which police, saying they couldn't find evidence of the rape, bullied Patty into saying she had lied, and she was charged with obstruction of justice. Patty almost went bankrupt trying to salvage what little was left of her reputation and sanity. Lueders spells out how Patty suffered from incompetence and bias at every level of law enforcement. The DA eventually dropped the charges against her, and DNA evidence helped convict the rapist, but some law enforcement officials continue to insist they did nothing wrong. This account by Lueders (An Enemy of the State: The Life of Erwin Knoll), one of the first people who went to bat for Patty, is a shocking revelation of the abuse rape victims are sometimes subjected to by the very people who should be seeking justice for them. (Nov.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Think cops are your friends? If you're a rape victim, think again. Lueders, news editor of a weekly paper in Madison, Wisc., follows Patty (no last name given) from the night she was attacked, through the final, riveting trial of her rapist. The legally blind single mother woke up one night in her Madison duplex to feel the point of a knife against her cheek and hear the man in her bed whisper, "Don't say anything, and no one will get hurt." When the assailant finally left, she called the police, expecting help. Instead, Patty herself came under suspicion. Detective Tom Woodmansee, on a one-man crusade to punish women who made up sexual-assault charges, quickly decided she was lying. Claiming he needed another hair sample, he summoned Patty to the police station. "I know you made this up," he said, refusing to let her leave until she confessed. Desperate to get away from Woodmansee, she recanted and then called a rape crisis center to report her forced confession. Patty was charged with obstruction, a misdemeanor that potentially carried a sentence of nine months in jail or a hefty fine. Eventually, DNA evidence helped vindicate her. Lueders was by no means a detached reporter of Patty's travails; he championed her in the press and helped her connect to legal advocates. Nonetheless, he makes an effort to be evenhanded here; though he depicts Woodmansee as an unambiguous villain, he also acknowledges that sometimes women do falsify rape charges. The text contains a few embarrassingly amateurish moments, as when Lueders opens a discussion of trial strategy with a quotation from NYPD Blue, and too many chapters end with such breathless cliffhangers as, "It was an exercise that would provehelpful to Patty's case but be devastating to Patty." The well-developed cast of characters and vivid dialogue compensate for these gaffes. An important, if imperfect, account that will captivate and outrage readers.

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