5 teens cleared of Brooklyn gang rape charges

New York: It was a shocking story splashed on headlines around the country: five teenage boys had approached a man and his daughter at night on a Brooklyn playground, ordering the man away at gunpoint before gang raping the 18-year-old woman in public.

Video footage of the teens laughing and joking inside a deli just before the alleged January 7, 2016, attack only added to the outrage. The five boys were quickly arrested, two of them turned in by their own parents. New York’s mayor and other critics demanded to know why the police hadn’t acted sooner.

Before that public anger could even cool, however, the case began to fall apart as questions mounted.

Did the teens truly have a gun? Did they really force themselves on the 18-year-old woman?

Most perplexing of all: what were a father and daughter doing in a dark children’s playground at 9 o’clock at night?

On Wednesday, the ugly answers tumbled into the light.

Prosecutors announced that they were dropping all the charges against the five teens, aged 14 to 17. The woman and her father had provided inconsistent and unreliable stories, said Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson. Snippets of cellphone videos suggested the sex was consensual.

Worst of all, the father himself had been “engaging in sexual conduct” with his own daughter when the incident began, Thompson said.

The real story was even more shocking than the original accusations, but it had spun 180 sickening degrees.

To some critics, the bizarre, lurid case and rush to judgement recalled in some respects another controversial New York City rape case.

In 1989, a woman was brutally raped while jogging through Central Park. The New York Times described the attack as “one of the most widely publicised crimes” of the decade. Five minority juveniles — four black and one Hispanic — were arrested. Donald Trump took out a full-page ad in four New York newspapers with the title: “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!”

The five teens were convicted of a slew of charges and sentenced to between five and 15 years in prison, only for another man to confess in 2002 to raping the jogger. The five men were exonerated and received a $40 million (Dh146 million) settlement from the city. The case was memorialised in a 2012 documentary named after the press’s moniker for the defendants: “The Central Park Five.”

As problems emerged in the alleged January 7 Brooklyn rape, people began drawing parallels with the Central Park Five.

“What are we really doing here?” Kenneth Montgomery, an attorney for a 14-year-old charged for the rape, told the New York Times. “Have we not learnt our lessons from the Central Park Five?”

“It is an overwhelming feeling to be facing these charges,” he told the New York Post, “and it is an overwhelming feeling to be exonerated of them.”

The case began to unravel almost immediately, long before Wednesday’s announcement.

The father and daughter initially claimed they had been set upon by the teenagers, who brandished a gun and ordered the father to leave. As he went to find the police, the teenagers forced her at gunpoint to have sex with at least one suspect and to perform oral sex on two others, the woman told investigators.

But when investigators interviewed the teenagers, they claimed that there was no gun and that the woman had willingly had sex. Within a day of their arrest, the teens’ lawyers claimed cellphone videos showed the encounter was consensual.

Most shocking of all, the teens told police they had encountered the father and daughter having sex in the park that night. The teenagers then joined in the act.

“She said yeah,” a man’s voice can be heard saying on the video, according to the Times.

“If you said yeah, it’s lit, like, you know what I mean,” a man then says on the video. “I could tell you a freak.”

Confronted by police, the father and daughter reversed course, admitting that there was no gun. The woman admitted that she had consented to the group sex.

The father and daughter also both eventually admitted to drinking alcohol and having sex with one another, according to the Times.

On Wednesday, Thompson lamented that he could not charge the father for incest because his daughter was not cooperating with investigators.

“The complainant, as well as her father, provided multiple inconsistent accounts to NYPD Detectives and to experienced Special Victims prosecutors about important material facts in this case,” he said in a statement, according to PIX11. “The complainant has recanted her allegations of forcible sexual assault and the existence of a gun, and she does not wish to pursue criminal charges against any of the defendants. She also refuses to cooperate with any prosecution against her father, who was engaging in sexual conduct with her.”

Thompson said that just because the charges were being dropped, however, doesn’t mean the boys did nothing wrong.

“That night, this young woman’s father and the five young men engaged in conduct that was reprehensible and wrong, but because of the lack of reliable evidence, criminal charges simply cannot be sustained,” he said.

— Washington Post