Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 25, 1990 TAG: 9003251974
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID MARGOLICK THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: GRINNELL, IOWA LENGTH: Long
During a break in her work, she came across a column in The Des Moines Register.
It was written by Geneva Overholser, the editor of The Register, and was about press coverage of rape. By failing to identify victims by name, Overholser said, the press did more than protect their privacy; it also compounded their stigma. She urged victims of rape to speak out and identify themselves.
"As long as rape is deemed unspeakable - and is therefore not fully and honestly spoken of - the public outrage will be muted as well," she wrote.
Shortly after that, Ziegenmeyer telephoned Overholser, and said she wished to tell her story - in print and by name.
What followed was an extraordinary personal and journalistic enterprise, which held tens of thousands of Iowans transfixed for a week and still sparks debates about rape and journalistic propriety. It also prompted debates about race because the man convicted, Bobby Lee Smith, is black.
Before her attack, Ziegenmeyer said, she gave little thought to rape. By going public, she said, she hoped to draw attention to the issue and perhaps to prevent others from being raped.
"I come from a small Midwestern town, and this only happened in places like Los Angeles or Dallas or New York or Chicago," she said. "I was from Iowa. I had never given it a thought. But now I'm going to do my damnedest to keep it from happening to another woman."
On Feb. 25, a month after Smith was convicted of abducting and raping Ziegenmeyer, the newspaper began telling her story.
On five consecutive front pages a reporter for The Register, Jane Schorer, traced Ziegenmeyer's experiences over what she calculated to be the 14 months, 12 days, 10 hours and 40 minutes from the time Smith confronted her as she sat in her car cramming for a real estate licensing examination to the moment he was convicted.
The series detailed not just the rape itself, but her subsequent experiences with the hospital, the police and prosecutors, the accused, and the criminal justice system.
It examined topics like her frustration with the courts, how she told her three young children of her ordeal and even how it affected her sexual relationship with her husband.
"When we made love, he was very careful," she told The Register. "He held me. If I cringed, he always asked - he still asks - was he doing something that reminded me of the attack."
The series was noteworthy not just for the victim's on-the-record candor about a cultural taboo, but for the detail with which The Register described the rape, detail that was published over the objections of some editors.
Equally striking was the reaction to the series. The Register calls itself "the newspaper Iowa depends upon" and is the largest in the state. Its editors had braced themselves for criticism, particularly from the kinds of Iowans once depicted by Grant Wood - the people Overholser characterized as "blue-haired ladies" and "mothers of 12 year olds."
They also feared a spate of canceled advertising and as many as 6,000 canceled subscriptions.
Instead, the series has been uniformly praised, not just in urban areas like Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, and Davenport, but in towns and villages throughout the state.
"As awful a story as it was, it shows us it is more than just a story; a real person was raped," reader Peggy Blazek of Des Moines, wrote in one of many letters on the series printed in the newspaper. "Nancy's willingness to tell us what happened and The Register's agreeing to print it are important events."
Another reader, James E. Smith of Sioux Center, declared, "The disgusting and degrading details of Nancy Ziegenmeyer's rape have no place in a family newspaper the caliber of The Register."
But he added, "Unfortunately, we have to face such violent crimes at a very personal level before we are aroused to action and commitment."
Many other readers wrote directly to Ziegenmeyer or Schorer to bare their own long-suppressed secrets. Together, their letters reveal something previously unseen: the dark side of life in the American heartland.
One letter to Ziegenmeyer came from a 26-year-old Des Moines woman who said she had been raped 11 years earlier and, she said, had yet to find a boyfriend. Previously, the woman said, she had told only one person of her ordeal.
"I am in awe of your strength and courage," the woman wrote. "I hope that you are the first link in the chain of recovery. I think I never really believed that other people like me existed. Rape victims never have a name or face. You are helping me to find mine."
Another, from Kanawha, reflected on how numerous the victims of sexual abuse were in the state. "There are tens of thousands of us just in Iowa," she wrote. "When you join the list yourself, you become so very aware of how widespread it is."
Ziegenmeyer, 29 now, who runs a small day-care center in this central Iowa community of 7,600, says she is as surprised as anyone by the reaction.
"I thought people in general would be outraged that someone came forward and did such a thing," she said. But in retrospect, she said, she attributes the empathetic reaction to the tradition in a farming community of people pitching in for one another when they need help.
"People here in Iowa are appalled to think that their neighbors and friends are being violated in any way, and come to rescue of one another," she said. "They weren't offended by what Jane wrote or Geneva printed because it was the truth, and that stands for something here."
For Ziegenmeyer, the wife of a mechanic, the series was the latest phase of her odd odyssey, in which she journeyed from the private torment of a woman identified in court papers only by her initials to public celebrity, including recent appearances on the NBC Nightly News and a CBS morning news program. For the second appearance, she came to New York. It was her first trip east of Cleveland.
"Most people believe that rape only happens to someone else and didn't really realize that a victim is an actual person," she said. "Jane made me a very ordinary, everyday wife, mother and person, and the public said, `This person could very well have been me.' They had a face and a name to go with the faceless and nameless stories.
Overholser said the publication of the series was attributable in part to what she called called the "Nixon in China syndrome," the ability of those appearing to have the greatest stake in the status quo to effect change.
Ziegenmeyer's story, she noted, not only was reported and written by a woman but also was published in a paper edited by a woman.
If anything, she said, it was the men, both on the paper and in its readership, who proved the most skittish. "Since the great majority of men are not inclined to rape, they are less inclined to think about it, and may be more discomfitted when brought face to face with it," she said. "
Overholser, who was a member of the editorial board of The New York Times, where her column was reprinted on the Op-Ed page, became the chief news executive of The Register a year ago.
She said The Register would continue to leave rape victims unidentified, but was considering asking them if they are willing to be identified. What she called the "overwhelmingly positive" reaction to the series suggested, she said, was how dramatically attitudes toward rape have changed.
"Americans are ready to look at this crime, not in a way that judges the victim. Indeed, if they're looking at her, they're judging her as a hero."
"I think Nancy Ziegenmeyer will help make the day come sooner that we will treat rape more like other crimes," Overholser said.
Five Register editors together reviewed the account of the rape before it was published. At Overholser's insistence, it included a reference to Smith's penis.
"Otherwise," she explained, "it could have been a description of a wrestling match." Even as the presses were about to roll, she discovered that a copy editor had substituted the phrase "when he had finished" for "after he had ejaculated," and she directed that the original be restored.
"He may just as well have finished lunch," she said. "You can easily strip the story of its power if your squeamishness overcomes you."
At the same time, she added, she was convinced that the most detailed account was also the least offensive, and also the most true, as she explained in a column that accompanied the first day of the series.
"I concluded that were I to meet Ziegenmeyer's courage with my timidity, shy away from offending readers, and render her story more palatable, I would be compounding the injustice," she wrote.
In the same column, she attempted to defuse another sensitive matter: race. Because the victim is white and the criminal black, Overholser wrote, the series could perpetuate a stereotype.
She noted that in Iowa, only 7 percent of offenders in sexual assault cases are black, and only 4 percent of rapes nationally involve black men and white women.
That did not quell criticism. One caller told Overholser that that even if it took 10 years to do so, she should have written about a case in which the rapist was white.
She noted, too that the Louisville Courier-Journal, like the Register a Gannett paper, dropped plans to run the entire series because of the race issue.
by CNB