ABSTRACT
Helen Benedict’s in-Depth analysis of the reporting of five high profile sex crime cases in the US views news production through a radical feminist lens. One Sunday night in March 1983, in the small city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, a young woman ran, screaming, out of Big Dan’s Tavern. Wearing only a sock and a jacket, she flagged down a passing pickup truck for help. Sobbing and shaking, she told the driver that she had been gang-raped. The victim of the Big Dan’s rape had been born and brought up in the North End of New Bedford. Abandoned by her mother in infancy, she was raised by her great-grandmother in a Portuguese-speaking household until she was five, when she moved to her grandparents’ big house in New Bedford. Although she saw her mother occasionally, she never knew her father. The family lived primarily on welfare.
