Everybody knows her, but papers won't print her name

Why does the mainstream media protect the identity of Bryant's accuser, if it's just a few mouse clicks away?

We know that she tried out for American Idol and that her high school boyfriend may have left her for someone else.

We've heard that she supposedly overdosed on pills two months before she accused Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant of raping her in the hotel where she worked in the small Colorado town of Edwards.

Her name is more of a mystery. Mainstream media organizations have shielded her under a longstanding tradition of not naming accusers in rape cases. But her identity can be found with a few clicks of a mouse on the World Wide Web - along with her yearbook photos, her phone number, her street and e-mail addresses.

The media swirl around the Bryant case has once again renewed the debate about whether media outlets should name rape victims without their permission. It is a well-worn battleground, with rape victims and their advocates pushing for privacy and some in the media seeking to abandon the withholding of names because they believe it perpetuates the stigma of rape.

But in the Internet age, there's another reason to question the practice: What's the point?

"One thing we know for sure is that the mainstream media used to be the gatekeeper of information to the American public, and the problem is now there's no more fence," said Walter Dean, senior associate at the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a nonprofit think tank in Washington. "The public can learn about anything they want without going through the gatekeepers and so the question becomes, what should your role be in this."

Trisha Meili, who was beaten, gang-raped and left for dead in a remote corner of Central Park on April 19, 1989, hopes journalists continue to offer rape victims privacy.

For 14 years, Meili was known to most people as the Central Park Jogger. They knew she was a Wall Street investment banker from a devout Catholic family in Upper St. Clair, Pa. That she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley, got a master's degree from Yale and once worked at a Boston shelter for abused women. That she had an eating disorder.

The public didn't find out her name until just this year, when she chose to reveal it for the first time during an interview with Katie Couric.

"I think when someone is sexually assaulted, all control is taken away from them and they are left powerless," Meili said in a phone interview from her home in Connecticut. "I lost control. I couldn't walk, speak or think coherently. I had trouble remembering to tell time. I didn't want my privacy taken away too. I was grateful I was able to control some aspect of my privacy."

For 20 years, John Benton kept secret the sexual abuse he suffered as an altar boy at the hands of an Episcopal priest named Richard A. Pollard. Then he told his wife. Next, he told his closest friends, the priest who replaced Pollard when he retired and eventually police.

Then he did what more and more rape victims are doing, invariably to draw out other victims or prove they are not ashamed of what happened.

He agreed to be named in the media.

But, like most rape victims, Benton came forward long after the crime had occurred and he had had time to process his feelings.

"I probably would not have come forward (initially) if I knew my identity was going to be revealed," said the 39-year-old residential designer from Tarpon Springs. "And this guy would still be on the streets."

Locally, rape victims in several well-known cases have agreed to be named but all still push for giving the rape victim privacy right after the rape.

Melissa M. Price, 32, accused the Rev. Polienato Bernabe of sexually abusing her for eight years beginning in 1978 at the Holy Name Catholic Church in Gulfport and at the Holy Family Catholic Church in St. Petersburg. She agreed to have her name used because she wanted to "give a name to the abuse" and reach out to other rape survivors.

Meagan Wideman, 23, was a teller supervisor at a SouthTrust bank branch in Largo when she says Gregory Wilbanks, described by prosecutors as a millionaire, lured her to his house to talk about a loan and raped her. Wilbanks was never charged with raping Wideman. Wideman did file a civil lawsuit with another woman, Kelly J. Smith, who charged Wilbanks with rape. Both women won a $6-million judgment against him.

Wideman and Smith agreed to be named, Wideman said, at the urging of their attorney, who thought it might draw out other victims.

Wideman said now that she doesn't regret going public, but she wasn't prepared for it.

"Society as a whole has such a negative view of rape victims," she said. "A lot of people were shocked, and while they didn't say anything negative, it was very clear the way they acted that it's a dirty crime."

The stigma associated with the crime of rape is often cited as one of the main reasons to protect the names of rape victims. But more and more, rape advocates are trying to do away with that stigma by urging victims to be open and educating the public.

Indeed, one of the largest organizations devoted to helping rape victims is encouraging them to use their names.

"We do encourage them because it can really help put a face on a crime that not a lot of people know about, and it reinforces the notion that there's nothing to be ashamed about," said Jamie Zuieback, spokeswoman for The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, operator of the National Sexual Assault Hotline.

Still none of these organizations suggest that newspapers should take away the courtesy they give rape victims of withholding their names. And some say encouraging rape victims to reveal their names too early does more harm than good.

"Right after the crisis is not the good time for the survivor to make any good decisions about publicity or privacy in the media," said Debbie Rogers, director of public awareness for the Florida Council Against Sexual Violence.

Several large newspapers contacted for this story, including the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, said they would continue their practice of not naming rape victims or accusers without their consent. That's also the policy at the St. Petersburg Times.

"Nothing in the Kobe Bryant case suggests that we should revisit our policy about naming victims of sexual assault," said Neil Brown, managing editor and vice president of the St. Petersburg Times.

But some say the media's practice of not revealing names keeps the stigma associated with rape alive.

Geneva Overholser, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and a former editor of the Des Moines Register, has long been an advocate for printing the names of rape victims.

Overholser thinks the mainstream media should avoid printing details about a victim's life and instead just print the victim's name.

"I think now in this Kobe Bryant case when the Internet has changed the patterns of news, now where the woman's name is all over the Net and the radio . . . now is the time to treat rape victims as we do any other crime involving adults," Overholser said.

"There is pain, I certainly don't deny that," she continued. "But you now have a situation where talking about her name is a hypocrisy. This woman's privacy has been invaded in the worst possible way. We should worry about that."

The Shelton-Mason County Journal in Washington state holds the distinction of being the only newspaper in America known to publish the names of all rape victims, including children.

Charles Gay, editor and publisher of the paper, said the Journal only does it when the cases go to trial and witnesses who take the stand are identified. The Journal has been covering rape cases in this way since before his father purchased the newspaper in 1966, Gay said.

"I think it's fair to name the accused and the accuser, and I think it's good and complete journalism to give the complete story," he said.

But the paper, which has a circulation of 9,300, would not report the details about the Bryant accuser's life as other mainstream media have, Gay said.

"In Shelton, we would be waiting for it to come to trial," he said. "We believe that's the proper place to publicize something instead of a trial in our newspaper. It's not our job to investigate accusers and decide that we are going to name or not name based on what we think of her."

Kelly McBride, an ethics faculty member at the Poynter Institute, which owns the St. Petersburg Times, says the very Internet that is flush with the name of the Colorado woman who accused Bryant of rape has also brought rape victims together.

"If I'm a rape victim, it's easier for me to find other rape victims without even leaving my computer," she said. "The subculture is becoming larger and larger."

This is causing more rape victims to come forward and those who do typically feel empowered by it, she said. One Omaha photojournalist, who is a rape victim, started a Web site featuring the names and photos of 70 rape victims who have agreed to participate.

But even as more rape victims come forward, not many want to be named right after it happens, when the news media is interested in the story.

"As journalists, we become less and less interested as time wears on," McBride said. "At some point there's an intersection, I swear you could plot it on a graph, and we need to shoot for that intersection, where there's still enough news value. Because I've talked to several rape victims who said, "You know, I approached the media to tell my story and I was told no, because it was too old.' "

McBride encourages media outlets to ask rape victims if they want their names published rather than assuming they don't.

She and others who advocate for protecting the privacy of rape victims said they don't think the media should print a rape victim's name simply because it's on the Internet.

"It doesn't mean we compromise our standards to the lowest common denominator," she said. "If anything, we should distinguish ourselves by stating what our standards are and then living up to them. I think that eventually we will no longer need to conceal the names of rape victims. How long that will take, I have no clue."

- Times researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this report, which used information from Times wire.

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