NYT: A case involving allegations of the forced prostitution of a Chasidic girl falls into chaos
THERE were mornings when the women at Mama’s Senegalese hair salon received an unusual guest: a 13-year-old Jewish girl from the neighborhood’s Chabad Lubavitch community. She had an unusual request: to change clothes in the bathroom.
She would walk in wearing the long traditional dresses she put on for school, then walk out wearing something less traditional: clothes that one might wear to work the streets.
“I’d say, ‘Baby, you a good Jewish girl,’ ” said Annie Allen, a beautician at the shop, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. “ ‘What you doing?’ ”
Now, nine years later, the question of what she was doing — or what was being done to her — lingers at the center of a haunting criminal case in the Brooklyn courts. On one side is the girl, who is now a woman of 22 and says that for the better part of a decade, a group of local thugs forced her into prostitution, ensuring her submissiveness with a steady diet of beatings, threats and rapes. On the other side are the accused — four older black men — who deny the woman’s charges and contend that she herself was a kind of predator: a troubled teenager who crossed Crown Heights’s racial divide with an appetite for sex.
All of this played out one block from the intersection where, in 1991, a black child was killed by the motorcade of the Lubavitch leader, igniting days of riots — and so an overlay of race has been placed atop the already fraught charges. While there is no indication of a racial motivation in the case, Crown Heights history hovers over everything and everyone: from the victim’s father, who said his daughter had met the men, in part, because she had “less reserve about conversing with African-Americans than is the norm in our community,” to the main defendant’s brother, who said he thought her presence could lead to trouble: “I never liked hanging out with her. She was the only white girl out there with a bunch of black kids.”
As in many sex-crime cases, the defense has questioned the victim’s credibility, quoting records that indicate a history of mental illness. The story has been tangled by the young woman herself, who repeatedly came forward to accuse the men, only — in a classic pattern, experts say — to continue to see her ostensible tormentors and withdraw some of her charges.