by Bernard Lefkowitz
Vintage Books
516 pages
Recommended for ages 14 and up
On March 1, 1989, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, a group of high school "Jocks" raped a seventeen-year-old retarded girl named Leslie Faber. Although most of the Jocks' classmates knew about the rape soon after it occurred, weeks passed before anyone had the courage to go to the police. And even after police investigations began, most Glen Ridge residents had trouble believing that "their guys" could ever have committed such a heinous crime. Bernard Lefkowitz, in Our Guys, tells the story of the Glen Ridge rape and the attitudes that lay behind it.
The seven boys involved in the rape of Leslie Faber -- Kyle and Kevin Scherzer, Paul and Chris Archer, Bryant Grober, Peter Quigley, and Richard Corcoran -- came from some of the town's most-respected families. They were the best athletes at their school and part of the most popular clique. They were heroes in outwardly-idyllic Glen Ridge. And from an early age, they had been taught that they didn't need to respect women. As they got older, they gained "more legitimacy and authority as a group each time they victimized a woman." They felt most deeply connected to each other when they were able to gain power over one of their female peers -- and when they realized that no one would try to prevent them from doing so. The idea of their own invincibility persisted among the boys even after they were put on trial for rape.
After the investigation into Leslie's rape began in the spring of 1989, the citizens of Glen Ridge stood behind "their guys," the seven boys who had been accused of raping Leslie Faber with a broomstick and a baseball bat. Glen Ridge High School's Class of 1989 circulated a petition requesting that their seven most popular athletes be allowed to march with their class at graduation. The Jocks' female classmates initiated and tape recorded conversations with Leslie Faber that they thought might help the boys' case. And the seven boys' parents worked behind the scenes to raise money for lawyers. One father even had the audacity to suggest that his two sons, both accused of rape, be allowed to do community service for their crime. Even the judge in the case seemed to be on the boys' side, for he gave them a relatively easy sentence because he sympathized with the pain their families had gone through. But no one in Glen Ridge seemed to have the least sympathy for Leslie Faber, the unpopular retarded girl who had spent her entire life striving to be accepted by the Jocks she idolized, and whose life had been ruined in one stroke by those same Jocks.
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