The truth about a rape

Great kudos to cops who, 24 years after a rape in Prospect Park, used DNA evidence to find the already-locked-up serial sex predator who committed the crime. Their persistence and precision, exemplary in this national #MeToo moment, should give heart to others who thought their pursuit of justice to have dead-ended.

Great shame on the unnamed police sources who back then, just after the woman known as Jane Doe came forward, smeared her as a fabulist, even when evidence emerged to corroborate her account.

Those police sources spoke to, and through, late Daily News columnist Mike McAlary. In these news pages in April and May 1994, even as the police found semen on the woman’s jogging shorts, even as the city and the rest of this newspaper established that a crime had occurred, he stuck to the story that the actress and activist had cried wolf.

“Rape hoax the real crime,” a headline above McAlary’s column screamed out of the gate, relying on insistent voices inside the NYPD, as reporters and columnists often, and necessarily, do.

Then, after the NYPD forensic lab found physical evidence of rape, a new column headlined: “I’m right, but that’s no reason to cheer.”

“Stand your ground,” he reported one of his unnamed police sources telling him. “The lab is wrong.”

But it was not wrong. The sources were wrong, terribly wrong — and so was McAlary. By the following week, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton was flatly declaring that cops had physical evidence, and that a rape had occurred.

The woman sued McAlary, and this newspaper, but the case was dismissed in 1997 because the judge found that McAlary had accurately reported the inaccurate information given to him by police sources.

McAlary died in 1998, and when his life became a Broadway play in 2013, the victim’s lawyer wrote an Op-Ed in another paper expressing disgust that the production gave short shrift to this chapter of his career. That reactivated coldcase cops who, wielding more advanced DNA analysis, went back at the semen in the rape kit and found a match.

This shouldn’t only happen when a high-profile play reanimates a two-decade-old controversy.

We know this to be true, and must say it without any doubt: Jane Doe was raped in Prospect Park on April 26, 1994. Some members of a police department sworn to protect the people of the city considered it their job to discredit her story and destroy her credibility, and one of our columnists amplified those attacks, causing her further pain.

Pray law enforcement officials and journalists alike learn from the wrenching lesson and never repeat the sin.