Because Marla Hanson demanded from her landlord the return of a security deposit on her rented apartment and resisted his advances, he dispatched two men last June to slash her face with a razor. The instantly notorious New York City attack left Hanson with visible scars, but the 25-year-old model says the courtroom assault that followed was worse. At one of the resultant trials, a defense attorney claimed, without producing evidence, that she was helping prosecutors frame the two slashers because they were black. He alleged that she was sexually voracious and "preyed on men." He even confronted Hanson with an anatomical obscenity that her landlord allegedly used to describe her, then asked her to define it.
"I was in shock that I had to answer that," Hanson said in a TV interview after the convictions came in. "I kept looking at the judge to help me." Instead, at the sentencing last week of Hanson's landlord, Acting Justice Jeffrey Atlas blasted Hanson and her attorney for publicly criticizing his handling of the trial. That caused Hanson to burst into tears and inspired a storm of outrage from editorialists and Mayor Edward Koch. "How many times must a victim be victimized?" he asked.
The passions raised by the venerable legal strategy of trying to discredit the victim got further visibility last week at hearings in another much publicized case, the murder trial of Robert Chambers, 20. A handsome preppie college dropout, Chambers claims to have accidentally strangled Jennifer Levin, 18, when she hurt him during predawn sex in New York City's Central Park last August. To bolster Chambers' version of the killing, Defense Attorney Jack Litman attempted to obtain Levin's diary as evidence, characterizing it as a chronicle of her "kinky and aggressive" sex life. After reading the diary privately, the presiding judge ruled that it contained no information relevant to the defendant's case. By that time, however, Levin's character had been impugned and the anguish of her family amply replenished. Her grief-stricken father has appeared in court wearing a JUSTICE FOR JENNIFER button.
The Hanson and Levin cases are vivid reminders that defense attorneys frequently try to portray female victims of sexual crimes as either sluts or teases. "Blaming the victim is a very sexist defense," says Kelli Conlin of the National Organization for Women. "It started with rape cases. The idea was 'She asked for it.' " In recent years, though, new rape-shield laws have excluded from trials evidence regarding a rape victim's sexual past, except any previous relationship with the alleged attacker.
Those protections do not extend to other crimes. Indeed, Litman first made a name for himself in 1977 by getting a conviction on the lesser charge of manslaughter for Richard Herrin, a Yale graduate who killed his girlfriend Bonnie Garland with a hammer. "It was suggested," says her father Paul bitterly, "that she was a manipulative, rich, spoiled person who didn't treat this lovely man who murdered her nicely." Garland, a New York attorney, is working for the spread of legislation that gives victims the right to a voice at bail hearings and with the prosecution before a plea bargain is accepted. "I've told Jennifer's survivors that they can expect further desecration of her memory," he says.