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In the days that followed, it seemed that sexual assault would become the ugliest motif of Woodstock '99. State police confirmed that they were investigating four allegations of rape; of course, they have little hope of finding the rapists, who are by now scattered across the country. There were apparently numerous other incidents of sexual assault. David Schneider, a rehabilitation counselor from Jessup, Md., told the Washington Post that during a performance by the group Korn on the first night, he saw a "very skinny girl, maybe 90 or 100 lbs.," get pushed into the mosh pit, where "a couple of guys started taking her clothes off... They pulled her pants down, and they were violating her." Schneider claims that he also saw other women raped and that the crowd seemed to be cheering on the offenders: "No one I saw tried to go in and rescue them." A crisis-services director for the YWCA said the heat, sleeplessness and readily available drugs and alcohol were "a perfect breeding ground for sexual assault."
Any crowd, of course, may at any moment become a mob, devolving into a single, violent mind. It's too bad that the Doofus of Mayhem (to give the idiot a title, like the Duke of Windsor) got loose at this third Woodstock.
The organizers had bad luck. They were mortified, of course. But perhaps it is time to go over this again: it is normal, perhaps even to be expected, that when a crowd the size of the City of Rochester, N.Y., is assembled in an unshaded field and is overcharged, peddled drugs and hosed down with vehemently moronic music, then something like a riot may come to pass. Garbage in, garbage out.