Retarded Woman’s Rape Put Character, Morality on Trial : Crime: The case from a New Jersey suburb ended in convictions and a loss of innocence. The victim wanted to be accepted.

GLEN RIDGE, N.J. —  It was a two-minute walk from the playground to the Scherzer twins’ house at 34 Lorraine St. There, down in a cramped basement before 13 young men, the 17-year-old girl began to undress.

Some of the best-looking, best-liked, most athletic guys in town were there that day. Like a lot of teen-agers, the girl was hungry to fit in. They were upperclassmen who could get a date with just about any girl in school.

She was plain and stout, with an IQ of 64 and the social acuity of an 8-year-old. This was well known. She had grown up among the gaslights and broad lawns that line Glen Ridge, a close-knit and affluent suburb of New York.

The girl had been out shooting hoops at Carteret Park that bright, blue early-March day. She would later recall that someone promised her a date if she’d go along to the Scherzers’ house. She agreed. When one of the athletes put his arm around her, she said, it was romantic.

In testimony later, though, the scene could only be described as grim. Six of the original 13 athletes, perhaps alarmed or uncomfortable, soon left.

But seven remained, pressing the woman to masturbate and perform oral sex. Finally, nude and spread-eagled on a couch, she was penetrated first with a broom handle, then with a 33-inch-long baseball bat, then with a stick.

In the midst of it, she heard: “Go further, further.”

*

Four years have passed, but that afternoon was very much alive this winter as county prosecutors argued that the girl was criminally wronged; that she was no more able to consent to these sexual acts than she was able to change a dollar.

The accused never denied their involvement. No one defended the moral vacuum in which the events occurred. Still, their attorneys argued, no law was violated, no crime committed in the basement that day.

A jury of seven women and five men in the Newark, N.J., Courthouse disagreed.

The graphic, often painful 23-week trial ended Tuesday when Christopher Archer, 20, Kevin Scherzer, 22, and his fraternal twin, Kyle, were convicted of rape. The fourth defendant, Bryant Grober, 21, was acquitted of the rape charge, but found guilty of third-degree conspiracy.

Two of the seven originally indicted had already pleaded guilty to lesser charges in exchange for their cooperation. Another one, the son of a Glen Ridge police officer who investigated the case, will be tried separately.

In many ways, it has been a protracted morality play featuring characters you knew in high school: swaggering campus stars and their proud circle of family and friends; the social outcast who longed to be one of them; a supporting cast of town police, schoolteachers, psychologists, community leaders and indignant lawyers for both sides.

The defendants sat shoulder-to-shoulder in the front row of the courtroom, wearing conservative suits and haircuts. They smiled warmly at extended family and friends, clapped each other on the back and cracked jokes during breaks.

“Look at them, the way they strut around,” said Marge Clark, a Harrison, N.J., resident who attended much of the trial. “They don’t seem to be worried at all, like it’s all in the bag.”

*

It is true that the girl was not a sexual novice. She had her first encounter at the age of 12, and others followed, according to testimony. At 16, she began taking birth control pills with her vitamins at breakfast.

Defense attorneys argued successfully that the New Jersey rape-shield law that prevents the use of their sexual pasts against assault victims should be partially lifted. The girl’s history was fair game.

“What the defense has done is raise every rape myth that we thought we had educated people about and answered,” said Carol Vasile, a local member of the National Organization for Women who attended the trial daily in solidarity with a girl she called “the ultimate blameless victim.”

Attorneys portrayed her instead as a full-breasted “Lolita” who eagerly, even aggressively pursued men. One said she had an “almost insatiable need to satisfy herself through sex.”

They argued that boys “will be boys. Pranksters. Foolarounds.” They suggested that her family was “dysfunctional,” society too permissive. It was theorized that because of her mental retardation, “she craved the embracing, she craved the euphoria because her brain functioned that way.”

The girl wasn’t vulnerable to the boys, it was argued, so much as the young men--and their raging hormones--were vulnerable to her.

The court heard the girl discuss, even brag about, her sexual skill in conversations taped secretly by one defendant’s former high school girlfriend--a popular student whom the mentally retarded girl admired.

“Yeah, but, but, I mean, I’m used to it. I mean seriously, I mean, I’m not ever gonna get off of, you know, sex. I mean I’m so used to it, I mean, I’ve been doing it since I was little,” the girl said.

“I guess you know what you’re doing and stuff, huh?” said Mari Carmen Ferraez, who taped the conversation at a defense investigator’s request.

“Yeah,” responded the girl, who reads at a second-grade level and cannot name four U.S. Presidents. “I mean, it’s amazing. I mean, you know, and I don’t have any diseases. I’m not pregnant. I’m so lucky.”

Her parents, counselors, teachers and swim coach all tried repeatedly to help her differentiate between love and sex. But the girl, who was first molested at the age of 12, could not seem to grasp that her body was private, that she had a right to say no.

Her parents put her on birth control at the age of 16 because they worried that she was vulnerable to peer pressure or a sexual attack. She wanted so badly to be loved, accepted, one of the gang.

“Why didn’t you ask the boys to leave you alone?” prosecutor Robert Laurino asked the girl when she took the stand in December.

“I didn’t want to hurt their feelings,” she replied.

She stammered her testimony, bashful and reluctant to hurt or embarrass the four defendants she still called friends.

That they were not, however, was painfully clear. The true crime, some argued, was that not one of that group of teen-age athletes had character enough to protect the girl, even if from herself.

“Maybe it was the heat of the moment on a hot spring day. It’s not clear,” said Brian Fahey, 25, a friend of the Archer family. “They’re guilty of a lack of moral judgment, but . . . are they guilty of a crime?”

Fahey, a handsome former high school athlete, knows these guys. He was friends with guys like them growing up. “It’s fairly common for a 17-year-old boy to think, ‘I’m cool. I’m sexually active,’ ” he said. “These were smart kids, hard-working, athletic . . . not by any stretch troubled kids.”

Jonathan Martin, a young black man from a neighboring town, also knows these guys and has a feeling for the world they come from. He has been stopped by police more than once while passing through town.

“Glen Ridge is a closed-door town, a private town where the feeling is, ‘If you’re not like us, we don’t want you,’ ” said Martin.

“There is this mentality about jocks, that they can do no wrong. It’s like they’re protected. No one can touch them. They obviously thought they could get away with whatever they wanted.”

At the end of that afternoon four years ago, the girl testified ,”Everybody put their hands on top of each other like it was a basketball game. They said if I told anybody I’d get into trouble. They said they’d tell my mother.”

She lingered a while after that near the swings and rocking horses in Carteret Park where she waited, she said, for her date to come by.

“I thought he’d like to go out with me,” she said. “But he never did.”