Thinking a lot today about Kitty Genovese, a lesbian from Brooklyn, whose brutal and senseless murder by a stranger was twisted and exploited to push a racist, anti-urbanist, and factually-incorrect narrative that has shaped the last 50+ years of American history. ❤️🧡🤍💜
There are a lot of differences between the murders of Kitty Genovese and Jordan Neely. But at the same time, our collective failures to learn the right lessons from Genovese's murder set up the *exact* situation of Neely's murder. And I fear we're still not paying attention.
Almost everyone gets the details of Kitty Genovese's death wrong, so I want to start off by telling what *actually* happened, not the myth, even though the myth is crucial to understanding how her death was exploited in ways that still harm us today and are relevant to Neely.
Kitty Genovese was a Brooklyn-born lesbian. At the time of her death, she was 28 and living in Kew Gardens, a suburban part of Queens (within NYC city limits). She was murdered by a Winston Moseley, a Black man who wanted "to kill a woman b/c they're easier and don't fight back".
As you can imagine, race will factor a lot into how this story is treated - Geneovese being a white Italian woman and Moseley being a Black man.
Moseley attacked Genovese *twice*, in two separate incidents over a ~30 minutes in two different locations, around 3:15am on a Friday morning. The first was outside her apartment, across the street from the LIRR station, and the second was in a different building where she fled.
The reason that these are two separate attacks is because Moseley took a break in between to get in his parked car, drive it somewhere else, park it, and return - an inexplicable detail which only highlights how truly absurd and senseless this murder really was.
Being 3am, most people were sleeping, but a few people did witness the attacks. One neighbor shouted "Let that girl alone". Others did call the police, but were shrugged off (more on that later). Some witnesses heard her shout but didn't recognize them as a cry for help.
Only one person definitively witnessed the stabbings and did nothing: Joseph Fink, a superintendent in the building across the street, who SAW the stabbing, "thought about going downstairs to get [his] baseball bat" but decided to go take a nap instead. Yeah. Fink sucks.
After the first stabbing, Kitty fled (with a punctured lung) to another building to hide. She collapsed in a hallway at the back, where Moseley found her ten minutes later, raped her, and continued stabbing her before stealing the $49 in her wallet and leaving.
The second stabbing took place right outside the door of Karl Ross, a gay man who was also a friend of Kitty's. He ultimately placed the phone call which got the police and ambulance to (finally) come - although it was unfortunately too late to save Kitty.
Karl Ross heard muffled screams outside his door around 3:30am, opened the door a crack to see his friend lying on her back as Moseley stabbed her repeatedly. Moseley stopped and made eye contact with Ross, at which point Ross closed the door.
I'm going into detail here not to be salacious, but because it matters: Ross has been unfairly blamed for not doing enough fast enough, but if you actually picture the scene, it's easy to imagine how terrifying - and confusing - that moment must have been for him.
That's even before you account for the fact that Karl Ross was gay, which means he knew all too well that calling the NYPD would put both himself *and* Kitty Genovese at risk, because the NYPD were (and still are) extremely homophobic and also ineffectual.
As evidence for "NYPD were ineffectual", I point to... the fact that MULTIPLE other people had ALREADY called the cops before that point, and they had refused to do anything (at one point even interrogating one caller over the phone as if she were somehow a suspect!).
Ross called two friends, one of whom told him to come over, so he escaped through his window into the friend's apartment via the roof, where he then called the police. He also called Sophia Farrar, another friend of Kitty's, who ran out of bed and to the scene of the stabbing.
Importantly: Sophia Farrar did not know that Moseley had already left by that point. All she knew was that her friend was being stabbed, and without further thought, she ran straight into what she thought was a dangerous situation, hoping to protect her friend.
Sophia Farrar was a true hero. Not because she called the police or ambulance (they had already been called by then), or because she saved Kitty (she couldn't). But because she risked her own life just to try. And because she is the reason that Kitty Genovese did not die alone.
Multiple witnesses saw a Black man murder Kitty, so you'd think the NYPD would begin their investigation looking for suspects fitting that description, right? Wrong. Their main suspect was Mary Ann Zielonko, Kitty's girlfriend, a white woman.
Not that racial profiling is a good thing, of course, but the fact that the police ignored literally the most basic leads just so that they could interrogate a lesbian for six hours about her sex life (yes) shows how ineffectual, incompetent, and homophobic they are.
Instead of looking for real leads, the police spent six hours interrogating Zielonko as their primary suspect, asking her invasive and irrelevant questions about their sex life, including what sex positions they enjoyed. Yes, really. ACAB ACAB ACAB.
How did the cops catch Winston Moseley, Kitty Genovese's killer? They didn't. He confessed. He was arrested for an unrelated suspected robbery (TV set) and while in custody for that, he just... happened to mention that he killed Kitty (as well as two other murders).
These are all the FACTS about Kitty Genovese's murder. So now we need to look at why almost every single thing I wrote is different from the popular story about her murder. What are the myths, and why do people believe them?
The blame for this lies mostly with the @nytimes, and specifically Abe Rosenthal. Rosenthal was at the time the metropolitan editor, but later promoted to Managing Editor and then Executive Editor (the top position at the paper). Oh, and he was also a homophobe.
@chimeracoder This is all very interesting. Can you please tell us the sources you’re relying on?
@chimeracoder I don’t believe “ACAB” counts as a fact. I was going to retweet this thread until I saw that.