You will rarely see the name of a rape victim — or the victim of almost any sex crime — in the pages of any newspaper.
Most follow the same guidelines we do here, which is not to name people who have been, or allege to have been, victims of sexual assaults or attempted sexual assaults. We allow three exceptions: the person agrees to be named; the assault and the victim’s identity are so well known that it’s pointless to withhold it; or there is a valid news reason to do so.
No law prohibits the publication of these names. The Plain Dealer and most newspapers elect to withhold them because of the stigma often unfairly attached to victims of sex crimes, and because we do not want the fear of disclosure to discourage victims from prosecuting their attackers.
And yet, in the last week, we have published the names of two women who said they were victims of particularly horrific rapes.
One, 18-year-old Johanna Orozco of Cleveland, accused her former boyfriend, Juan Ruiz, of sneaking into her bedroom on the second floor of her grandparents’ home and raping her at knifepoint. She is now in the trauma unit at MetroHealth Medical Center after being hit in the face by a shotgun blast — fired, she says, by Ruiz. We did not report the initial rape charges, but elements of the story have been in the paper several times since the shooting on March 5.
The other, Liz Seccuro of Greenwich, Conn., has been in the national news recently after going to the police with an e-mail she had gotten from a man who was apologizing for his part in what she believes was a gang rape when she was a freshman in college, 20 years earlier. We ran an Associated Press story on Page One three Sundays ago, and on Friday we published a story saying that the man, William Beebe of Las Vegas, had been sentenced to 18 months in prison for aggravated sexual battery.
The publication of these names does not signify a step away from our general policy, so it is appropriate to explain why we made exceptions in each case.
The local case was complicated by a couple of factors.
Our initial report of the shooting did not name Orozco because of the rape charges. But her name later became well known after several of her family members — outraged over the fact that magistrate Laura Williams had declined to keep Ruiz locked up after he had been charged with the rape — held a news conference to express their displeasure. To dramatize the human cost of what they saw as a catastrophic decision, the family displayed large photos of Orozco, along with a prom dress they said she will never wear. They wanted people to know who she is.
But even though we joined other media in using her name, it wasn’t an automatic decision, because Orozco was in grave condition in the hospital and had not given us permission herself. As much as editors might have admired the family’s stand, there was some thought that it was Orozco’s alone to make. Ultimately, we decided that given the wide publicity of the case, it would be pointless to avoid using her name.
It was a decision complicated by the fact that we had inadvertently used her name in the paper before the news conference. Two days before the family went public with her name and photo, we had published it in a follow-up story on the official decisions that led to the tragedy.
That revelation was a mistake. By the second day of the story, the reporter, and the long string of editors who reviewed the story, all were now considering Orozco as the victim of a devastating shooting and neglected to think of her still as a rape victim. The part of the story that identified her was the segment that provided details of the shooting.
All were mortified the next day when they realized we had published the name of a rape victim. Newspaper people are supposed to do their jobs dispassionately, but it is impossible to be involved in a story like this without feeling heartfelt sorrow for Orozco and her family, and the last thing we wanted to do was to add to the pain.
Cleveland City Councilman Joe Santiago, a neighbor of the Orozcos who has been helping them deal with the tragedy and its aftermath, offered some consolation by saying that the family would have made her name public anyway. But, of course, that first revelation should have been left to them.
The Seccuro decision was far less complicated — for us, at least. She is the one who had to wrestle with the trauma of what to do about this man who came out of a past that she had tried to bury for 20 years. But when she then elected to go public with the story, hoping to raise awareness of sexual assault, all we had to do was put her name in the paper.
Hers was a courageous decision for anyone to make and one that I personally applaud. Sexual-assault victims are just that — victims — and by keeping their names out of print, the media reinforces the notion that they have somehow done something wrong.
Some newspapers, hoping to combat that stigma, have changed their approach and treat sexual assault victims like victims of any other crime — names and all. But that policy assumes a common compassion toward sexual assault victims that isn’t universal in our society. It might seem a noble experiment, but it’s one that uses people who already are suffering the most severe trauma of their lives as guinea pigs.
I don’t think that is up to us, and neither do the editors who decide such matters here. So, the decisions — and the mistake — we made concerning the identities of the two rape victims will continue to be the exception rather than the rule.
