Linda Fairstein, the ex-head of the Manhattan district attorney’s sex crimes unit, inspiration for “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and crime novelist – is being forced into exile since the release of a Netflix series about the infamous Central Park jogger case she oversaw, the New York Times reports.
Fairstein headed the sex crimes division when a white woman jogging in New York City's Central Park in 1989 was raped, beaten, and left for dead. In Ava DuVernay’s new four-part series, “When They See Us,” Fairstein’s character is shown as the driving force in the case that wrongly sent five black and Latino teenagers to prison for the crime – despite doubts of a prosecutor and facts that pointed to the teens’ innocence.
Online petitions and a hashtag, #CancelLindaFairstein, have called for a boycott of her books and her removal from prominent board positions, the Times noted. She’s since taken her Twitter account down and resigned from the boards of several organizations including Safe Horizon and the Joyful Heart Foundation, which aid victims of sexual violence, and Vassar College, her alma mater.
“The truth about my participation can be proved in the pages of public records and case documents,” Fairstein said in her letter to the chairman of Vassar’s board, the Times reported. “But that has not been apparent to those embracing the mob mentality that now dominates social media, any more than it was considered by the rashly irresponsible filmmaker.”
At least one former colleague decried the public pillory.
“It’s a terrible, terrible thing when someone gets wrongfully convicted,” Daniel Alonso, a colleague at the district attorney’s office, told the Times, but added: “I think it’s terrible to ‘cancel’ someone’s entire career over one matter.”
Lawyer Andrew Miltenberg, Fairstein’s lawyer, has accused Netflix and DuVernay of “misrepresenting the facts in an inflammatory and inaccurate manner” and threatened to take legal action, the Times reported.
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