Counter-Currents
The Witness
How Lies about Kitty Genovese’s Murder Were Used to Undermine White America
Spencer J. Quinn
2,387 words
Urban myths are insidious enough when they are false. But when they assume universality in the broader culture — while reflecting negatively on that culture — then they can cause people to lose faith in themselves. This is one way in which civilizations begin to decline.
For the last 60 years, one such myth is that of Kitty Genovese.
Thanks to the New York Times reporting of her grisly 1964 murder in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens — during which 38 people supposedly watched and did nothing while she was stabbed to death — her name has become synonymous with bystander apathy. She lives on to this day in numerous studies and publications describing how inherently self-centered and risk averse people can be. The only problem is that the New York Times story which broke the story was filled with lies — lies that reporter Martin Gansburg and Times editor Abe Rosenthal wished to propagate to sell newspapers and further their careers, certainly, but also to shake the confidence that Americans had in themselves at that time; especially, I believe, white Americans.
In The Witness, a fascinating 2015 documentary which revisits the Genovese murder, many of these lies are uncovered. It also poignantly depicts how such a horrific act can destroy families and haunt people for decades. The documentary was co-written and co-produced by Kitty’s younger brother William, and follows him as he interviews surviving participants of the incident and its famous aftermath. He does the narration as well:
Two weeks after my sister Kitty’s funeral, the New York Times published a front-page story. It barely mentioned her killer. Instead it focused on Kitty’s neighbors, and practically blamed 38 of them for her death. The Times story was seen as proof that New York City was uncaring, that America was falling apart. And my sister’s been a symbol for bystander apathy for decades.
The first thing we notice about William Genovese, however, is that he has no legs. It’s revealed later in the documentary that he had enlisted in the United States Marines to fight in Vietnam, in part because he believed Rosenthal’s false apathy myth and wanted to counter it. He got his legs blown off as a result.
Early in the film, Genovese studies the court transcripts and the partially-illegible police reports from the time of the murder, and then interviews the surviving witnesses. He learns that most of them were not eyewitnesses but in fact earwitnesses. Many had heard Kitty scream, but by the time they got to their windows they could not see anything, since the attack occurred in two stages: one on the sidewalk and one a moment later when an injured Kitty staggered around a corner and into a small vestibule, where her killer returned to finish the job. It was also nearly 3:30 in the morning, so most of these witnesses were not fully awake and didn’t realize a murder was taking place, in any event. One man attested that he had witnessed the first attack and shouted at the killer, causing him to run. One woman insisted she had called the police, but was cut off after she was told that they had already received multiple calls from other witnesses. The police logs show only one phone call that evening, however. Of the 38 witnesses claimed by the New York Times, only five testified in court.
You can buy Spencer J. Quinn’s young adult novel The No College Club here.
One witness, Sophie Farrar, appeared in the vestibule as the attack was taking place and ran down the stairs to intervene. After the killer fled, she assisted the stricken Kitty and watched as the poor girl lay dying in her arms. Days later in an interview, Farrar said she would gladly do it again. In the story, however, she is reported as having said she didn’t want to get involved. The fact that Kitty died in her arms was left out of the story — and was something Genovese himself was unaware of until he started filming The Witness years later. “It don’t pay to talk because they twist what you say,” Sophie says.
So much for bystander apathy.
After getting what he could from the surviving witnesses and official records, Genovese interviews various media figures who were involved in the case. According to television correspondent Mike Wallace, no one challenged Abe Rosenthal and the New York Times back in 1964 because of the tremendous clout the Old Grey Lady carried back then. In his interview with Genovese, however, former WNBC reporter Gabe Pressman shares a slightly different opinion:
Pressman: I had no firsthand knowledge of the story. But my friend Danny Meenan covered the story. At this point he was doing radio, I believe, for WMCA. And among all the police reporters I have known, and I’ve known many, he was one of the best, if not the best. He said, “The story doesn’t make any sense to me.” And he gave me an account of what he found, and it says here there were many witnesses, some 30-odd in the number. One conclusion all seemed to have, it was a drunken brawl between man and wife.
Martin Gansburg, the author of the page-one story in the Times which caused the furor, was challenged by this irate reporter. “Why didn’t you include in your story the fact that many witnesses did not believe a murder was taking place?”
Gansburg replied, “It would have ruined the story.”
Genovese: That to me is incredible. It’s curious to me why — and I’m not trying to blame Danny Meenan or yourself or anybody else — but how come people didn’t call the Times out on that?
Pressman: Because it was the New York Times. And Danny, you know, he had to continue to hold on to his job. I don’t think that he probably was interested in taking on Abe Rosenthal and the New York Times.
A couple of years passed. I was teaching a course, and this seemed to be something that the class would want to explore. A couple of the people being enterprising, I guess you would say, called Rosenthal. And Rosenthal called me. He was really angry. He was screaming at me.
“Do you realize,” said Rosenthal, “that this story has become emblematic of a situation in America? That it’s become the subject of sociology courses, books, and articles?” And I think that that is abhorrent to anyone who is interested in the truth.
In probably the most inexplicable and disappointing moment in The Witness, however, Genovese conducts an interview with Rosenthal himself. But their conversation onscreen is brief and anti-climactic. The most Genovese can get out of him — or was allowed to get — is the following soundbite when describing the Times article: “People all over the world were affected by it. Did it do anything? You bet your eye it did something. And I’m glad it did.”
Genovese sets Rosenthal up as a villain in the first half of the film, describing him as the dishonest originator of an insidious urban myth. This myth has been chipping away at American self-confidence for decades, and Genovese himself could be seen as a victim of it. Genovese even states bluntly that it was Rosenthal who broke the story, and then capitalized on it with a book entitled Thirty-Eight Witnesses. Yet when he finally confronts Rosenthal about his mendacity, he doesn’t hold the man’s feet to the fire. So why include the interview at all?
After this, we see Genovese’s family questioning his obsession with his sister. Her murder was so traumatic, his parents never really recovered. His brothers understandably want to keep it in the past, while William’s children as well as his nieces and nephews hardly know anything about Kitty. At one point, William says to one of his brothers, “If you buried it, you should have.”
We also learn more about Kitty. She was living in the city and working at a bar. She had been separated from her husband, and at the time was romantically involved with her female roommate. A very popular and energetic gal, she’s remembered fondly by the people who knew her. The Witness makes terrific use of the plethora of super-8 film footage of Kitty that has survived, and it seems that she was anything but shy. Unfortunately, by eschewing the traditional life of husband, home, and family and pursuing a nocturnal lifestyle in a major city, Kitty Genovese put herself in danger.
That famous close-up photo of her face? That’s her mugshot. She had been arrested for acting as a middleman between a bookie and his clients — another thing about her William hadn’t realized until he started making this movie.
As for the danger, we don’t meet her killer, Winston Moseley, until 57 minutes in. He’s black. Did you know that? I didn’t.
Genovese barely mentions this fact in The Witness, and Moseley’s race does not come up in the New York Times article at all. When I speculated that Rosenthal wished to shake the confidence of white Americans, I was referring to the way in which the Times article deflects blame onto an innocent target — the majority-white residents of Kew Gardens — and away from its rightful target: black Americans. Blacks have always committed a disproportionate amount of violent crime, something that people were certainly aware of back in 1964, especially in cities. They should be held accountable for that, especially considering that they never shy away from holding whites accountable for every wrongdoing they have committed throughout history. Thus, the headline of Gansburg’s story should have read:
ANOTHER AFRO-AMERICAN STABS AND RAPES WHITE WOMAN: HAD “INTENT OF FINDING A WOMAN AND KILLING HER,” KILLER SEZ
Okay, so that’s more New York Post than New York Times, but you see my point. Gansburg’s article is a paragon of misdirection — away from the truth and toward a place where whites, egalitarian individualists that they are, will start feeling guilty merely for existing. The Kitty Genovese story took off in the broader culture not because it shamed those innocent Kew Gardens residents, but because it transmuted them into stand-ins for the majority-white America of the time. This isn’t about something being in the water in Queens. It’s about all whites everywhere. We all have the potential to become apathetic bystanders. The shame is on us.
Once this is established, whites will do anything to prove that they are not like those callous bastards who stood there and watched — just watched! — that poor girl get stabbed to death. I know that’s how I felt when I read the Watchmen graphic novel back the 1990s, which briefly references Kitty Genovese in the masked vigilante Rorschach’s origin story. I had never heard of her until then. After that, her name stuck with me forever.
From Alan Moore’s Watchmen
The additional fact that Rosenthal — and presumably Gansburg — were Jews only fuels my speculation. This form of mass racial shaming through fake psychological analysis is as old as Freud and the Frankfurt School. Kevin MacDonald covers this in great detail in his 1998 classic The Culture of Critique. The New York Times coverage of the Kitty Genovese murder would have fit nicely into that volume.
There was one other infuriating moment in the documentary I must comment upon — and it’s infuriating in a good way, in the sense that it does not reflect badly on William Genovese or the film, even though it may have revealed more than Genovese had intended. Genovese had tried to arrange an interview with Moseley himself, who was still serving his life sentence in prison at that time. (He died, having never been granted parole, in 2016.) Moseley refused, but his son Steven did not. It’s funny that the 1964 police reports mention Moseley’s 135 IQ, but not how they ascertained that figure. Did they test him themselves? Did they simply take the killer’s word for it? Do they always determine the IQs of murderers? Who knows? But one thing we do know is that the son did not inherit his IQ from his father.
You can buy Spencer Quinn’s novel White Like You here.
The man sits down for an understandably awkward interview with Genovese, and almost immediately starts playing the race card. When talking about his father, he claims, “There was a lot of racial tensions back then. And your sister was using a lot of racial slurs at him and he just lost it. That’s what he told me.”
Genovese then patiently informs Steven that two weeks prior to murdering Kitty, his father had shot a black woman in the stomach, dragged her into her home while her family was sleeping, raped her, and then set her and her house on fire. This had all been public knowledge at least since Gansburg’s article was published, yet Steven Moseley had no idea. He admits to relying solely on his bloodstained psychopath of a father for this information, and then absurdly tries to equate his circumstances with William’s (“Your family took a loss. And my family took a loss. You know, it affected everybody.”) Then he has the unmitigated gall to inquire if his life is in danger because William Genovese happens to share a last name with a famous mafia family. He actually asks William Genovese, who is legless, if he’s part of the Genovese crime family. Of course, the irony of a mass murderer’s son fretting over who might or might not be in a crime family sails right past Steven Moseley.
The ignorance of this man astounds as much as it offends.
As The Witness progresses to its inevitably bittersweet conclusion, aided mightily by deft animation, brisk pacing, and a sparklingly clear script, our empathy for William Genovese only grows. His is an impossible quest in which he opens many doors that may have been better left shut. But he lost his legs partially because he believed the false urban myth surrounding his sister, so of course he has more at stake than his siblings do. Of course he’s more desperate to find closure. Plus, according to everyone in his family, he had a special relationship with his older sister. They really did love each other. This comes through loud and clear in The Witness as William Genovese searches for the elusive truth — the truth that the New York Times should have reported on back in 1964.
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17 comments
Excellent work. It’s hardly surprising to any of us that her killer was black. You’re right. It’s always kept out of the story. It was only after I woke up that I did a little research to find out the killers race. He was a budding young serial killer. Are there any unsolved murders in and around that time? I wonder if the police ever looked into it? Doubtful.
Great review.
I remember watching The Witness on Netflix with my wife years ago. We were both shocked to learn that the story we had been told all these years was not only wrong, but was the opposite of what had happened. Of course, in retrospect we shouldn’t be shocked at all given how many Jewish lies have been exposed over the years.
“Did you know that? I didn’t.”.
Was that a joke? I didn’t know about this story, but somehow I knew THAT….
If this crime had taken place in the “bad old days” of the 1920s rather than the progressive 1960s, the murderer wouldn’t have lived on for another 52 years. Instead, he wouldn’t have lived on for another 52 hours.
A fine piece of analysis and writing.
I was a NY teenager then and we all took the story exactly as the NYT told it.
Misdirection indeed. The entire pitch and meaning of the narrative was a condemnation of the neighbors. The actually murderer escaped notice. It was almost as if a ghost had done it. Not til now did I know he was another Subsaharan savage. And we all felt guilt for what he did.
As the proverb goes, We grow too soon old and too late smart. But then again, we have been lied to all our lives.
There was a movie that I remember shown several times on TV in the 70s. The Woman Who Cried Murder, or She Cried Murder. I remember the beginning, I was pretty young, but that was my introduction to NYC as a place where “people got killed when they walked down the street”, or some other such urban myth that I my mom believed. I seem to remember the scumbag negroid murderer being portrayed as white, but I can’t be sure.
Great article, does well in deconstructing the Jew propaganda, but I am left shaken with the uneasy feeling that this story is emblematic of something much more insidious. I think you’ve barely scratched the surface of the vile Jew lies.
I’m glad the truth came out about this story, and I could not be less shocked about the guilty players. It is, however, unfortunately true that plenty of people would rather look the other way than help.
In 1985 I was a senior in high school and my mom and I went to visit Washington DC. As we walked up to the gates of the White House about 4:00 pm a massive black man grabbed me by the wrist and stared saying “I want some pu$$y!” He was clearly on drugs or drunk, but he was strong as an ox. While I was trying to wrench free and my tiny mother was hitting him and screaming, I looked up and saw at least 40 mostly white tourists just standing there, staring at us, and not one of them made a move to help. Half of them were grown men. That’s when rage entered me and I got free, grabbed my mother, and screamed “shame on you” at all of them.
How in that situation you come away being mad a White people for not intervening is just another form of anti-Whiteness. Where’s your sympathy for White people who have to choose between having their lives destroyed for helping or helping White strangers who might just turn on them?
1985 is not different than now. Look at what happened to the McMichaels for intervening.
Whites have a long way to go before we can control our destiny.
Don’t expect an army to come out of the woodwork. It takes time.
1985 was plenty different than today. Today I wouldn’t go to DC without a significant financial reward for doing so. And I did not expect all of them to help, but possibly one out of forty would have been more heartening than none. Even at age 17 I expected my own people to protect me. Telling the negro to be ashamed would have been the equivalent of scolding a hamster.
Why did you expect White strangers to protect you in a situation fraught with ‘racial overtones’? What would cause you to hold this belief? DC is full of tourists but it is not your typical ‘tourist town’ where the locals care about the visitors. DC has be supermajority negro for a long, long time and, as you well know, negros hate White people. So, DC is probably the only ‘tourist town’ that hates tourists more than Paris.
However, dispensing invective about White people in the middle of a race war is just giving aid and comfort to our enemies. If you don’t have anything nice to say about White people in these trying and difficult circumstances for White people, then I would suggest not saying anything at all.
So we shouldn’t discuss white liberal women? Because they are pretty problematic. How about Biden? He’s white as all hell. How about those pesky honkies in Antifa? Is everyone white off limits? Or just those in an anecdote that bugs you?
What an article, SJQ.
1964…”Come on, Whitey, quit being apathetic and help your fellow man, whatever color he may be.”
Civil Rights Act, Hart-Celler, shift the blame from blackie…your theory sounds plausible to me.
This is a great article and Spencer hits all the right points ─ including the demographic of the perpetrator, which anyone with half a brain could have guessed, but (almost) nobody dares mention.
The narrative that some girl was brutally murdered in 1964 while crowds of bystanders just watched or shut their blinds was of course nonsense and yellow journalism. This case is well-known as a result, but not so much the actual details.
I did not major in psychology, but I have taken a few psychology courses, and the mainstream view on this famous case is not that bystanders watched or willfully did nothing but that they did not realize that anything was really wrong, nor that their own actions were needed to help.
The course work did not provide any real details of the Kitty G. case, but the didactic conclusion justified by the example was that for bystanders to take action, they somehow have to be convinced of two things:
1) that there really is an ongoing threat, and
2) that they personally have to be the one to meet an exigency somehow, like calling the police.
It is important that people know that you can’t just assume that somebody else already reported an incident.
As a last resort, bystanders may need to take direct action themselves ─ if they can do so without getting stabbed or shot. Cellular phones, cameras, and lawful concealed weapons in the hand of citizens does help.
One thing is that if you are being accosted in a public place such as subway, it is useful to point at the most respectable and reliable-looking person reading the newspaper or diddling on their Smartphone and not wanting to get involved in somebody’s tawdry domestic disturbance and just say “help ─ you, quickly, get the police!”
Then the crowd can quickly change from confused gawkers to a raised hue-and-cry of pitchforks and torches.
It also helped after a nerdy Jewish electronics engineer who had gotten mugged so many times by Yoofs on the New York subway that he started to carry a .38 Smith in his pocket ─ so around Christmastime in 1984 when four Teens attacked him with improvised weapons, he laid out all four, apparently missing once and so expending all five rounds.
Everyone survived but one was crippled and he was the only aspiring rapper who did not go on to an illustrious post-shooting felony career.
Bernie Goetz was acquitted by a jury in the People’s Republic of New York for the shooting of the four Negroes ─ to the dismay of the Morgenthau DA (yes, one of those Morgenthaus) but he was nailed for carrying a concealed weapon without a rarely-issued permit.
Goetz also lost a civil case when the crippled former delinquent sued him for damages and was awarded 43 million dollars.
Anyway, this case was instrumental in a long legal trend where most states now allow the public to carry weapons concealed. In 1990, we were still fighting for this in Idaho, where Democrat Sheriffs had on principle refused to issue permits.
Citizen Carry is a huge deterrent to Diversity Crime, assuming that some kind of Civil Rights crap does not come into it if the perpetrators are indeed the usual suspects when they get shot in the course of their crimes.
Some places don’t allow an armed citizenry ─ but ask yourself how well the police or security forces are in those areas. If it is subpar, like the NY subways in the 1980s, then avoid going there at all. There will not be any no-go crime zones in the Ethnostate, but we are very far from there.
I try to avoid living in places where Amazon can’t leave a package on the porch and have it still be there when you get off work and come home. And I try not to visit bad neighborhoods at all if I can avoid it. My Grandmother used to live in the Maryvale neighborhood of Phoenix. Not the worst by far, but there was once even a Wikipedia article on the outlandish crime in that area, although that now seems to have been taken down for unknown reasons.
In the day, after the war, the Maryvale neighborhood was White and middle class, and a reasonable commute to Downtown for professionals. But today it has become increasingly melanated and non-Anglicized. There have been efforts to gentrify the neighborhood with gated communities for modest White retirees on a budget, but I am not sure how well this has worked.
My point is, from personal observation, people hearing grunts and high-pitched squawks from the street late at night are likely to hear the same things EVERY night.
Occasionally there will be a drug-related murder or stabbing outside Grandma’s window, and then out comes the crime scene tape. I have been there often enough. That is life in an urban environment.
So is that strange sound in the night the flutter of an immodest domestic quarrel, the bars letting out, or somebody actually being raped and murdered?
When you call the police, what do you really know to tell them? Most of the time it is nothing at all. Sometimes you hear shooting but even if you call the police, the Yoofs will have scampered off. Odd how quiet it gets when the Black & White patrol cars come rolling up.
People need to get into the habit of observing and reporting. Maybe if there really are a lot of shootings, minority horseplay or otherwise, the authorities will increase patrols.
I can say that I have been challenged by a lot of guys claiming to be Neighborhood Watch. Some were complete AHs. Normally you can identify yourself and the “George Zimmerman” guy thanks you and then leaves you alone. You never have to jump out of the bushes and try to beat that creepy-ass Cracker down in the parking lot for eyeballing you ─ and if you did, it would not be unreasonable to risk getting shot like poor dindu nuffin’ Trayvon Martin.
One time I got off work later in the evening and went out to the mailbox. It was very dark but well before 9 PM. I found a youthful and tall (if a bit overweight) White security guard who was wearing some kind of uniform and carrying a sawed-off shotgun. Dude literally soiled his Depends when I walked up out of the night holding my mailbox key.
I immediately did my best to calm Deputy Donuts down and jokingly reassure his embarassment ─ and I even showed him my driver’s license for identification without being asked. The security guard (probably too dumb to be an off-duty cop but who knows?) surely thought that he was aware of his surroundings. But I could have taught him a thing or two about doing guard and sentry duty and maintaining a better presence in a “war zone.” That and how to shoot and maintain your rifle are the first two things that a solider learns.
No, you can’t bring your guns into DC ─ sometimes also called the “murder capital.” Looking at the demographics, it ain’t my kind of place. I wonder if carrying bear spray would get you thrown into jail there if the usual suspects tried to mug you. I’m guessing probably so, and that underscores the real problem here. Citizens are not the threat. Criminals are.
Yeah, I am going to reiterate my longstanding opinion that sending fewer perps to prison is NOT making things safer for White people. The opposite is the case.
🙂
A great article, and I remember reaching many of these same conclusions when I watched it almost a decade ago.
Lügenpresse is an apt description of the matter. Incidentally, A.M. Rosenthal was a big opponent of German unification after the Berlin Wall came down and after Germany did unify was a player in making sure the Germans groveled even more, calling for Germany to follow after the example of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C..
Excellent essay.
“the New York Times story which broke the story was filled with lies — lies that reporter Martin Gansburg and Times editor Abe Rosenthal wished to propagate to sell newspapers and further their careers”
every.single.time.
Great idea for a review, Spencer, and very well done. I have learned some things, and won’t be forgetting them. I also just found out that Abe Rosenthal has been dead for nearly 20 years. I actually thought (when I read his name) he might still be alive.
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