Kitty Genovese, was brutally murdered on a cold March night in Queens, in 1964; Genovese was attacked, stabbed, raped and murdered. It shook New York to core and it was widely reported that she could have been saved; had 38 heartless New Yorkers, not ignored her screams, as she lay dying in a pool of blood.
The New York Times sensational report forever linked her name to the sensationalized notion of a city—and by
extension, a nation—filled with terminal indifference.
No
one challenged the paper of record for decades as Kitty Genovese became
an emblem for the phenomenon known as the bystander effect, shorthand
for the deterioration of modern American society at large. Reduced to
the horrifying details of her tragic death, she’s been cited for half a
century in film and television, potent fodder for crime procedurals
like Perry Mason and Law & Order. Not even Girls could resist devoting an entire episode to the most famous murder in the history of New York City.
But
when Genovese’s youngest brother, Bill Genovese, sought the truth of
what happened the night his vibrant 28-year-old sister was brutally
murdered, he uncovered startling details and witnesses that pieced
together a different account of that fateful evening. Tracking his
amateur investigation over the course of several years, five decades
after the media turned his sister into a proto-meme, the documentary The Witness takes a heartaching deep dive into a story we already thought we knew. Read more
