In today's "random movies of the day" feed came up The Accused (1988) — Jonathan Kaplan, Jodie Foster, an Oscar for Best Actress and a reputation as one of the first mainstream films to talk about rape as the main subject rather than a plot device.
The film is remembered for two things: the bar scene, shot almost like a documentary reconstruction, and the final act where prosecutor Kathryn Murphy puts on trial not the rapists (they already took a plea deal on a lesser charge) but the men who stood in the bar watching and cheering. The jury finds them guilty of criminal solicitation — incitement to commit a crime.
What hooked me wasn't the ethical question on the surface here — what hooked me was the legal status of this finale. I checked the archive — out of 579 long-form pieces, none touched on this film or the case that inspired it. And almost immediately I stumbled on what became the story: in the real New Bedford there was a trial of the spectators too — only it ended exactly the opposite way. Hollywood didn't retell the story, it delivered the verdict the story itself never delivered.
On March 6, 1983, around nine in the evening, a 21-year-old New Bedford resident left home after putting her two daughters to bed — met with a friend, then was walking home, remembered she was out of cigarettes, and turned into the corner bar Big Dan's on the north side of town where there was a cigarette machine. Her friend left earlier. The door was locked behind her, and she was the only woman left in the bar.
What came next — a scene CNN later ran on daytime broadcast for a month. She was stripped, laid on a pool table and raped for about two hours. She broke free, ran out into the street in a torn sweater and one sock, and was picked up by three students driving by in a truck.
Now — the fact that was on everyone's lips in the first weeks. The police report, compiled from her words, stated: she was raped by "12 to 15 men," a crowd stood around, some of whom were laughing and shouting. This very image — not a person but an audience that turned rape into a spectacle — made the episode in this port town national news.
There were ten people in the bar that evening. Her, six future defendants, the bartender, one other patron, and a drunk sleeping in the corner. One of those present admitted — first in an interview with the local paper, then on the witness stand — that he shouted: "Go for it! Go for it!" No one confirmed any other shouts in the room.
Formally, charges against the "spectators" in this case did exist, and there were six names in them. Four — Daniel Silva, John Cordeiro, Victor Raposo, and Joseph Vieira — were charged with aggravated rape. Two more, Jose and Virgilio Medeiros (same last name, not relatives), were initially brought in as accessories under the doctrine of joint enterprise — "encouragement of unlawful action and failure to intervene when it could have been stopped." By the start of the trial the prosecution raised the bar for them too, reclassifying to the same aggravated rape: under joint venture a person is liable for the crime if they aided or encouraged.
So the state had exactly the legal construction the film's finale requires. It's not that the law didn't exist. It's that it didn't work.
The trial went on in Fall River, in district court, for almost a month. Fearing the defendants would turn on each other, Judge William Young split the case into two parallel trials before two isolated juries: one in the morning, the other in the afternoon. All six defendants and one of the bartender witnesses testified in Portuguese through interpreters.
The outcome: four guilty, the two Medeiroses acquitted on all counts. A quarter century later Young explained the logic simply at an anniversary forum: the jury convicted those who touched the victim and acquitted those who didn't. The one who shouted, by this arithmetic, walked out of the room a free man.
In parallel in the same courtroom another lawsuit was underway — about who has the right to watch at all. And here a detail emerges that the film doesn't reflect at all.
In 1981 the U.S. Supreme Court in Chandler v. Florida unanimously ruled that the presence of TV cameras by itself does not violate the right to a fair trial. Some states went further: Massachusetts Superior Court Rule 3:09, canon 3(A)(7), is worded as a direct mandate — the judge must allow broadcast, recording and photography of open proceedings, limiting or suspending coverage only when it creates a substantial threat of harm to a specific person.
That's what the victim's defense was built on. Before trial the prosecution filed a motion with an affidavit from her: she's afraid to testify because she could be recognized from photographs, and she'd been trying all this time not to reveal her involvement in that evening to either the public or her own children. Young conducted an extensive voir dire of the jury about whether the presence of cameras would affect their ability to evaluate evidence, then banned the press from filming and photographing the victim in the courtroom. TV station WLNE-TV tried to challenge this unilaterally and was denied; they didn't appeal.
The ban held — the Massachusetts Superior Court affirmed it in 1988. But what's interesting is what the defense argued on appeal: not the much simpler thesis about protecting the victim, but that the protection looked like special treatment, and the jury saw it. The lawyers demanded shifting the burden of proof to the state: if a juror knows this witness won't be touched by cameras, he reads her testimony as more honest, meaning the defendants were tried differently from everyone else. In support they cited testimony from one juror on videotape: "They have to be given that privilege — not to be on camera. They're basically reliving the rape."
The court denied, and the denial's wording here matters more than the dispute itself: where a judge's decision fits within the rule, the burden of proving bias remains on the defendant. Both convictions — Vieira, Silva, then Cordeiro and Raposo — were fully affirmed in 1988.
Inside the courtroom itself it was even harsher, and this is recorded in both appeal transcripts. The defense insisted there was no violence at all. Silva's attorney Edward Harrington painted a picture: conversation in private, jeans removed, "both fell to the floor," she initiated. Silva testified himself: she agreed, he said, "looked very happy."
Bartender Carlos Machado was interrogated almost like an accomplice. He said he saw her on the floor and heard a scream as her pants were pulled off, that Jose and Virgilio Medeiros were yelling "Do it! Do it! That's it!", that he asked one of them to step away from the phone, then Silva took off his pants and climbed on top of her. And under cross-examination he admitted that even before the attack he had a "bad impression of the girl": she was laughing and talking with the guys, and he wanted to call the police to have her thrown out. It turned out the bartender was going to eject her for talking in a bar — and then became the prosecution's chief witness.
Then — toxicology. Chief toxicologist of the Allegheny County coroner's office Charles Winek testified that by blood analysis taken several hours after the incident, the woman was "clinically intoxicated by alcohol." Her testimony sounded impressive and cost her dearly: Young, sentencing the four, said in the quiet packed courtroom that the jury's verdict established the fact of rape beyond reasonable doubt, and therefore any plea for leniency built on the consent version "would defile that verdict."
I'll note separately: Massachusetts in those years had a Rape Shield Law, meaning a law protecting the victim from questions about past sexual history. It didn't prevent several hours of cross-examination about how she behaved, what she drank and who she smiled at. The woman who herself asked not to be named was protected from one thing and not protected from another.
While the trial was going on in Fall River, reporters who had descended on New Bedford for a month were trying to figure out one thing: who actually shouted. Alan Levine from the local Standard-Times was working on this, Fred Bayles from Associated Press was working on this, dozens of correspondents from networks and major papers were working on this.
What emerged was inconvenient for everyone. There were ten people in the bar, not a crowd. One person shouted, and he admitted it in the courtroom. The defense got the victim herself to clarify at trial: she acknowledged that after what she'd been through she couldn't vouch for the number — she heard shouting, couldn't determine the number of people.
And here begins the most interesting part, which the New York Times in April 1984 broke down essentially against itself. In the first reports the source attribution was there — "according to police, from the victim's words." Later, when the material went into news feeds, the attribution crumbled: what remained was "as patrons stood by and cheered." Journalists, believing the description, began getting comments from legal and sociology experts — can you try bar patrons and what does this say about American values. At demonstrations in New Bedford people carried signs "Rape Is Not a Spectator Sport." TV producer Larry LaMotte, asked why the case was so interesting, answered honestly: the brutality, the public heat and, of course, "there was that cheer."
The paper admitted its own: its verdict reports repeated the image of a cheering crowd and omitted testimony that the only source of shouting was the two acquitted men. The national news editor said: "In hindsight — we should have worded it more precisely." Bayles from AP put it more simply: "First impressions stick."
The explanation the reporters themselves gave is also worth keeping in mind. In the neighborhood around the bar it was hard to talk: the Portuguese community lived there, and many of those approached didn't speak English, while the correspondents sent in didn't speak Portuguese. Some residents refused to talk out of conviction that the press was biased against immigrants. While journalists tried to untangle this, marches were already happening in the city, prosecution witnesses were receiving threats, and a postcard circulated on the streets, issued by the porn magazine Hustler: "Greetings from New Bedford, Massachusetts, the Portuguese Gang-Rape Capital of America," with a naked woman on a pool table.
Tom Topor's screenplay grew directly from this case. Topor spoke with 30 rape survivors, with rapists, prosecutors, lawyers and doctors. The first draft was about the lawyer; director Jonathan Kaplan insisted the victim be equal to him in importance. The pool table on screen was a direct reference to New Bedford — but producers feared lawsuits, and the table was replaced with a pinball machine.
What came next — the production history that is the real legal commentary. First test screenings gave the lowest result in Paramount's history: the audience felt Jodie Foster's character deserved what was done to her. The studio was looking for ways not to release the film. Producer Sherry Lansing persuaded them to hold a second screening — for women only. Of the twenty present, eighteen had personal experience, their own or someone close, related to rape. A few months later repeat testing gave one of the highest scores in the studio's history.
The rape scene was shot over five days. Foster said she didn't remember filming, blacked out and burst blood vessels in her right eye from crying; actor Woody Brown, playing one of the rapists, ran off the set and threw up in his trailer. Budget — 13 million, box office — 32.1 million, Oscar for Best Actress and the film's only nomination (the last time this happened was in 1962 with Sophia Loren).
Now — what made me sit down to write this. The film isn't just "inspired by" the case. It closes the only hole in the real story — the one where the trial of those who encouraged didn't produce a guilty verdict. In the picture the prosecutor reclassifies the observers' actions as criminal solicitation, takes the case to a second trial, the victim finally tells her version publicly, and the jury finds the observers guilty. Legally elegant and dramatically inevitable. Only in New Bedford there was no second trial: there was one trial, with two juries, and those acquitted — were precisely those heard shouting.
And one more asymmetry you only feel when you lay two rows of facts side by side. The film gave the lawyer's role to Kelly McGillis, and McGillis agreed to it because two years earlier she herself survived an attack and rape — two men broke into her apartment. The victim's role went to Foster, whom producers initially considered "not sexy enough" for the part, after refusals from Kim Basinger, Demi Moore, Jennifer Beals, Meg Tilly and Rosanna Arquette. What united the two leading actresses in the main film about rape in 1988 was that one lived through it, the other played it. The real woman was already dead two years by then.
The New Bedford verdict was followed by numbers that don't add up to one picture. Three received nine to twelve years in Walpole maximum security prison, Vieira six to eight; three could apply for parole after six years, he after four, though the maximum under the statute was life. They actually served about six and a half.
When they were led out of the courthouse, the crowd whistled and shouted "Let them go." The largest marches — by various estimates, tens of thousands of people — weren't in support of the victim but against the verdict: the city's Portuguese community, over 60% of New Bedford and Fall River's population, considered the case persecution of immigrants. Judge Young responded to the sentence with a phrase worth quoting in full: a defendant's ethnic background plays no role in sentencing, and any such consideration insults the deepest ideals of American justice. District Attorney Ronald Pina, whose family is also Portuguese, like the victim's family, called the sentence fair: not excessive but not minimal.
A month later Pina went to Washington and told a Senate subcommittee on criminal legislation that the burden of proof on the question "should the public be let into a rape trial" should be shifted to those who want openness. The hearing was called by Senator Arlen Specter — a reaction precisely to this case. The real dispute about "spectators" in New Bedford wasn't about bar patrons. It was about those who watched — and was decided not by juries but by a procedural rule.
Everything else scattered to the usual places. The victim was identified on live broadcast — the court had the right to prohibit publication of the name and didn't; later Judge Young called this his mistake and said he regrets it to this day. She left the city because of harassment and three and a half years later died in Miami, crashing her car into a pole; her four-year-old daughter got a broken arm, the six-year-old escaped with bruises. The bar closed and was boarded up with plywood two weeks after the incident. The building, which later became first a discount bakery, then a storefront church, was put up for sale in 2022 for 500 thousand; the realtor said those interested mention they "remember this place."
Here I have two places where I can't bring the material to a common denominator, and I won't pretend I can. First — who exactly shouted. The cross-examination transcript names Jose and Virgilio Medeiros; the New York Times summary says the only source of shouting was the two acquitted men; meanwhile reporters never established authorship of the remark, and only found someone who admitted it after several weeks. Second — the circumstances of death. At first Florida highway patrol reported the cause wasn't established and alcohol or drugs weren't involved; a week later UPI and AP citing the medical examiner wrote that blood alcohol level was almost three times the intoxication threshold and that she'd spent more than six months before that in a drug treatment program. In 2019 Karen Curtis's book came out, where according to the daughters' words a different version is reconstructed: the car was forced off the road by a white van, and this, according to the author, is confirmed by the highway patrol report. I haven't seen the report, haven't verified the book, haven't interviewed the daughters. So I'm leaving it as is: two documents, two mutually exclusive explanations and forty years between them.
The only ironclad thing I took away from all this has nothing to do with morality. A rule imposed on a witness immediately becomes an argument about the weight of their testimony; a ban imposed on a crowd immediately generates a question about who counts as a crowd at all. And the most durable thing in this story — not the verdict. Most durable — the number "12–15": no one established it, the whole country's interest grew from it, it was repeated a week after being refuted, and Hollywood left it untouched with all its scale, meanwhile replacing the pool table with pinball.