On November 5, the documentary Out in the Night was screened in Olin, followed by a discussion. This event was sponsored by Residential Education Fellows Program, the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Intersectionality, Gender and Sexuality Programs, the Division of Institutional Equity and Inclusion, the Holleran Center, Community Partnerships, and the Co-Sponsorship Fund. The documentary covers the New Jersey Four, a group of black lesbians who served time in prison after defending themselves from a homophobic attack. Renata Hill, one of the New Jersey Four, attended the screening and spoke afterwards.
On the evening of August 18, 2006 Renata Hill, Patreese Johnson, Venice Brown, Terrain Dandridge, and three other women visited New York City, and expected to be accepted as openly queer women in the city. The women were standing on a corner in Greenwich Village when a man walked up to Johnson and, pointing at her vagina, asked to “get some of that.” She informed him she and her friends were lesbians and not interested in him. The man became hostile and threatened to sexually assault the women. He was especially hostile towards the masculine presenting women in the group, shouting at them that they looked like men. He then became physical, through swinging at the women and pulling out large chunks of Brown’s hair. At one point, he began to choke Hill. Johnson pulled out a small knife and stabbed him in order to save Hill. When describing her decision to do so, Johnson stated, “Yes, I did pull my knife out, and I did because you couldn’t tell me my best friend wasn’t about to die.” The man continued to chase and attempt to beat the women after he was stabbed. Bystanders jumped in to defend them, and the fight de-escalated, but the police had already been called. The friends were arrested.
The women were charged with gang assault, assault, and attempted murder. Three of the women pled guilty in order to avoid harsher punishments. Hill, Johnson, Brown, and Dandridge pled not guilty. Johnson explained this choice, saying, “I claimed self-defense. If you’re standing there and you’re just watching a man beat on one of your friends, then he turns around and hit you, you have a right to defend yourself.”
The initial coverage of the incident and the coverage throughout the trial was sensationalized. The attack was reported under headlines such as “Attack of the Killer Lesbians” and “The Case of the Lesbian Beatdown.” The inaccurate portrayal of the women as a gang sensationalized the case. News personality Bill O’Reilly reported on the case and believed it was the work of a lesbian gang called Gays Taking Over. Many media outlets portrayed the women as having attacked the man in an anti-straight hate crime. The New York Post’s article about the incident began, “One of them was ‘slightly pretty,’ so the freelance film director decided to say hi.” The man, a DVD bootlegger, is quoted in the article as saying, “This is what I get for being a nice guy.”
The prosecutor claimed it was an unprovoked attack. Security tapes showed the man choking Hill, but he claimed not to recognize what was happening in the video, or if the person he was choking was a woman. He was found to have written sexist and homophobic comments online, such as, “Women should welcome your advances because that’s how the race should propagate itself.” The images submitted of his injuries show a long cut down his abdomen, which was evidence of a seemingly life threatening stabbing. However, after the trial, Johnson’s appellate lawyer discovered that when the man went to the hospital, they performed surgery on a hernia he had, and the “stab wound” was the scar from the surgery. The wound from Johnson’s knife was barely an inch long.
Dandridge’s mother, Kimma Walker, did not expect a positive outcome from the trial. She stated, “I knew it was going to be a gay thing. But of course, you being a woman, and then being black, and then the nerve of you to be gay.” Dandridge was charged with second degree gang assault and sentenced to three and a half years. Brown was charged with second degree gang assault and third degree assault and given five years in prison. Hill’s charges were gang assault two and assault three and she was sentenced to eight years in prison. Johnson was charged with gang assault two, assault one, and assault two.
Supporters of the women believed they had acted in self-defense and continued to speak up for them after their sentencing. Mollie Hill, Renata Hill’s mother, advocated for her daughter and her friends, saying on a radio show, “The media doesn’t tell the whole story. They didn’t tell how my daughter was attacked, how she was choked. It’s called gay bashing, but they won’t call it that… my daughter is in jail for 8 years for defending herself.” After two years, a movement to release the women re-emerged and organized protests. The women were referred to as “The New Jersey Four.” All four women’s cases were reconsidered. Dandridge’s case was overturned, and she was released with no criminal record. Hill and Brown were granted retrials after an appeal determined that the judge in the original trial gave an inaccurate description of what being an accessory to a crime is to the jury. According to Hill’s appellate lawyer, Alexis Agathocleous, the judge told the jury that “the jury doesn’t have to decide whether a person who is supposedly involved is only one percent involved. You’re either involved or you’re not.” This description by the judge, Agatheoelous says, “actually doesn’t describe accessorial liability at all.” Hill eventually agreed to a plea of three and a half years.
Johnson’s appellate lawyer Karen Thompson believed Johnson had not caused serious physical injury to the man. The hospital reports stated that “he was never in immediate danger.” Every legal argument Thompson made was rejected, but Johnson’s sentence was decreased from eleven to eight years. Thompson explains this, saying, “Whatever happened in that trial court, they knew was wrong.” Johnson was the last of the women to be released. She was released in 2013 after serving seven and a half years.
After the movie, Hill spoke to Conn students about her experiences. Hill was honest, charismatic, and funny. She described her initial hesitancy to agree to the project. “A lot of stories from the African American community are told through a white lens,” she said, expressing her concern. However, she ultimately felt that director Blair Dorosh-Walther represented the women holistically and did not take advantage of them. The movie portrays the women as real people, not martyrs or tokens. The women are not seen crying in the film, and Hill explained that this was purposeful. Though they all cried in interviews, the director Blair Dorosh-Walther did not include those scenes per their request. Hill did not want to be pitied, she said, she just wanted her story told. Before the movie was made, Hill felt the women “never got a chance to tell [their] side of the story” because of skewed media coverage. She “needed the opportunity to speak up” and raise awareness of this issue: the discrimination queer women of color face in the criminal justice system. “We’re not the only ones this happened to,” Hill told the audience. “But it’s not being talked about.”
As Black queer women, the New Jersey Four faced discrimination on the basis of these identities. Activist Angela Davis spoke at a past rally for the women, stating, “Well, suppose the seven young women had been white and the assailant had been black and suppose the young white women had decided that they did not want to take this anymore, that they were going to resist. And I say this because there is no institutional mode of resisting homophobic street attacks. There is nowhere to turn. You either assent to the homophobia of everyday culture. You either pretend that this is something that you’re supposed to smile about and move on. Or you figure out a way to make a statement to speak out, to resist.” At the intersection of queerness and blackness, these women and their act of self-defense was demonized, and their voices were silenced.
“I wouldn’t changed how I responded at all,” Hill asserted. “I wouldn’t change how I responded, and I wouldn’t change what I did for my friend and myself.” Hill is currently getting a degree in social work and plans to work with minors in the foster care system.
