A Survivor’s Tale Backfires in the Telling

“Dateline NBC” airs an hour tonight titled “Screams in the Night.” But first have come charges and countercharges in the night.

Just as the screams were Karen Pomer’s--those of a woman terrified by her savage attacker in Santa Monica on Oct. 4, 1995--so, now, are the charges.

The segment is a powerful statement about rape. But to rape victim Pomer, 41, whose own case is the hub of the program, it barks a more shrill, uglier language.

A filmmaker and longtime political activist, Pomer screened the program last week courtesy of the Santa Monica Outlook, which made available to her a copy it had received from NBC, which routinely sends out such programs in advance for review. And what Pomer saw angered her.

She accuses “Dateline NBC” of twisting her story in a segment “so inflammatory, misleading, distorted and inaccurate that I feel revictimized all over again.”

More precisely, she claims the “Dateline NBC” report on her case “fans the flames of racism,” in part by making it appear that she believes her African American attacker raped her repeatedly over a period of six hours early that morning because she was white. Correspondent Maria Shriver says in a voice-over: “She feared the rapist might have chosen her because she is white.”

Not true, Pomer told The Times on Monday.

She also accused “Dateline NBC” of erroneously conveying the impression that the rapist let her go only after she showed him photos of her dead husband, who was black, and goddaughter, who is black. She insists that he had agreed to let her go even before she did this, that her words in the program recalling the rapist as expressing sorrow over his actions after seeing the photos were “taken out of context.”

Pomer’s charges are also in a letter to “Dateline NBC” executive producer Neal Shapiro, Shriver and field producer Claudia Pryor, the unseen reporter for much of the piece. Pomer says she sent the letter last week, but as of Tuesday afternoon had received no official reply from the NBC program.

“I plan to write her a personal note,” Shapiro said by phone from New York Tuesday.

Shapiro publicly denied all of Pomer’s allegations, however, as did Shriver and Pryor in separate conversations from New York. “I don’t see this as an hour about race,” Shriver said. “I see it as an hour about rape.”

Pryor also made comments this week to the Associated Press, and she was taking no prisoners. She shot back that Pomer was angry at “Dateline NBC” for not advancing a “political agenda [that] . . . makes her rapist sort of a troubled young man who did a terrible thing but we need to feel sorry for him.”

If Pomer were outraged at the “Dateline NBC” crowd before, she’s doubly so now after Pryor’s countercharge that she hoped to evoke sympathy for the man (never apprehended) who held her captive at gunpoint and repeatedly sexually abused her.

“How dare they?” Pomer fumed Monday. “That is a disgusting thing to say about someone who barely survived the rape. Trying to discredit me in that way is a very hurtful thing to do. This man almost killed me.”

The face of that man may be a source of confusion during the program, which twice displays a composite sketch of him done by a police artist, but which also periodically shows the face of another African American male being drawn as the segment unfolds, leaving the impression that he, too, is Pomer’s rapist.

She said that she was never shown the drawing and that it doesn’t resemble her attacker. “I don’t want an innocent black man to be arrested by police,” she said. Shapiro said that the drawing would be labeled on the air as a dramatic device.

Pomer says she now believes she erred in letting “Dateline NBC” beam her 17-year-old goddaughter’s photo to the nation, and has asked the program to omit it from the version that airs tonight. The response is noncommittal. “I asked her goddaughter for permission,” Pryor said. “I suspect Karen’s reason for wanting it taken out is that she sees that it proves that she herself plays the race card.”

In the program, Pomer says she would have shot her rapist if she had had a gun. Later, she expresses less anger for the rapist than for the Santa Monica police, but explains, logically, that she feels that way only because she expected less of him--she was certain he would kill her--than of the police, whose behavior in investigating her case she faults severely.

Much of her criticism and a rebuttal from Santa Monica Police Chief James Butts are included at length by “Dateline NBC,” as is a vivid description, much of it in Pomer’s own words, of her horrific experience with the man, who abducted her as she was returning home shortly after midnight, and of her resourcefulness in surviving. The program also focuses on a second rape victim, identified only as Patty.

Excluded, to Pomer’s great dismay, are her charges of the “institutionalized racism” she said she has encountered inside the Santa Monica Police Department.

“She made allegations that she could not substantiate in any way,” Shapiro said. And “it was not a charge we could prove,” said Pryor.

Pomer wishes that NBC had been as circumspect about making connections between her rape and the O.J. Simpson criminal trial that had ended earlier that day.

Shapiro said that some of Pomer’s objections may be resolved in the intro and ending attached to the polished version airing tonight.

Whether the controversy over the program eclipses its positive side remains to be seen. “Whatever a person’s perception of this story,” Patty, the other rape victim, told The Times Tuesday, “I believe they can come away with some truth--that even if the system works against you, it’s possible to recover from rape. After four years of walking through darkness, I am a true survivor. No one can take that away from me.” Or Pomer.

* “Dateline NBC” airs at 10 tonight on NBC (Channel 4).