In overcoming trauma, she reflects city’s best instincts

The vicious attack on a Central Park jogger became a symbol of the vulnerability of New York in the late 1980s -- reinforcing the feeling that horror and prejudice lurked around every urban corner.

A white investment banker -- a “golden girl”-- was raped and beaten by a “wolf pack” of Harlem teens on a rampage of assaults and robberies in the park one April night. For years after, all involved were stereotyped, like cartoon characters in a sequel to “Bonfire of the Vanities.” Women trembled waiting alone on subway platforms with black teenagers. Black parents worried that their sons would be randomly picked up by cops and railroaded into confessing to crimes they had not committed. Lone joggers were said to be courting danger.

But 14 years later, that metaphoric New York moment is now being reduced to human scale as the real characters step forward to tell their stories. What really happened -- or at least what we think we know now -- is still horrible but much less threatening.

As New York faces a new kind of menace, maybe it’s worth looking back at what scared us then -- and how wrong we were -- to help put perspective on our new fears. Certainly, the jogger, who has finally come forward, reveals that in times of trauma, the city can show its best side even while the hysteria threatens to overwhelm its better instincts.

The man who definitely did rape and maim the jogger has recently confessed, and it turns out Matias Reyes, a convicted murderer and serial rapist, symbolizes absolutely nothing. He is just another madman who could as easily have turned up in Duluth that year as he did in New York City. It also turns out that while the five teens in that so-called “wolf pack” weren’t exactly choirboys, they played a lesser role in the attack than prosecutors thought. A judge threw out the convictions that had kept them in jail for years.

The image of New York also has changed. It is a cleaner, richer city. Now the threat is terrorism -- one that knows nothing of class and race; one that turns skyscrapers into dust.

In the last week, the jogger, Trisha Meili, has come forward. She has written a book about her astonishing recovery. She is 42, married, and living in a cushy Connecticut suburb. Because she has willingly given up one part of her life that she retained throughout her ordeal, her privacy, we now know that her extraordinary recovery is very much like the one New York itself has experienced after the traumatic attacks of Sept. 11.

The outsized nature of the crime against the jogger -- and the way her attackers were demonized -- also brought an outsized outpouring of support. Which helped save her.

For 5 1/2 weeks after the attack, Meili, who had lost three-quarters of her blood, lay in a coma in a New York hospital. Her face was smashed, her skull was cracked, her brain was swollen and she was thrashing wildly. Day in and day out, a Trinidadian nurse held her in her arms like a baby and talked soothingly to her. “I am a black person,” the nurse generously told Meili years later. “If it was black people who hurt you, I guess it was supposed to be a black person who got you back.”

Her family, friends, ex-boyfriends, colleagues, doctors, therapists and thousands of strangers engulfed her in love. Frank Sinatra even sent 18 roses. A man from New Jersey wrote her faithfully for years. And what about all those cold, calculating 1980s investment bankers? Her firm paid her medical care that insurance did not cover, held her job, even opened a “branch” in her room at a Connecticut rehabilitation center and made her a vice president the year she went back permanently to work.

“You can’t ever expect this kind of support,” Meili said last week during a brief interview in her publisher’s office here. “But I guess my feeling, and the reason I wrote this book, is to encourage people in any way they can to reach out as so many did to me.” Six and a half years after she had nearly lost her life, she was back in Central Park, crossing the finish line of the New York City Marathon.

Although she has no memory of the attack -- the brutality of being beaten by a brick and a pipe prevented her brain from recording anything that happened to her -- she carries traces of it in her body. She limps slightly. She has no sense of smell. There is a small scar on her right cheekbone and her mind lapses when she tries to recall a word or collect her thoughts.

She is not who she was, but she is at peace with that. She even laughs off a moment when she can’t answer a question about her pre- and post-attack identity. “Who am I now? Hmm. I don’t know. What I really want to say is, ‘Wait a minute. I had a head injury. Give me a break.’ ” It’s hard to focus on her loss now. She is beautiful, an elfin figure with extraordinary blue eyes and small, delicate hands and a relentlessly upbeat spirit.

The youngest of three, Meili was always dazzling -- as a daughter, student, ballerina, athlete, friend and do-gooder. After graduating from the best schools, she added “investment banker with a social conscience” to her resume. Still, none of these accomplishments diminished her insecurities and struggles with control. She apparently began battling anorexia when she was 15, but it didn’t fully blossom until she was in her early 20s.

During her recovery -- in addition to relearning everything from walking and talking to putting on mascara -- Meili did the kind of self-evaluation a lot of women do in their 20s and 30s. For the first time, she saw the connection between her “compulsive need to run” and her anorexia.

About two years ago, she gave her first public speech. She talked candidly about the power of good intentions and how her mind and body healed themselves without her conscious intervention.

“I believe that not harboring resentment toward whoever attacked me made a huge difference to my healing,” she writes. “Yes, I did feel anger. Yes, I wanted justice and participated in the process. But I was able to focus much of my energy on healing and did not let anger and resentment eat away at me and prevent me from progressing.”