Kitty Genovese Witness Myth Unravels

On March 13, 1964, a 28-year-old bartender named Kitty Genovese was murdered outside her apartment building in Kew Gardens, Queens, but the famous claim that 38 witnesses watched and ignored her attack is a myth. Two people called the police, while a woman named Sophia Farrar found Genovese after the second attack and held her until an ambulance arrived. The New York Times published its exaggerated account two weeks later, although nobody witnessed the entire attack and many neighbors misunderstood what they heard. In 2016, the newspaper acknowledged its flawed reporting, while another reporter recalled Times reporter Martin Gansberg saying that the omitted facts "would have ruined the story."

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