Scarred
Not long after she made her trek from Texas to New York, Marla Hanson saw her modeling career end at the hands of a razor-wielding thug. Six years later, the cuts on her face have healed, but the emotional wounds remain.
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Around midnight, Marla and Roth met at Shutters and talked for a while, more or less civilly. He told her that he would return the deposit but that he had half in cash—too much to give her in such a public place; maybe they could step outside. “Lots of people were out,” she recalled, “and it was a nice night. There was a neighborhood police station right around the corner. It didn’t feel dangerous. I thought, ‘Surely he’s not going to try anything.’ Then I saw him glancing over his shoulder. I turned around to what he was looking at, and there were two guys following us. The minute I saw them, I knew something was going on. I was running all these TV shows in my head. Your thoughts aren’t even your own: ‘Run, scream, panic,’ then, ‘Wait, I’m getting all worked up over nothing.’ I calmed myself down. But Steve was acting so weird. Everything in the bar started to come back to me. When I got there, his hands were shaking. He was sweating, and his eyes were all glazed over. I thought, ‘That’s it. These guys are going to try to kill or rape me.’
“I don’t know what comes over you. Almost a calmness, like shock: ‘I should have seen what was going on.’ I started looking around to see how I could get out of it. But then the two guys ran up and caught me. They were pushing me through the parking lot. I saw Steve standing under the streetlight, acting like he wasn’t part of it. I don’t know why I didn’t scream. I backed up against a fence and tried to stay on my feet. I thought, ‘They’re probably going to kill me. I’m probably going to die. I just don’t want to be raped, and it’s hard to rape somebody who is standing up.’
“It’s a strange experience,” Marla said. “It’s like you’re off somewhere watching yourself. I just resigned myself to the fact that I might die. I wasn’t upset by that. The short one got around behind me, put his arm around my shoulders, and had one hand on my face. He was trying to push me onto the ground, but my legs were braced. The tall guy started waving his hands in front of me. I thought he was trying to tear my clothes off. I kept looking for cars, trying to push their hands away from me. I was trying to figure out what they were doing. I caught Steve’s eye, and he had this horrified look on his face. And then, all of a sudden, he came over and said in this loud voice, ‘Say what are you doing to that girl?’
“The two guys ran off down the alley. Steve grabbed me and jerked me through the parking lot without saying anything. I thought, ‘Now he’s the one who is going to try to kill me.’ So I elbowed him really hard in the stomach and ran. When I ran out of the parking lot, I saw the blood and started screaming. People just stared at me. I knew I had to get to a hospital. I tried to flag a cab, but I didn’t have any money with me, so I ran back into the bar. The bartender started screaming, ‘Oh, my God, who did this to you?’ I said, ‘Steve Roth.’ She looked at me and said, ‘Steve?’—like she didn’t believe me. Somebody got me some towels. I sat on the barstool and thought, ‘It’s going to be my word against his.’”
A few minutes later some cops stopped two black men running down the street in blood-stained clothes and handcuffed them, face down, on a sidewalk. Before other officers took her to the hospital, Marla twice identified 19-year-old Darren Norman and 26-year-old Steven Bowman as her attackers. Norman, the tall one, was accused of actually wielding the blade. Bowman, who had razor cuts on his hands was a longtime friend of Roth’s; at the police station, he made a statement implicating him. Meanwhile, Roth had jumped into the squad car with Marla, claiming to be her fiancé and, later, a robbery victim. By the time Marla got to the hospital and made her accusation, Roth had told the cops too many conflicting stories. He was in jail by dawn.
Following surgery, Marla awoke to an entirely different life. By the second day, the phone rang constantly. “The doctor went crazy,” she told me. “He said, ‘Don’t you understand? Those are muscles in your face! You’ve got to lie flat on your back. You can’t talk.’ So I unplugged the phone. The nurses came in and said, ‘Look, we are not your answering service. We’re not equipped for this. You’ve got to plug in that phone.’ So I did, and it rang nonstop.” Reporters barged into the room demanding interviews. A TV journalist persuaded her that the story was all over the country; she needed to get word to friends and family that she was all right. Marla granted him an interview, which angered the other reporters. To appease them, she held a press conference.
At first, money was an issue. “I didn’t have a private room because I didn’t know how I was going to pay for anything,” Marla said. Then she received a call from the secretary of a man named Milton Petrie: The octogenarian philanthropist had written Marla a $20,000 check to cover her medical expenses. When she tried to decline, the secretary said, “Listen, let’s be practical. You don’t have any money. My boss has millions. His wife would spend more than this on one dress.”
“There was this outpouring of compassion,” Marla said, “and I was extremely moved by it. But a lot of it had a very strange tone. Old friends were saying, ‘It’s your karma,’ and ‘I knew something like this would happen if you moved to New York.’ It was starting to sink in. Somehow this all was my fault. A woman in Dallas called and said, ‘You don’t know me, but we’re very concerned about you down here. Honey, whatever you’ve done, God will forgive you. You may have strayed off the path of righteousness, but that’s okay. We all get a second chance.’ God will forgive me? What have I done, exactly, that I need to be forgiven for? So I said, ‘F—- you’ and hung up. My dad was really shocked. There were a lot of religious callers like that—implying I had gone to New York and just gone wild. ‘This is what happens to you when you’re bad. There is this big lesson being taught here.’ I thought , ‘How sad that people would think God is like a Mafia boss: You gotta do what He says, or you gonna get your face cut.’”
By the time Marla got out of the hospital five days later, the prosecution of Roth, Norman, and Bowman was under way. First came the trial of Roth. The evidence against him was circumstantial, but he hurt his own case by testifying how just that day he had broken off a long gay love affair with Bowman and announced his engagement to “a very pretty girl.” Roth alleged that Bowman had set upon Marla out of jealousy, mistaking her for his fiancée. Roth was convicted on December 20, 1986.
So far, so good: The criminal justice system was working well for Marla. The police, the district attorney’s office, and the courts had moved quickly, though Roth’s sentencing was postponed until after the trial of Norman and Bowman. Roth’s lawyer had been thorough but courteous in his cross-examination of her. And the prosecutor, Connie Fernandez, had a great deal in common with Marla. Fernandez had grown up in San Antonio and graduated from Trinity University; she too had gone to New York alone in her early twenties.
But the trial of Norman and Bowman, which began the following March, was a scene worthy of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Bowman’s attorney, a black man named Alton Maddox, Jr., was a fixture in New York cases involving racial strife. In his opening statement, Maddox said, “I will tell you about a woman named Marla Hanson who was after every man in this city. A woman who preyed on men and their relationships with women....Marla Hanson, a girl out of Texas, has a lot of racial hangups....As she walked up that street, just the simple act of seeing two black men walking, saying nothing to her, acting in the fashion of any two civilized men—she went absolutely nuts. Immediately she began to think she was about to be raped. And immediately began to think about all the fear of black men she had brought from Texas.”
To make matters worse, Maddox wasn’t the only one who whipsawed Marla. During the trial, the judge in the case, Jeffrey Atlas, told Fernandez that Marla’s alleged flirting with “other women’s men” might be considered “improper-low, even,” and he gave Maddox great leeway in calling Marla’s credibility into question. Incredibly, Atlas not only allowed Maddox to introduce Roth’s description of Marla as a “c—-t,” but he himself asked for her interpretation of the term. “The same as a ‘bitch’” she said, humiliated.
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