On Thursday morning, Sonya Silverstein, Arnie Silverstein, and the ACLU's Stefan
Presser cleared their calendars, Eden came to Philadelphia from New York, and,
with the media notified about the astonishing turn of events, the water buffalo
defense team worked to seek an injunction in federal court against the May 14
Penn hearing. The Silversteins' office was a beehive, fueled by controlled fury.
Surrounded by computers, typewriters, ACLU staff, the Silversteins and their
employees, Eden, Kors, and a growing body of Penn students, including the editor
of the DP, Stefan Presser was like the conductor of an unruly, barely-in-control
symphony orchestra. Never ruffled, Presser brought order out of chaos, assigning
everyone parts, sending his staff for forms and opinions, keeping his eye on the
clock, and occasionally letting the General Counsel's Office at Penn know what he
was doing. Stefan Presser was Justice in a suit, and he was in command. With
about a half-an-hour to go before the federal courts closed, and with runners
standing by, Presser faxed the ACLU/Silverstein brief to Shelley Green, general
counsel of the University of Pennsylvania. The suit was not directed at the
University as a corporation, but, rather, at Hackney, Aiken, Morrisson, Brobeck,
and Read, as individuals. Fifteen minutes later, the University, over Shelley
Green's signature, faxed Presser, with a copy to Brobeck, that the University would
honor its earlier agreement that the May 14 hearing would consider only dismissal
of the charges.49
Penn had told Eden not even to try to assemble his scattered witnesses, but
it had not told the JIO to cease preparing her case. The five plaintiffs, their
two advisors, the JIO, and the JIO's fifteen witnesses--brought to Penn at Penn's
expense -- arrived at a May 14 hearing that they fully believed would resolve the
issue of innocence or guilt. The JIO had brought two pieces of evidence: an
American Heritage Dictionary listing "Africa" as a home of water buffalo; and
-- the most shocking -- a two-page university police report from the night of the
incident that contradicted the very stipulation that Robin Read had made about Eden's
words after her own extensive investigation. According to this report, written on
the morning of January 14, 1993, when the police went to one room from which insults
supposedly issued, every resident had said that every overheard epithet was shouted
"by Eden."
What had happened? The truth would emerge after the summer, when a resident
of the dorm wrote an op-ed in the DP, explaining that on the night of January
13-14, 1993, the students who had shouted epithets panicked, and that because
Eden had stepped forward, they falsely attributed everything to him in their
dealings with the university police.50 On May 14, 1993, however, something
far more dramatic happened. The university knowingly suppressed the truth in
the hope of gaining a conviction against Eden Jacobowitz. In fact, the
university police, at the request of the JIO, had conducted a two-week
investigation starting on January 14, 1993, and had written a long, 12-14
page report, about what actually had occurred. This time, the residents of
Eden's dormitory told the truth to the university police, who filed their report,
wholly corroborating Eden's own true story. That report was presumably the basis of
Read's initial stipulation about "water buffalo" and "zoo." At the May 14
hearing, Eden knew nothing of that longer report, his witnesses were not
there, and he was apparently meant to be railroaded into a conviction that would transform
the case and salvage Penn's reputation. (One year later, a university officer
saw Kors walking across campus. He ran over and to thank him for having
"defended the water buffalo kid," and asked what Eden had thought of "the
long report" that proved his innocence. Shocked to learn that neither Eden
nor his defense even knew of the existence of such a report -- let alone saw
it -- he explained that "we did a very long report that showed that Eden
was telling the truth about everything." A few weeks later, a campus reporter
asked the then chief of university police, John Kuprevich, if he had a copy of
the fourteen-page police report on Jacobowitz. "Yeah, I have it," Kuprevich
replied, "but it's confidential." It was bad enough that the University was
scapegoating a wholly innocent student who happened to admit that he had said
"water buffalo." When the May 14 hearing actually came, Penn knowingly accused him of
saying still other things that it had been told he absolutely had not said.)
