Turns out that's not how things happened. There were indeed neighbors who were aware or half-aware that something horrible was happening to a woman in the neighborhood, or at the very least that some woman was screaming, but the idea that 38 people just sat there and let it all unfold without doing anything—while remaining riveted, as if it were a radio drama or a TV show—is false. A lot of people near the scene of Genovese's murder had no idea exactly what was going on, and there were people who tried to help or contact police.
How, then, did an untrue version of the story become enshrined as legend? The New York Times is to blame.
The film's main character is Bill Genovese, one of Kitty's many younger siblings. He adored his big sister and was devastated not just by losing her so suddenly and violently but by the account of her death in the Times, which went on to spur many fictional retellings, including episodes of TV's "Perry Mason," "All in the Family" and "Law and Order." Bill is in a wheelchair now after losing both his legs. We eventually learn that Bill's leglessness, too, is related to the murder—specifically to the Times's coverage, which was not just incorrect but willfully exaggerated, to sell papers and create an American illustration of the the famous explanation of how the Nazis rose to power: evil triumphs when good people to do nothing.
If I'm making "The Witness" sound like a film about journalistic ethics, more so than a story of the Genovese family's loss, well, it is that. For a good part of its running time, it is mainly about what happens when the institutions we entrust to tell our stories fail us.
Bill is our surrogate, chasing down the real story for reasons of personal catharsis. The information he gleans by studying coverage of the case and contacting the reporters tells us a lot about the relationship between a free press and the society it chronicles. The film insists that for every benefit accrued by telling a wrong or concocted story—such as the invention of the 911 emergency system, which came about partly as a result of the public feeling collectively ashamed of itself after Genovese's murder—there are downsides as well, some severe.
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