Who Was That Girl, Anyway?

Call this a post-mortem on the Gina Grant affair. Assuming that there are no more startling revelations, the issue appears to be on its way out, the inevitable TV movie notwithstanding.

The issue has been drummed into the ground through two weeks of debate, and at tonight's student forum at the Institute of Politics, we'll probably see the dust jump a little more .But before Grant slips away from our national attention span, it might be useful to take one last look at the whole debate.

What I've found most ironic throughout the whole affair is the huge gap between the two Gina Grants who were put forth by both sides. There is little room for agreement because they're really not really speaking about the same girl. And that gap exists because, despite the headlines, no one really knows who Gina is anyway.

On the one hand, we have the proGina forces who take her as an embodiment of the American dream. Here we have a girl who overcame an abusive past to excel in high school through traditional values of hard work, integrity, and maybe a little bit of homicide. She finally seemed to have succeeded, until Harvard, that bastion of snobbery, rescinded its offer rather then risk the bad publicity of having a matricidal killer within its ivory tower.

On the other side there's the pro-Harvard group, arguing that Grant is a manipulative, and probably evil, honors student who brutally murdered her drunken mother in an argument over her boyfriend. Gina first tried to avoid arrest through clumsy lies, but when this failed, she used Alan Dershowitz's "Abuse Excuse" to sail her way through the juvenile justice system. When it came time to applying to Harvard, she lied about the killing and tried to capitalize on her status as an orphan.

Standing on the sidelines through the debate is the real Gina Grant. Despite an occasional press release, the girl has stood apart from the storm, watching her self-proclaimed defenders on campus and in the media protest against the reticent Harvard administration. With both Grant and Harvard remaining mute, both sides are left to rely on rumor and second- hand sources to assess the case. And we find debaters eliciting the image of Gina Grant that most agrees with their gut prejudices about the American judicial system.

Relying primarily on the statements of the friends and attorneys(and a psychologist hired by her attorney to exonerate her in court), the "pro-reform" elements see a Gina Grant who has been reformed into a model citizen. On the other side stand the "law-and-order" people who look at the brutality of the case and the lack of documented physical abuse. They see not a self-made honors student but a self-made orphan.

These competing icons--call them Horatio Alger and Lizzie Borden--have caught national attention because they question the assumptions of success that underly both our juvenile justice system and the Ivy League admission process.

Harvard was apparently interested in Grant because of the "orphan angle" as much as because of her academic achievements. The enchantment of the noble admissions officer with Grant's rags-to-riches success story and the disgust when faced with the reality behind that myth creates a wonderful irony, illuminating the shallow standards on which admission applicants are judged.

But at the same time, Grant's juvenile record was sealed because the matter is supposed to be ended. The Grant Affair shows that the past is never so neatly shut. It's in vain for the justice system to claim that her background is simply irrelevant. The past will always be with her, even while she fades from the national spotlight.

Ultimately, the justice of Harvard's action really depends upon who killed Grant's mother . Which of these two caricatures applied to Harvard? Neither Grant's now ill-advised untruths, nor Harvard's reflexive response reveal who she was. And so the answer remains behind the scenes, outside of the press and the controversy, in the heart of a girl who murdered her mother.

Steven A. Engel's column appears on alternate Wednesdays.