Victoria Rogers Character Analysis

A Puerto Rican woman who has accused Fonny of raping her. Mrs. Rogers moved to New York City six years before she was raped, coming to the city with an American engineer she met in Puerto Rico. Unfortunately, this man left her after they had three children, but Mrs. Rogers remained in the city. As Ernestine points out to Tish at one point, Mrs. Rogers doesn’t think she’s lying when she says that Fonny raped her. Even though Fonny is innocent, Ernestine explains, Mrs. Rogers can’t change her testimony because doing so would force her to reexamine this traumatic experience. Unfortunately, she was tricked into singling out Fonny, since Officer Bell arrested Fonny and made him the only black man in a lineup of other possible suspects, knowing that Mrs. Rogers already indicated that the rapist was a black man. As such, it was easy for her to assume Fonny was the perpetrator. When Sharon travels to Puerto Rico—where Mrs. Rogers eventually flees—to convince her to reconsider her testimony, the conversation is too much for Mrs. Rogers to bear, and she starts screaming. Shortly thereafter, she flees once again, evading Sharon and making it impossible for anyone to get her to alter her testimony.