Cathy and Gary in Medialand

By Michael S. Serrill

They were one of the most improbable pairs of guests ever to appear on television's Today show. There sat Gary Dotson, 28, and Cathleen Crowell Webb, 23, stiffly, elbow to elbow, on a couch facing Interviewer Jane Pauley. His sentence had just been commuted after he served nearly six years in prison for raping Webb; she had tearfully recanted the rape charge in March, after becoming a born-again Christian. They were telling Pauley about their dramatic face-to-face meeting the night before, at which Webb said she could not "apologize enough" to Dotson. "He's not a rapist," Webb said. "He doesn't have the character of a rapist." The painfully inarticulate Dotson insisted he was not angry, that he bore more ill will against the system than against his false accuser.

So much for NBC. Within minutes the odd couple was whisked off, in separate limousines, to say it all again on ABC's Good Morning America, and then again for the CBS Morning News. On CBS's show, effervescent Co-Anchor Phyllis George ended her interview by calling on Dotson and Webb to shake hands, and they did, limply. But then George added, "How about a hug?" The astonished Dotson and Webb declined. In light of the continuing assertion of Illinois officials that Dotson is guilty, George's hug suggestion was inappropriate, to say the least. George later explained to Washington Post TV Critic Tom Shales that she had not meant to offend anyone, and that, in any event, the entire Dotson affair seemed to have become a "charade."

Indeed, by the end of last week, the Gary and Cathy Show had turned into a traveling media circus. NBC picked up the steep tab for the pair's airfares -- in Dotson's case, a chartered jet -- and hotel rooms. The drama seemingly will not end until the final commercial is played on the TV movie that may result from last week's flood of offers for Dotson's life story.

The amicable morning-show encounters took place against a grim background of continuing questions about what really happened on July 9, 1977, in a Chicago suburb. A dazed and injured Cathleen Crowell, then 16, told police she had just been raped and cut with a broken beer bottle by a young man in a car. Dotson was subsequently convicted of the rape and given a 25-to-50-year sentence. In March, Webb first told Illinois authorities that her accusation had been false, and then surfaced on Today, insisting that she had made up the story out of fear that she was pregnant by a boyfriend. Last month, however, the judge who presided over the original trial rejected Webb's recantation and refused to throw out Dotson's conviction.

More than 70,000 Illinois citizens signed petitions urging Governor James Thompson to free Dotson, and he extended executive clemency early last week after a three-day hearing. But Thompson announced that he still believed Webb had been raped and Dotson properly convicted. He was commuting the sentence, said Thompson, because it left a "cloud over the Illinois justice system," and because Dotson had served enough time for the crime. The Governor's failure to give Dotson a pardon, which would have cleared his record of the charges, means that in the law's eyes he is still guilty. Dotson, therefore, is appealing for a new trial.

There have been no public or judicial pressures to try Webb for perjury. A more serious consequence of her recantation is that it may intensify what one Massachusetts prosecutor calls "the continuing public perception that the victim of rape somehow brought it on herself." According to a 1985 Justice Department study, 1.5 million rapes or attempted rapes are estimated to have occurred in the decade that ended in 1982. Experts say half of such crimes go unreported. One of the principal reasons is victims' frustration with the criminal-justice system.

To help combat this problem, a majority of states, including Illinois, have passed laws that prevent defense lawyers from discrediting alleged rape victims' testimony by such tactics as exploring their sex lives in court. Some attorneys say that the names Webb and Dotson can now be expected to make their way into the summary arguments of defense counsel in rape cases. Gloria Allred, a Los Angeles attorney and feminist, hopes the case "does not demoralize rape victims who feel they may not be believed."

One of the most disturbing aspects of the Dotson case is that, as time passes, it becomes increasingly difficult to know what to believe. Illinois officials are continuing their investigation of the Dotson case. Last week Lance Claxton, a former cellmate of Dotson's, said that Dotson told him that he had met Webb at a party on the night of the alleged rape and that she may have had sex in a bedroom with three other men. Though Claxton subsequently failed a lie detector test, his story adds a new note of uncertainty to an already bizarre case.

With reporting by Laura Lopez/New York and Don Winbush/ Chicago