Her third-person narrative is an elegant testimony to the fact that she still has no access to her own interior experience at that time — no memories of the night of the attack, nor the six weeks that followed it. She cannot remember being “I” in those moments. It’s almost as if she is telling her story through the lens of the public’s obsession with it: “The rape of a slim, seemingly frail, innocent woman,” she writes, “seems a rape of the city itself.” She acknowledges the ways her vulnerability was part of her public image (“frail”) but also resists understanding herself wholly in terms of this frailty (“seemingly”).

The lead prosecutor in her case was a jogger as well: Elizabeth Lederer, a white woman in her 30s who ran the same Central Park trails as Ms. Meili. In her cross-examination of Mr. Salaam, trying to dispute his claim that he’d gone into the park that night to “walk around,” Ms. Lederer asked: “Did you have jogging clothes on?” She said: “You weren’t going there for a picnic, were you?”

Ms. Meili describes the fantasies of invulnerability that brought her to the park to run: “I was indestructible, omnipotent. Comfortable. I could run and run and nothing and no one could harm me.”

But fantasies of invulnerability — even ones that get punctured — have never been democratically available. In “Cross Country,” the poet Roger Reeves speaks as a black man running, a man who feels “the making and unmaking of my body” as he runs. “What name must I carry above the dust / of this field?” he asks. The poem was inspired by a morning run in Austin, Tex., when Mr. Reeves was trailed for a quarter-mile on Guadalupe Street by a white man who followed him yelling: “Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!” That’s the name his poem’s speaker carries above the dust, as he “makes” his body through exertion and feels it “unmade” by hate.

The Central Park Five had their own fantasies of invulnerability: They believed that because they were innocent, they wouldn’t go to jail. They thought if they said what the police wanted them to say, they would go home. But instead they went to prison — where their own bodies, already vulnerable, became even more so. Kharey Wise was beaten up in the TV room at Rikers Island. Even after he was released, Raymond Santana still showered with his boxers on.

*

What is it about the imperiled silhouette of the young female jogger that grips the collective imagination with such force? I think it has something to do with the wholesomeness of jogging — the way it suggests capability, self-improvement, female autonomy — and the horror of witnessing its virtues violated.