Martin Garbus, the lawyer for the victim, wrote a scathing Op-Ed piece in The New York Times in 2013 after seeing “Lucky Guy,” the Broadway show that lionized Mr. McAlary. He said on Tuesday that “the trauma from the news stories was nearly as great as the trauma from the rape; she had to live with those stories for 23 years.”

“The detective said it was my piece, in The Times, on the play, that led him to begin to think about reopening the case,” Mr. Garbus said, adding that no one has yet apologized to the woman.

Mr. Garbus conceded there was very little officials could do now, legally. He said the woman, who is now 51 and married with two children, “feels relieved” about the police breakthrough in her case, but was declining to speak about the matter. Mr. Garbus would not say what she does for a living, though she was pursuing an acting career at the time of the attack. He said that she now lives “in the metropolitan area.”

“She was called a liar,” Mr. Garbus said. “So she feels good about her vindication. She doesn’t have to walk along the streets any longer and fear that someone is going to call her a liar. But what happened to her is terrible.”

Mr. McAlary, a dominant tabloid reporter, went on to write a series of columns in The Daily News on the brutalization of Abner Louima by officers in Brooklyn, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1998, months before he died at age 41. A libel suit that Mr. Garbus had brought against him on behalf of the woman was dismissed in 1997 after a judge ruled that Mr. McAlary was entitled to First Amendment protections to write about what the police had told him.

Mr. Webb has a long criminal history: He was arrested for at least 10 sex offenses from 1968 to 1995, the police said. In 1995, he was charged with raping four women and attempting to rape a fifth, according to law enforcement officials and court records. He was convicted in October 1997 in connection with all five cases, and sentenced in December 1997 to 75 years to life in prison.

Mr. Davis, the police spokesman, said it was important to close the Prospect Park rape case, even with an expired statute of limitations.

“It’s an open case,” Mr. Davis said. “We want closure on it. We want to try to do everything we can to show that we are going to fully investigate these things as thoroughly as we can.”