‘Let’s go wilding” was the terrifying battle cry of a pack of youths who rampaged through Central Park in New York on a spring evening in 1989.

Most of them barely knew each other. By the end of the night at least a dozen people had been attacked or robbed and as dawn broke there was an even more chilling discovery. A young woman, barely alive, her body thrashing wildly, was found in the undergrowth. She had been raped and sodomised, bludgeoned with rocks and branches and slashed with a knife. One of her eyes was hanging out of its socket and she had lost 75% of her blood. In hospital she spent 12 days in a coma and was given the last rites.

The woman was an investment banker with the Wall Street firm Salomon Brothers, a 28-year-old yuppie who had jogged into the rotten heart of the Big Apple. As such, she came to represent the collision between the masters of the universe and an underclass that was running wild.

The Central Park Jogger became famous but, for 14 years, she guarded her privacy while five teenagers who confessed to attacking her were sent to jail. Zero-tolerance policing, impelled in part by her case, went on to make New York a safer city than London.

End of story? Not quite. Trisha Meili, a petite blonde with a small scar below her left eye, has written a book about her recovery and last week announced her name to the world. There was a new twist to her tale, too, which emerged while she was in the middle of writing her memoir.

Out of the blue last year, Matias Reyes, a convicted rapist and murderer turned born-again Christian, proclaimed that he alone had carried out the attack. A DNA test duly matched semen found on her sock, and the five youths, whose convictions have been overturned, are now claiming compensation for a miscarriage of justice.

The police have continued to bluster about the arrests, insisting the attack was too frenzied to be the work of one man. It has become a nasty, messy business.

Meili could have been forgiven for tearing up her book and remaining anonymous. Instead she greets me at the office of her Manhattan publisher with a wide smile. Her gait is slightly unsteady and she claims to get confused at times, but I never detected any trace of that. She is tiny, no more than 5ft tall, and elegant in a Chinese silk jacket and black trousers. As I am to discover, Meili, 42, has grit and determination, which helped keep her alive and stay the course.

When Reyes made his confession, she was knocked back. After receiving so many merciless blows to the head, she has no memory of the events of that night. The “Supporters”, as she calls them, of the youths had harried her at their trial, calling her a white devil, whore and slut, but she always assumed the convictions were safe.

“Four out of five had videotaped confessions and were very convincing about what they had done,” says Meili. “At some point along the line, someone or more than one person is lying, but I’ve had to say to myself, ‘You know what? I am never going to know what happened.’ I’ve got to move on, almost for my own protection.”

She did not watch the television special in which Reyes described from prison how “I was drawn by her appearance and just had to have her”. He had already attacked other women and slashed them around the eyes, warning them they would be blinded if they didn’t let him have sex. Two months after attacking Meili, he raped and murdered a pregnant 24-year-old woman and was jailed for life.

“Do I want to watch and hear what he did to me? No,” she says emphatically. Meili admits, however, that: “How much I want to know is a constant battle for me. It’s about me, so I should know, but I really do feel it’s fortunate that I don’t have a memory.”

When Reyes emerged as the perpetrator “it was almost like living through the attack for the first time. When I came out of my coma, I wasn’t focusing on the attack, I was focusing on getting better”.