On a humid August night, 28-year-old Dwayne Buckle sat on a fire hydrant outside an art house movie theater in New York’s West Village. Within four minutes, the young man would lie beaten and bleeding from a stab wound—or so the story goes. The alleged perpetrators: a group of seven African American lesbian women — out to get some phone numbers and have a good time in one of New York’s most openly gay-friendly neighborhoods.

The tabloid headlines wrote themselves. The New York Post went with “Attack Of The Killer Lesbians”, while the New York Daily News reported: “‘I’m A Man’ Woman Growled During Fight'”. Laura Italiano, the reporter who penned the NY Post’s story, painted the women as a “seething sapphic septet” — a description she stands by today. “I don’t think it was a stretch to say they were out for blood,” insists Italiano.

Prosecutors claimed Buckle—also African-American—had been critically injured in what was an unprovoked attack, and the women were offered a plea deal. Three of them took it, serving out sentences of six months. The other four: Patreese Johnson, Renata Hill, Venice Brown and Terrain Dandridge, maintained their innocence. Those four are the subject of Out In The Night, an hour-long documentary set to air on PBS and Logo TV on Monday, June 22.

It was August 18, 2006, and though it was long after midnight, the temperature lingered at a balmy 70 degrees. Buckle thought the ladies looked feminine. One of the group was slightly pretty, he thought, so Buckle said “Hi”. As Patreese Johnson tells it in the film, Buckle pointed at her genitals and said: “Let me get some of that.” Patreese, then just 19, told him she was gay, hoping to deflect his attention. “He said ‘I will stick my dick in your ass’.” The New York Times described the man’s comments as “innocuous” and said the women had attacked him “inexplicably”.

Patreese Johnson, from Newark, New Jersey, admits to stabbing 28-year-old Dwayne Buckle during the incident outside the IFC Theater in Manhattan's West Village on August 18, 2006. PBS

Renata explains to Vocativ how the situation escalated. “I’m a joker, so I said ‘They’re all my girlfriends, they’re all out here with me’. That’s when everything took a turn for the worse. He got really upset and defensive, and started cursing at us, telling us he would ‘fuck us straight’. It escalated, and he threw a cigarette. Next thing I know, a fight had broke out.”

Buckle, from Queens, admitted in his court testimony to telling one of Patreese’s friends “she looks like a man”, but added: “She did appear to look like a man, so I said that. And she was yelling at me. She was disrespecting me as a man, so I called her an ‘elephant’.” Buckle claimed the women came for him, that he was surrounded, forced into a defensive crouch to protect his face from a hail of blows. He didn’t know that Patreese was carrying a small steak knife. “Somebody told me I was stabbed, and as soon as he said that, I felt it,” says the man. “I was hollering and screaming. I felt like I was going to die.”

Renata Hill, from Newark in New Jersey, with her son TJ, after her release in 2010. Renata accepted a plea deal of three and a half years during her retrial. PBS

NYPD officer Christopher O’Hare said he was able to identify the women, who remained in the area after the attack, because he saw them “high-fiving” each other, celebrating “like ‘we fucked this guy up’.” The seven were arrested, taken to Riker’s Island jail, and at their trial eight months later, slammed with seven charges, including attempted murder and several counts of assault.

Security camera surveillance of the attack tells a vastly different story to the one the media reported. The footage shows Buckle wearing a blue backpack and white sneakers as he swings for Renata, pins her to the ground, and later rips dreadlocks from Venice’s head. It shows Patreese pulling out a knife and stabbing him, but afterwards, Buckle is seen walking upright and pursuing the women along the street, taunting Venice by waving her own ripped dreadlocks in his hand.

Patreese admits in the documentary to stabbing Buckle. “I did pull my knife out. You couldn’t tell me Renata wasn’t about to die.” She sounds defiant as she explains that she carried a weapon because her brothers, one of whom was shot by police when Patreese was 11, told her she needed to be able to defend herself if she got into trouble. “All I really wanted to do was scare him,” she says. Renata denies that the group celebrated after the attack, telling Vocativ: “We were not high-fiving each other or laughing about it. We were just walking home. If we were laughing at any point, it’s just because that’s how we are when we’re together.”

The court heard that Buckle had written online about his feelings towards women and homosexuality, stating that women should not refuse men’s advances “because that’s how the race should propagate itself”, and saying gay causes are akin to “devil rights”. Buckle even claimed that “80 percent of serial killers are homosexual”. He was not charged, and later sued each of the women for $5m over what he called a “straight hate crime”.

In a police radio conversation which was recorded but not entered into evidence, an officer reveals that the knife Patreese used “was like a tiny little penknife”. In the film, the officer can be heard telling the dispatcher: “There’s not even blood on the scene. It’s all nonsense.” Regardless, Patreese, Renata, Venice and Terrain were handed down sentences of between three and 11 years.

Security camera footage which showed the incident between Dwayne Buckle and the seven African American women on August 18, 2006 was presented to the jury in the trial. PBS

Renata feels the women would have been treated differently if they weren’t African American, homosexual, and from “the hood” in Newark, New Jersey. She tells Vocativ: “We had never been in trouble with the law. I completed high school, I had college credits, I had gone to tech school and had taken up computers. I was a single mom who taught my kid never to do drugs. I was a good person, so I felt they could have at least offered me an anger management program, rather than just sending me to prison and branding me a criminal for the rest of my life.”

Renata says she was shocked when FIERCE, an organization which fights police brutality against gay and transgender people, started campaigning for the four women’s release. One of their biggest supporters was Blair Dorosh-Walther, a film director. As a white woman, at first she hesitated about making a film about the treatment of African American lesbian women. But their case struck a chord with her. Blair tells Vocativ: “If I was with a group of my white friends, and a man approached us in that way, I have friends who would really be in his face. If a fight broke out, we definitely wouldn’t have been arrested and we definitely wouldn’t have been treated like animals.” Blair eventually decided to direct the documentary. She had to apply for funding five times before getting lucky. “I had funders say they didn’t believe the women because they lacked remorse,” she recalls.

The four women appealed. Terrain’s charge was dismissed, and Renata and Venice were granted retrials. Renata agreed to a plea deal of three-and-a-half years, only to discover her son TJ, who was just five when she went to prison, had been taken into state custody. “There was that fear of, what if I don’t get him back?” she says in the documentary.

In Patreese’s retrial, her lawyers argued that she had been convicted under the statute of gang assault, for which she would have had to cause the man serious physical injury, which she claims she did not. A photo of Buckle’s alleged wound presented as evidence was in fact from a hernia operation doctors conducted while stitching up a significantly smaller incision made by Patreese’s knife. The judge rejected her lawyers’ argument, but still lowered Patreese’s sentence from 11 to eight years. Before her release in 2013, she admitted that while carrying a knife made her feel safe, she would never again carry a weapon. “That’s what caused me to be in this situation,” she says.

A photograph taken of Dwayne Buckle's stomach after the assault on August 18, 2006. The larger wound was created by doctors, who were treating a hernia. The wound created by Patreese is the smaller wound on the left. PBS

Renata was eventually reunited with her son. But she tells Vocativ she fears the discrimination she still faces as an African American gay woman. “We’re at the bottom of the food chain. I feel like it doesn’t matter what happens to us.”

‘Out In The Night‘ airs as a simulcast as part of the PBS documentary series POV (Point of View) and on Logo TV on Monday, June 22 at 10pm ET.