At about 9 p.m. on March 16, 2006, Dave Evans was napping in his room at his rental house on 610 North Buchanan in Durham, North Carolina, when “I woke up to thundering knocks on my door like it was going to be broken down.” The Duke University senior, one of four co-captains of the school’s highly ranked lacrosse team, had just finished a grueling practice. Dave and co-captain Matt Zash, who also lived in the house, yelled to each other about who would get the door. Suddenly Dave heard, “Police! Freeze! Don’t move! Put your hands up!”

He ran into the living room. “There were all these cops with their flashlights in our eyes,” he recalled. “It was like in a movie or something. The next thing you know, they were patting us down, going through our pockets, yelling, ‘Why didn’t you answer the door?’ I said I was sleeping. They shouted, ‘Who was in the backyard?’ ”

The cops said that they had a search warrant. Sgt. Mark Gottlieb and Officer Benjamin Himan had obtained it after interviewing a 27-year-old black woman named Crystal Mangum earlier in the day. An exotic dancer—a stripper—she claimed she was gang-raped at this house three nights earlier. As the officers read from the warrant, Evans and Zash interjected. These were lies, they said, and asked for a chance to tell what really happened.

Gottlieb ignored them. The police took $160 that was lying on a table—money they thought belonged to Crystal Mangum—and demanded to know where her wallet and cell phone were. On top of the refrigerator, the boys said. We found them in the backyard. “Yeah, sure you did,” sneered Gottlieb.

“We kept telling [the police] we would help in any way,” Dave Evans recalled. “I said I would take a polygraph.”

When Dan Flannery, another co-captain and housemate, came home, he found it filled with cops. He, too, asked for a chance to tell the truth. Instead, to his bafflement, Officer Richard Clayton accused him of assaulting a policeman weeks before. As cops surrounded Flannery, he feared he would be beaten up. In the background, he could see an officer helping himself to birthday cake. Flannery had just turned 22.

The cops backed off when they realized they had the wrong guy, but the night went from bad to worse for the lacrosse players. In an effort to show their innocence, they volunteered to be interviewed at the Durham police station. They answered every question and gave DNA, blood and hair samples, knowing that if any of their DNA was found on Crystal Mangum, it would mean decades in prison. The police put them into separate rooms and told them to write their recollections of March 13, 2006. As Dave Evans started writing his, Gottlieb said to him, “Tell us the truth or you’re going to jail for life.”

Evans remembered thinking, The truth will set us free.
 

A Storm Is Brewing

It was past 4 a.m. when the police finally dropped the boys back at their house, exhausted, frazzled and stripped of their cell phones and computers. Gottlieb and Clayton told them not to mention this to anyone.

Before long, however, the police, as well as Mike Nifong, the Durham County district attorney who took charge of the case, were convincing the world that the Duke lacrosse players had been uncooperative, putting up “a stonewall of silence.”

The captains’ first inkling that the party they’d hosted on March 13 would end up being more than a waste of money and a bad memory came during a bowling trip on March 15, the night before the cops showed up. Coach Mike Pressler got an urgent message from Sue Wasiolek, dean of students, who said the team had hired strippers. One was now charging gang rape.

Pressler called his four captains aside and confronted them. Yes, they’d hired strippers, they admitted. But nobody touched them, they swore.

The coach knew his team well. After coaching lacrosse for 24 years—at Virginia Military Institute, at West Point, at Ohio Wesleyan, and at Duke for 16 years—Pressler considered this one of his favorite groups of players. Sue Pressler, his wife, thought of them as family: “They were everything you’d want your kid to be—polite, courteous young men.” Though angry about the strippers, Coach Pressler believed his players. Calling the dean back, he handed the phone to Dan Flannery and then to Matt Zash.

The boys said it was a lie. Dean Wasiolek advised them to cooperate with police and tell the truth, and not to hire attorneys or tell anyone about the charges, they recalled. Nothing would come of this.

Now, after a few hours’ sleep on March 17, Evans, Flannery and Zash met with Pressler and Chris Kennedy, senior associate athletic director. Kennedy said the captains must tell their parents immediately and that they’d need attorneys. When he called his father from Pressler’s office, Dave Evans later recalled, “I told him I was in trouble, that something bad had happened. I didn’t need him to yell at me, I just needed him to listen. That’s what he did. He [didn’t dwell on] how stupid we’d been, which I freely admit.”
 

“Everyone Was Angry”

Though it was spring break for Duke students, the lacrosse team had played a game in San Diego over the weekend and had returned to campus to practice. By Monday, March 13, they were tired, spent and looking for fun. Team tradition called for a party that week, so some of the seniors had a bright idea: Why not hire exotic dancers as entertainment? When Dan Flannery called Allure Escort Services in Durham, he was told that two women could dance for two hours for $400 each, starting at 11 p.m.

Flannery agreed. But for everyone who gathered at the house that night, expecting a frivolous event, things turned sour fast. Crystal Mangum and Kim Roberts showed up late and didn’t begin dancing until midnight—stopping four minutes later. Actually Mangum could barely dance at all; she fell down while trying to take her shoes off. Guys assumed she was drunk or on drugs. The players, some of whom were taking photos, said that for a moment the two women writhed around on the floor, simulating a sex act. Many players found it disgusting.

Some looked away. One looked at his feet. One sent a text message on his phone; another gave a thumbs-down.

Reade Seligmann, seated on the floor, shrank back in distaste. “I didn’t like the tone of the party,” the 20-year-old sophomore and high school all-American said later. Neither did sophomore Collin Finnerty, six-foot-five and freckle-faced, who commented, “It was not appealing at all.”

When Kim Roberts started some sexual banter with the players, one of them made a comment she considered way too crude. Roberts stormed out of the room, followed by Mangum, who was yelling and stumbling. Virtually everyone in the house was now angry. Guys who had shelled out money for the night’s entertainment felt cheated. The party was a bust.

Seligmann and Finnerty left the house. As for Dave Evans, a three-year starter on Duke’s lacrosse team and a former intern for Sen. Elizabeth Dole, he, too, left shortly to walk to another lacrosse house a few yards away.

The women ended up in the bathroom together—some guys feared they were doing drugs—and by 12:15 a.m. or so, they were both outside the house. After going back inside and holing up again in the bathroom together, the dancers left for a second time. Roberts went to her car. Mangum was in the backyard, but suddenly she decided to return to the house once more: She was missing a shoe.

Matt Zash said that Mangum was cursing and pounding hard on the back door. He didn’t let her in. Then some of the guys heard a thump. They saw Mangum sprawled on the stoop, apparently passed out. A player picked her up and helped her to the car. At this point some nasty comments were exchanged, with sexual and racial overtones; one player followed up with the N-word, which Kim Roberts acknowledged provoking. The car took off.

Ninety minutes later, after the police had placed her in a mental health facility because of her bizarre conduct, Mangum began making claims of gang rape. This won her immediate release and treatment as a rape victim.

Mangum also reportedly told others, “I’m going to get paid by the white boys.”

Kim Roberts said the rape charge was “a crock” in a statement to police. When Crystal Mangum was examined by three doctors and five nurses at Duke University Medical Center, not one of them found any physical evidence of rape. No bruises, no bleeding, no tearing. No sweating, no changes in vital signs, no symptoms that were ordinarily associated with the pain Mangum had now begun describing.

One nurse, who saw herself as a rape victims’ advocate, told police she thought Mangum had been raped, noting the woman’s hysterical behavior. As to the absence of physical evidence, the nurse explained away the lack of any lacrosse-player DNA on Crystal Mangum’s person by saying, “Rape is not about passion, but about power.”

Later, she said it was possible no rape had occurred.
 

The Press Pounces

After telling doctors in vivid detail what three guys had allegedly done to her, Crystal Mangum was far from vivid when asked what they looked like. She was sure they were white, she told the police. But according to Officer Himan’s handwritten notes, she could recall little else.

On two occasions, March 16 and 21, Sergeant Gottlieb asked Officer Clayton to show Mangum photos of most of the 46 white lacrosse players, hoping it might be easier for her than trying to describe them. They all looked alike, Mangum said. She added that she had drunk a 24-ounce beer before the party. It later came out that she had a history of bipolar disorder and that she had been taking Flexeril, a muscle relaxant, possibly heightening the alcohol’s effects. “This is harder than I thought,” Mangum told Clayton.

Still, she picked out five faces, identifying four of them with “100 percent certainty.” The fifth was Reade Seligmann, whom she identified with only a “70 percent” confidence level. She did not recognize Dave Evans at all when twice shown his picture.

But Mangum had said there were three rapists, not four or five. And the four faces she picked with “certainty” didn’t include the three young men—Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty and Dave Evans—whom she inconsistently picked in a third photo ID session and who became the focus of the case when they were charged with raping her. (Seligmann and Finnerty were then suspended by Duke; Evans graduated before his indictment came through.) Even if Mangum was raped, she had no idea who had done it.

One of the four she had picked with certainty, Brad Ross, was not even in Durham that night. Her identifications of the others were all flawed by various mistakes. Yet the Durham police and district attorney Mike Nifong ignored this powerful evidence of innocence. By March 23, Nifong’s office was ordering all 46 white lacrosse players to give DNA swabs.

After the Durham police tipped off the newspapers to the mass DNA sampling, articles tainting the players began appearing in local and national news organs, including The New York Times, implying that a sexual assault had occurred. “Dancer Gives Details of Ordeal,” read one headline in Raleigh-Durham’s News & Observer. The word alleged was conspicuously absent. The subhead cited the claim of “A Night of Racial Slurs, Growing Fear and, Finally, Sexual Violence.” No alleged there either.

As a result, people across the country began branding the Duke team with a “lacrosse thug” stereotype. Some said they had it coming. Lacrosse players were a bad bunch, they asserted, and probably racists to boot. They were privileged white kids. They were conceited. They were boorish.

Journalists never seemed to mention that the Duke lacrosse team had a good record of community service, especially with a reading program that assisted black and Hispanic children in the Durham public schools. Devon Sherwood, a freshman goalie and the only black member of the team, recalled how 46 white guys went out of their way to welcome him when he joined. Each one shook his hand. Each one offered him help. He said, “I felt more accepted than I’d ever felt in my lacrosse career.”

Many players hung together off the field, acquiring a reputation for loud, off-campus partying. But they studied hard. They got better grades than any other lacrosse team in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Pressler, the U.S. Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association coach of the year in 2005, held his talented team to high standards. Their graduation rate? It was 100 percent.
 

“I’ll Never Forget it”

Toward the end of March 2006, Mike Nifong began a media barrage unheard-of for a prosecutor. In one week, he spent 40 hours giving as many as 70 media interviews and press conferences.

In fiery language, Nifong declared that medical evidence made it clear that the alleged victim had been raped by Duke lacrosse players. False.

Fanning the flames of racial and class hatred, he suggested the players’ rampant use of racial slurs during the supposed incident. False.

The players were a “bunch of hooligans” whose “daddies” would buy them expensive lawyers, Nifong said, and the entire team had formed “a stonewall of silence” to protect three rapist teammates. False.

Nifong warned that other team members could be prosecuted for “encouraging or condoning” rape if they didn’t cooperate. He said that DNA tests would identify the suspects and rule out the innocent. But when two separate rounds of DNA tests (including one done at a private lab at his request) came back negative, Nifong ignored the results. He compared the accuser’s claims to multiple cross burnings and a quadruple homicide that had occurred in the area recently.

Coincidentally, the week of March 27, 2006, had been declared Sexual Assault Prevention Week at Duke. Over 750 students and Durhamites took to the campus on March 29 in an annual Take Back the Night rally, a common event at colleges nationwide. Planned for months, the march triggered one of the darkest events yet in this case, as student activists joined with feminists to heighten pressure on the lacrosse team.

Late on the afternoon of March 29, the Duke campus was flooded with wanted posters showing photos of 43 of the team’s 46 white players, coupled with a demand that someone come forward to identify the rapists. Dinushika Mohottige, a senior at Duke, told ESPN she distributed posters because “I’m so outraged by how heinous the crime was. But more than that, it’s the lack of compassion the lacrosse team has shown for the victim.”

As freshman Michael Catalino later recalled, “The day those [posters] appeared was probably the most awkward day of the spring term.”

Tony McDevitt saw his and his teammates’ photos posted on a tree as he was returning from a late-afternoon run. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget it,” he said. “I was thinking, What kind of society is this? I ripped them down.”

A few students supported the lacrosse players. Members of the wrestling team had started wearing lacrosse gear to show their solidarity, and they spent the night of March 29 tearing the posters down. But mostly, McDevitt recalled, in late March and early April, “it felt like we were betrayed by the students. Everyone on campus believed we were guilty, except for people who really knew us.”
 

Fear Tactics

At a time when the Duke players were in grave jeopardy from a prosecutor increasingly veering out of control, their own school was portraying them as rowdy, drunken white racists who might well be rapists too.

“The faculty was a lot worse than the students,” Coach Pressler recalled. “It was appalling.” For months, virtually none of the 600-plus members of the arts and sciences faculty publicly criticized the DA or defended the players’ right to fair treatment. Some admitted privately that they were afraid to cross the activists, lest they be smeared with charges of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia or right-wingism. One chemistry professor would personally experience the backlash for speaking out.

Months after the team’s innocence had been made clear, this professor became the first member of the arts and sciences faculty to break ranks with the academic herd when he wrote a column for the student newspaper, The Chronicle. Within 24 hours, the head of the Duke women’s studies program accused the professor of using racially charged language.

Leading the rush to judgment was Houston A. Baker, Jr., professor of English and of African and African American studies. In a March 29 public letter to Duke administrators, he demanded the dismissals of the lacrosse players and coaches. Acknowledging that the rape allegations were unproven, he called the players “white, violent, drunken men, veritably given license to rape, maraud [and] deploy hate speech.” He bemoaned their alleged feeling that “they can claim innocence and sport their disgraced jerseys on campus, safe under the cover of silent whiteness.”

The university provost publicly criticized that letter, but for his insights, Baker was in demand among TV hosts such as MSNBC’s Rita Cosby and CNN’s Nancy Grace. He was also quoted in newspapers such as The New York Times and USA Today.

Baker responded to one critic with an e-mail that said, “You live in a white supremacist fantasyland.” In another e-mail, sent to the mother of a lacrosse player, Baker called her son and his teammates “farm animals.”

Many Duke students were enraged by Baker’s hate-filled antics. But he had plenty of faculty companions in his crusade, especially humanities and social sciences professors trained to consider American society deeply flawed, with powerful white males oppressing women, minorities and the poor.

At the same time, Mike Nifong could hardly have hoped for a more obliging helper than university president Richard Brodhead. Though Brodhead said that the legal process must run its course, he publicly assailed the lacrosse team, albeit in more muted ways. In early April, athletic director Joe Alleva told Pressler that the rest of the season would be canceled. It was a heated meeting. Pressler later jotted down what was said.

Pressler: “Joe, you believe the kids are right; you believe in the truth. What message does it send to the students if we as educators say the truth only matters when it’s convenient?”

Alleva: “It’s not about the truth anymore. It’s about the faculty, the special-interest groups, the protesters, our reputation, the integrity of the university.”

Pressler stressed that the DNA results clearing his players could come back any day. (Nifong already had the first round of test results by now, but he delayed turning them over to the players’ attorneys until April 10.) Pressler left the meeting thinking he had won some time.

But later in the day, he got a call from Alleva, who demanded to see him. Alleva said the season would in fact be canceled and that Pressler must resign immediately or face suspension and possible removal. Brodhead would announce the resignation. The coach felt he had no choice.
 

Hysteria and Tears

At 4:30 p.m. Mike Pressler called his team together. “Guys, our darkest hour has come,” he began. The lacrosse season was over. The players’ dream of winning a national championship—of triumphing over adversity—was dead. Their coach was resigning, effective immediately.

Hysteria filled the packed meeting room. There were tears. Screams. Kids holding their heads in their hands as if in physical agony. The coach’s tears flowed too. He spoke for 40 minutes.

Outside, the media waited. Sensing that something was up as the lacrosse players came crying into the parking lot, the journalists began rushing over.

Faculty extremists would apply the body blow. The April 6 Chronicle featured a full-page ad signed by 88 Duke faculty members. Asking “What does a social disaster look like?” the signatories stated without qualification that something had “happened to this young woman [Mangum].” They based their judgment on the DA’s uncorroborated allegations.

Meanwhile, Coach Pressler would have a hug and affectionate words for each team member. “Fellas,” he told the guys that afternoon, “you are not responsible for this. In the right time and venue, I will tell our story so that the world can hear the truth.” Fortunately that day would finally arrive.

In June 2007 a disciplinary panel of the North Carolina bar stripped DA Mike Nifong of his law license after ruling that he had engaged in “dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.” That same month, Duke announced an out-of-court settlement with Coach Pressler and with lacrosse players Dave Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann.

Mike Pressler now coaches at Bryant University in Rhode Island. Dave Evans works on Wall Street after graduating from Duke in 2006. Reade Seligmann transferred to Brown University, while Collin Finnerty transferred to Loyola College in Maryland.

Which professors signed the damning document that was published in The Chronicle? What were the media headlines that indicted the team in spite of the evidence? What did DA Mike Nifong say that got him disbarred? Read The Duke Lacrosse Rape Case for more.

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