Even more depressing is another comparison between the two cases. While campus journalists and many other students at Duke were refreshingly open to evidence and critical thinking as the case there unfolded, the vast majority of U-Va. students have been sheep-like. They have emulated — or at least tolerated — the anti-male prejudices of U-Va. academics and administrators. Some have even called for secret criminal trials in rape prosecutions.

As to lacrosse case similarities, the most obvious was the initial mob-like rush to judgment at U-Va. by left-leaning faculty, administrators, and news media in embracing the now-infamous claim by “Jackie” of being gang-raped on a bed of shattered glass. By presuming the guilt of college men accused of implausibly barbaric crimes against women and minorities, these academics were oblivious to the lessons from Duke.

Not unlike the 88 Duke professors who signed a public statement in 2006, which included a thank-you to protesters who had urged the team captains’ castration, those U-Va. professors who individually spoke up immediately after the Rolling Stone article were eager to see it as exemplifying a campus “rape culture” of which there is little hard evidence.

Then there is the lamentable performance of school President Teresa Sullivan, who has rivaled the shameful indifference to due process shown by Richard Brodhead, who is, alas, still Duke’s president. Sullivan’s sins include using the Rolling Stone article as an excuse to accuse seven unnamed fraternity members of “evil acts” and to suspend all U-Va. fraternities both before and after the accuser’s story unraveled.

And while The Washington Post’s excellent work exposing Rolling Stone’s errors of omission and commission was a welcome change from the newspaper’s own shoddy journalism in the lacrosse case, the New York Times continued its pattern of presuming the guilt of accused males. Its Duke coverage was exposed long ago as so appallingly biased as to prompt apologies from multiple editors. True to form, the Times disgraced itself yet again in early December by running an article aggressively defending Erdely’s piece just as it was collapsing.

The one encouraging on-campus aspect of the Duke case was the reaction of many students, including the award-winning news and editorial team at the student newspaper, The Chronicle.

During the many months when Brodhead and his professors were treating lacrosse players as presumptively guilty pariahs, student journalists dispassionately analyzed events and repeatedly scooped the national and local news media. Chronicle commentators, most notably Kristin Butler, eviscerated the cowardice of campus elders. Students also recognized Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong’s lies far sooner than did their teachers, and worked to change the system by registering voters to oppose Nifong at the ballot box.

The responses of the vast majority of U-Va. students to the Rolling Stone fiasco were far less inspiring. It was, of course, predictable that self-styled victims’ rights activists would embrace Rolling Stone’s version of events. Less predictable, and more striking, was the uncritical acceptance of Jackie’s wild tale by the student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily. Until late December, its coverage mirrored Rolling Stone’s, even as various off-campus publications shredded Jackie’s varying accounts.

Instead, the newspaper’s executive editor, Katherine Ripley, was busy sending tweets with the hashtag #IStandWithJackie about how the Jackie story “resonated with me.” (Ms. Ripley hasn’t revealed which of Jackie’s mutually contradictory stories she believes; her most recent tweets have utilized the #IStandWithSurvivors hashtag.) Assistant Managing Editor Julia Horowitz proclaimed that “to let fact checking define the narrative would be a huge mistake.”

Even U-Va. fraternity members, President Sullivan’s most immediate targets, meekly accepted their ill-considered suspension without critical scrutiny either of Jackie’s now-discredited claims or of their own alleged complicity in a supposed “rape culture.” While a national organization of fraternities demanded that Sullivan apologize, the fraternities at U-Va. made no such demand.

Indeed, the school’s fraternity council recently joined with the student council and various victims’ rights groups to recommend that the state of Virginia change its laws to hold secret trials, with the public excluded, in all criminal prosecutions for rape — a stunning call for star-chamber-style railroading of accused males.

The student coalition also expressed hope that the university would provide accusers access to legal counsel (their recommendations contained no reference to accused students’ need for lawyers), while ordering all future U-Va. students to take a course in “Women and Gender Studies.” At Duke eight years ago, by contrast, a similar curricular proposal won support only from the most extreme anti-lacrosse faculty members, and even the Brodhead administration elected not to embrace it.

What explains this difference between students at Duke in 2006 and U-Va. now? We cannot be sure. But we do know that the past eight years have witnessed a profound effort to devalue due process for students accused of sexual assault, regardless of the merits of the accusation. This trend, which was ably analyzed by Peter Berkowitz, has been accelerated by Obama administration demands that campuses significantly weaken their already weak procedural protections for accused students or face crippling cutoffs of federal funds. The inevitable result will be more convictions — whether the accused was guilty or not.

Today’s students have been bombarded with the president’s assertions that “one in five women on college campuses has been sexually assaulted during their time there” and similar claims by other officials, journalists, and academics. As Slate’s Emily Yoffe has observed, this absurd figure (which since has been discredited by the Bureau of Justice Statistics) implies that the typical college campus has the same rate of rape as war-torn areas of the Congo.

Yet powerful media voices, ranging from the New York Times to Huffington Post to BuzzFeed, have touted the claim while aggressively promoting the dubious “rape culture” narrative. They’ve done so through dozens of articles portraying sexual assault accusers who failed to prevail in campus disciplinary cases as victims of gender discrimination.

And the nation’s most prestigious universities, including U-Va. and Duke, have pushed such ideologies of resentment — in their reeducation-camp-style “orientation” sessions for new students, in the extremist race/class/gender teachings that dominate many humanities courses, and in the kangaroo-court disciplinary systems that have censored expression of “offensive” political views as well as railroading dozens of students on rape charges that appear to be based on flimsy evidence.

In such an environment, it might be understandable that few students would risk being branded as “rape apologists” by defending due process. In this respect, the U-Va. student response may evidence a troubling trend over the last eight years. In any event, it surely illustrates a poisoned campus culture that has implications far beyond Charlottesville.

KC Johnson is a history professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Stuart Taylor Jr. is a Washington writer and Brookings Institution nonresident senior fellow. They co-authored the 2007 book “Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case.”

The post U-Va. Reaction to Rape Claim: Worse Than at Duke? appeared first on Stuart Taylor, Jr..

Meanwhile, author William D. Cohan has ratcheted up his wild claims and misleading innuendoes during at least 10 broadcast and print interviews about the book, even, in some cases, after proof of their falsity had been published by us and others.

Most of the interviewers have been as fawning as most of the reviewers, leaving unchallenged Cohan’s evidence-free innuendoes that Duke lacrosse players did something terrible on the night in question.

The notable exception was Jon Stewart’s interview of Cohan this week on “The Daily Show.” Stewart repeatedly cut short — with observations such as “in this case they were exonerated” — Cohan’s efforts to slime the lacrosse players.

All this despite the fact that the 621-page book, “The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of Our Great Universities,” adds not a single scrap of new evidence that undermines the well-founded consensus that — as North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper found in April 2007 — no Duke lacrosse player committed any crime against the mentally imbalanced accuser, Crystal Mangum.

Since the early hours of March 14, 2006, Mangum has provided more than a dozen dramatically varying versions of her story of being sexually assaulted in a bathroom by (variously) three, four, five, and 20 members of the Duke lacrosse team, who had paid her and another woman to strip at a spring-break team drinking party.

Cohan’s main additions to the record are long, tiresome interview transcripts uncritically presenting the self-serving ruminations of disbarred District Attorney Mike Nifong, a convicted liar. Cohan added a jailhouse chat with Mangum, who is now serving an 18-year prison sentence for murdering her boyfriend. Cohan deemed her “rational, thoughtful, articulate” even though her newest story contradicted each of her prior accounts.

From these two discredited and highly compromised sources, Cohan advances two aggressively revisionist theses. First, he contends that “something happened in that bathroom that none of us would be proud of,” citing the Nifong-Mangum claim that a sexual assault in fact occurred despite all the DNA, photographic, physical, medical, and other credible evidence and witness accounts to the contrary.

In our opinion, Cohan has veered into potential slander by speculating in one broadcast interview that the falsely accused former students might have been “very successful at covering it up,” thanks to the “deep pockets” of their parents and attorneys.

Second, Cohan portrays the “honorable” and “quite credible” Nifong as the real victim in the case — a model prosecutor who was “railroaded” from office for the “red herring” of failing to give defense attorneys DNA test results that “didn’t matter.”

In fact, Nifong’s efforts to hide these test results — showing the DNA of four males who were not Duke lacrosse players on Mangum despite her denials of having recently had sex — were essential to Nifong’s own publicly stated theory of the case, undermined the credibility of his complaining witness, and violated two separate provisions of North Carolina law. It’s a primary reason the state bar relieved him of his law license.

Cohan, too, breezily wishes away the fact that no lacrosse player’s DNA was found on or in Mangum, a fact that all by itself proves that her stories of a long, brutal, three-man beating and gang-rape with no condoms could not possibly be true.

Despite these and many other fatal flaws, Cohan’s book has been celebrated uncritically in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, the Daily News, Newsday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Economist, FT Magazine, Salon, and the Daily Beast, and in interviews by MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and “The Cycle,” Diane Rehm New York Magazine, Cosmopolitan, and various public radio stations.

(Brian Lamb gave Cohan an hour on C-SPAN, but Lamb also graciously granted a request by one of us, Stuart Taylor, for an opportunity to respond to his own interview of Cohan.)

The review in the daily New York Times, by Susannah Meadows, was a bit more balanced than most. At least it acknowledged that “Cohan hasn’t unearthed new evidence” and “[t]here is still nothing credible to back up the account of an unreliable witness,” meaning Mangum. But even though these indisputable facts blow up the foundation on which Cohan has rested his book’s credibility, Meadows puffs Cohan’s “exhaustive, surprisingly gripping retelling of the episode” as an “extremely impressive feat” that “proves its worthiness.”

Nor did the book’s factual errors, internal contradictions, and relentless bias prevent David Shribman, editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, from extolling Cohan’s “meticulous research and evenhanded tone” in his review for the Wall Street Journal. Or prevent Simon Akam from praising the book as “laudably even-handed” in The Economist. Or Mark Dent from lauding it as “fair and objective” in Shribman’s Post-Gazette.

Meticulous? Even-handed? Fair and objective? Cohan appears to have quoted only five people for the record: Nifong, one of his lawyers, Mangum, former Duke Chairman Robert Steel, and one of the 47 lacrosse team members. (Because Cohan provided neither endnotes nor a list of his interview subjects, we may have missed one or two other on-the-record interviewees, but we doubt it.) Portraying Nifong as a courageous hero “crucified” for a few forgivable “mistakes,” the “even-handed” Cohan did not even attempt to give most of the people he helps Nifong smear a chance to respond.

This list includes the judge who sentenced Nifong to a night in jail for lying in court; the wrongly indicted players’ five principal defense lawyers; the two North Carolina State Bar prosecutors who presented the case against Nifong; and the three bar disciplinary panel members who did disbar him for egregious prosecutorial misconduct after a five-day public trial in which he had a full opportunity to defend himself. The panel concluded that Nifong hid highly exculpatory DNA evidence and made inflammatory, race-baiting attacks on the accused in the media to help win the black vote in a tight primary election.

Such sins against the most elementary principle of journalistic ethics would “be pathetic mistakes for a daily newspaper story.” Those are the words of Joseph Neff of the Raleigh News & Observer, the journalist who broke more stories on the criminal justice side of the case than any individual reporter. He continues: “For an author spending months or years on a book, it’s a revealing choice to avoid interviews that contradict the revisionist narrative: that Nifong is the victim.”

Yet many interviewers of Cohan have taken their cue from an author who began — and, from all appearances, ended — his book with scant understanding of either criminal justice or higher education. (His three previous books dealt with the financial industry.)

Ignoring the mountains of exculpatory evidence in the case, the co-hosts of “Morning Joe,” for example, asked such probing questions as “No good guys here, you say?” and “What are the other details that really surprised and shocked you?” Of the falsely accused students, Leonard Lopate of WNYC wondered, “Is it fair to say they came from privileged backgrounds?” Of Nifong, Lopate sympathetically queried, “Did he feel that he was being railroaded?”

At least two lessons can be gleaned from this disturbing performance by the media.

First, most of the mainstream media have proved incapable of learning from their own egregious mistakes. Eight years ago this spring, in a frenzy of liberal groupthink, they ignored obvious evidence of innocence for months. Meanwhile, they sought to uphold a storyline of a modern-day morality play, with privileged, loutish, white athletes brutally raping a noble African-American working mother.

As Jon Stewart told Cohan, who could not have been happy to hear it: “It is so tailor-made for what our media enjoys more than anything, which is a sensationalized conflict. This is white kids, richer kids, at a privileged university, a woman of lesser privilege, you know, this is, this is the perfect storm for them in terms of generating something. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out for them in that she was not a particularly good exemplar of David versus Goliath.”

Cohan’s revival of the false narrative that Stewart rightly rejected allows the original rush-to-judgment crowd to comfort themselves with the fiction that they were right all along. For his part, Cohan substitutes the hopelessly vague claim that “something happened” in that bathroom. This is quite a retreat from Mangum’s initial claim — which even she has abandoned — that she was gang-raped in a bathroom. But in fact, no credible evidence exists that any Duke lacrosse player was ever alone with Mangum in any bathroom, for any purpose at all.

Second, it seems that many book reviewers don’t do much homework, or even read the books that they are supposed to be evaluating — at least, not closely enough to notice the numerous contradictions, inconsistencies, and non-sequiturs (as well as false assertions) that litter Cohan’s book.

As Radley Balko wrote in a Washington Post blog post, “While Cohan’s book continues to win airy praise in elite outlets from reviewers who have little prior working knowledge of Durham, it’s getting panned by people who have specialized knowledge of Nifong, and of the lacrosse case in particular.” The latter group includes each of us, in reviews published by The New Republic and Commentary, as well as Neff’s review in the News & Observer and Peter Berkowitz’s review in RealClearPolitics.

One reason for this discrepancy is that only people with independent knowledge of the facts have easily recognized the false and misleading nature of many Cohan assertions.

The upshot is many reviews by the casually informed, but politically correct, crowd  credulously parrot demonstrably false statements that can most charitably be attributed to Cohan’s indifference to the facts and evidence — amplified by his decision to avoid interviewing people who might challenge his (and Nifong’s) fallacies.

Here are seven such examples:

— Cohan has presented as plausible Mangum’s claim — for the first time, in a prison interview by him sometime between 2011 and 2013 — that the lacrosse players “shoved a broomstick up me” during the alleged assault, leaving “wooden pieces” inside her. In fact, that story flatly contradicted both the physical evidence (nothing about wooden pieces) and all of Mangum’s more than a dozen prior statements, in 2006, 2007, and for years thereafter. None mentioned being assaulted with a broomstick. The only previous references to a broomstick in the case was the fact that during the four-minute “dance” in the living room, one of the never-indicted players picked up a broom that was leaning against the wall and suggested that the two strippers use it as a sex toy. This angered the other stripper, Kim Roberts, who stopped the performance, yelled curses, and stormed out of the room with the almost incoherent Mangum stumbling behind her.

— Cohan has asserted multiple times that he was the first journalist to disclose the findings of sexual assault nurse Tara Levicy’s report of her interview of Mangum, and has repeated the claim even after being reminded on April 14 of our own 2007 book’s extensive quotations from Levicy’s report. That report was also cited in 2006 by CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” at least two major newspapers, several TV stations, and two blogs (including Johnson’s) in 2006 and 2007.

— In an April 25 radio interview, Cohan falsified the details of Levicy’s report by asserting that the nurse “found evidence that [Mangum] had been brutalized and that she had been hurt very badly.” The report indicated nothing of the kind. Neither Levicy nor any of the other three doctors and four nurses who examined Mangum found any physical evidence of an alleged attack. Cohan has dismissed critics (including Taylor, directly) of such falsehoods as “haters” without indicating what he thinks they hate.

— Cohan has hyped his book with wildly inflated assertions that the case cost Duke over $100 million, including payments of $20 million to each of the wrongly indicted players in 2007 to settle their claims against the university. The settlement also covered the more than 100 professors and administrators — from Steel and Duke President Richard Brodhead on down — who joined in trashing the lacrosse players in their hour of peril.

The settlements were actually about one-third of what Cohan asserts, as authoritative North Carolina journalist Bernie Reeves reported in July 2007 and as both of us have confirmed. The basis for Cohan’s estimate appears to be ill-informed gossip, which he calls “the consensus around Duke and Durham.”

— Cohan’s book, which repeatedly launches character assaults against the defendants, cites Nifong to assert that the wrongly indicted Reade Seligmann and his parents never paid his first two defense lawyers a dime. But Phil Seligmann, Reade’s father, denounced the Cohan-Nifong claim as “patently false” in an interview with Taylor, saying that he had paid the two lawyers “hundreds of thousands of dollars” for all their work.

— James Coman, the veteran prosecutor who led Attorney General Cooper’s reinvestigation of the case, has denounced as “figments of [Nifong’s] imagination” the former DA’s assertion in Cohan’s book that Cooper “sandbagged” Coman and his colleague Mary Winstead by declaring the indicted lacrosse players innocent.

In fact, Coman told the N&O’s Neff that he and Winstead insisted that Cooper declare the students innocent. Cohan never called Coman or Winstead to check the accuracy of Nifong’s self-serving speculation. (Cooper refused to talk to Cohan, as did the three defendants, apparently sensing Cohan’s bias.)

— Robert Steel, who in 2006 chaired Duke’s Board of Trustees and whom Cohan praises as a key source, contradicted in an April 9 email to Taylor Cohan’s claim that Steel agrees with Cohan and Nifong that “something happened in that bathroom that none of us would be proud of.”

While the pro-Cohan news outlets studiously ignore such problems with the book, the New York Times — ignoring its own embarrassingly discredited reporting on the case in 2006 — has once again led the way.

It followed the April 6 Meadows review with the even more uncritical piece by Caitlin Flanagan, calling Cohan’s book “a masterwork of reporting” in the April 24 Sunday Book Review. Neither review mentioned the paper’s inglorious role in 2006. Cohan gushed in a tweet, “The brilliant Caitlin Flanagan totally gets it.”

Yet this media praise has coincided with a disinclination even of most sympathetic reviewers and interviewers to embrace Cohan’s innuendo — central to his book – that some kind of assault did take place and that Nifong was the victim of a “kangaroo court,” the bar disciplinary panel.

(One notable, but not noble, exception is Karen R. Long, in Newsday, who does appear to accept the “something happened” claim in a brief review containing three factual errors about the evidence. Newsday has declined to correct them; and Long has refused comment.)

More typically, reviewers have glossed over or simply ignored the indefensible claims at the heart of this book, while hailing Cohan’s skill as a narrator — his “intriguing recap of a courthouse battle,” in the words of Nick Anderson’s somewhat mixed review in the Washington Post — and focusing on his exhaustive recitation of the well-known facts that binge drinking and related bad behavior are endemic at universities and that big-time athletics often eclipse scholarly pursuits.

The book ends with a note from Nifong to Cohan saying he hoped one day Cohan could meet Nifong’s son. The author has reciprocated the sentiment: In a recent interview, he said with some passion that of all the characters in the drama, “I certainly feel sorry for Mike Nifong, the prosecutor, whose life was ruined because of this.”

Cohan’s sympathy for a rogue prosecutor did not faze the sympathetic reviewers and interviewers. But how deferential would they have been to Cohan if Crystal Mangum had been a mentally unbalanced, white sorority sister moonlighting as a prostitute (as did the real Mangum) who had hurled wildly implausible rape charges at three football players from a mostly black school?

And if in that context Cohan had glorified a prosecutor who had used race-baiting pre-trial publicity to rally the white vote in a racially polarized primary, and then concealed exculpatory evidence in the hopes of sending innocent people to jail for 30 years?

That question answers itself. The question that lingers is: When will they ever learn?

The post How the Media Again Failed on the Duke Lacrosse Story appeared first on Stuart Taylor, Jr..

The best-selling, highly successful author’s 621-page The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of Our Great Universities adds not a single piece of significant new evidence to that which convinced then–North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper and virtually all other serious analysts by mid-2007 that the lacrosse players were innocent of any sexual assault on anyone.

Unless, that is, one sees as new evidence Cohan’s own stunningly credulous interviews with three far-from-credible participants in the drama who themselves add no significant new evidence beyond their counterfactual personal opinions.

They are Mike Nifong, the disbarred prosecutor and convicted liar; Crystal Mangum, the mentally unbalanced rape complainant and (now) convicted murderer, who has dramatically changed her story more than a dozen times; and Robert Steel, the former Duke chairman and Goldman Sachs vice chairman, who helped lead the university’s notorious rush to judgment against its own lacrosse players.

Cohan is not deterred by the fact that Nifong admitted and Steel said, quite unequivocally, both in April 2007, that the lacrosse players were innocent of committing any crimes during the March 13–14, 2006 spring break party at their captains’ house, where Mangum and Kim Roberts were hired to strip. Nifong said on July 26, 2007 that “there is no credible evidence” that any of the three indicted lacrosse players committed any crime involving Mangum. Steel said on April 11, 2007 that Cooper’s exoneration of them that day “explicitly and unequivocally establishes [their] innocence.” Nifong has since all but retracted his admission and Steel has waffled on his.

Cohan duly but inconspicuously includes these statements in his semi-free-association narrative. At the same time, he implies dozens of times that one or more players sexually assaulted Mangum in a bathroom during the party. In recent interviews, Cohan has made his thesis more explicit: “I am convinced, frankly, that this woman suffered a trauma that night” and that “something did happen in that bathroom,” Cohan told Joe Neff of the Raleigh News & Observer. In an April 8 Bloomberg TV interview, he ascribed the same view to his three main sources: “Between Nifong, Crystal, and Bob Steel, the consensus seems to be something happened in that bathroom that no one would be proud of.” He said much the same on MSNBC’s fawning “Morning Joe” the next day.

Cohan also asserted in a Cosmopolitan interview that Mangum now “describes it as somebody shoving a broomstick up her. All I know is that the police believed her, district attorney Mike Nifong believed her, and the rape nurse Tara Levicy believed her.” This seems doubtful, since none of Mangum’s many stories in March 2006 and for years thereafter mentioned anything about a broomstick being used to assault her, a scenario also ruled out by the physical evidence.

(Disclosure: I coauthored, with KC Johnson, a 2007 book concluding that all credible evidence points to the conclusion that no Duke lacrosse player ever assaulted or sexually abused Crystal Mangum in any way. I have also become friendly with some of their parents and lawyers. I thus have both a lot of relevant information and an obvious interest in discrediting Cohan’s book. I have no complaint about its references to me.)

The rape-by-broomstick and other Cohan innuendos and assertions are not supported—indeed, they are powerfully refuted—by the long-established facts that his own book repeats, not to mention some facts that he studiously leaves out.

This has not prevented an amazing succession of puff-piece reviews in The Wall Street Journal, FT Magazine, the Daily News, Salon, the Economist, the Daily Beast, and The New York Times, whose reviewer (unlike the others cited above) at least knew enough to write that “Cohan hasn’t unearthed new evidence” and that “[t]here is still nothing credible to back up the account of an unreliable witness.”

Some of the most sensational supposed revelations in Cohan’s “definitive, magisterial account” (as touted in Scribner’s press package) were proved false within two days of his April 8 publication date.

In an April 9 email responding to an inquiry from me, Robert Steel contradicted Cohan’s claim that Steel thinks “that something happened in that bathroom that no one would be proud of.” Steel told me: “I have no view now, nor have ever had a view of what if anything happened in the bathroom. Period.” He added that he had never used, or heard, the words used by Cohan.
James Coman, the veteran prosecutor who led Attorney General Cooper’s reinvestigation of the case, has denounced as “figments of [Nifong’s] imagination” Nifong’s assertion that Cooper had “sandbagged” Coman. To the contrary, Coman told reporter Joe Neff that, after an in-depth reexamination of the evidence, he and his colleague Mary Winstead insisted that Cooper declare the players innocent, and Cooper agreed. Cohan appears never to have called Coman or Winstead to check the accuracy of Nifong’s self-serving speculation.
Phil Seligmann, father of wrongly indicted lacrosse player Reade Seligmann, denounced as “patently false” Cohan’s claim that the Seligmanns had never paid Reade’s first two lawyers, Buddy Conner and the late Kirk Osborn, for any of their work. “We made hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal payments to Kirk and Buddy,” for all the work they did, Seligmann said. He added that Cohan had never contacted him or Reade to check his false report.
Cohan’s claim that Duke University paid $60 million in 2007 to the three wrongly indicted lacrosse players to settle their threatened lawsuit against the university is flat-out false. The actual figure is widely known to have been one-third as much, as stated in more reliable reports. These reports also give the lie to Cohan’s wild, book-promoting claims that the lacrosse case has cost Duke “near $100 million” in settlements and legal and PR fees.
Sensational smears based on false information aside, the absence of new evidence does not deter Cohan from seeking to spin his own tendentious characterizations of old evidence—often contradicted by other evidence elsewhere in the book—into dark Nifongesque innuendos of sexual assault, or “something.”

Along the way, Cohan repeatedly smears the falsely accused “Duke lax bros,” as he mockingly calls them on Twitter. Sometimes he disparages them in his own voice (as in, “the festering wound that was Duke lacrosse”). Sometimes he happily quotes Nifong, left-leaning professors (one of whom calls the players “arrogant, callous, dismissive”), and journalists. Cohan does not cite many specifics other than the lacrosse players’ admittedly bad (but not very unusual) record of binge drinking and noisy parties at rented houses in a residential neighborhood near the campus. And sometimes, just for balance, he says nice things, especially about the only team member who gave him an interview.

He deprecates as “perfunctory” the conclusion of a committee chaired by liberal, black law professor James Coleman that the lacrosse players were generally polite, nondisruptive students who had “performed well academically,” behaved in an “exemplary” fashion on trips, and been “respectful of people who serve the team,” from bus drivers and airline personnel to the groundskeeper.

In a remarkably content-free exercise in character assassination by proxy, Cohan approvingly quotes Nifong’s attacks on all of the former DA’s major antagonists—without, it appears, seeking responses from any of them, excepting Roy Cooper, who refused to talk to Cohan. With seeming approval, Cohan quotes Nifong trashing Cooper for “selling [his] soul to the devil” by exonerating the lacrosse players. He quotes Nifong denouncing as “corrupt” Superior Court Judge Osmond Smith. (Smith had sentenced Nifong to a night in jail for lying to him in court.) Corrupt? Nifong explains that he was told by someone who was told by someone that someone else had “overheard” Judge Smith at a wedding saying something that seemed to prejudge the case.

Cohan also endorses Nifong’s attack on the three-person, North Carolina State Bar disciplinary panel that disbarred Nifong after a five-day trial. Nifong calls the panel a “kangaroo court” engaged in what Cohan calls a “sacrificial slaughter.” The panel had found Nifong guilty of violating the state’s ethical rules by his aggressive media campaign, early in the case, to tar the lacrosse players as racist rapists and “hooligans”; by seeking to hide highly exculpatory DNA evidence from the defense; and by lying to Judge Smith about that evidence. Cohan does not put the slightest dent into the overwhelming evidence supporting the actions of Cooper, Judge Smith, and the state bar panel.1

Cohan devotes dozens of pages to describing Nifong—and quoting his self-descriptions—in mostly glowing, if sometimes unintentionally ironic, terms, as in “Nifong developed a lifelong disdain for bullies.”2 Indeed, Cohan’s attitude toward Nifong’s proven, extreme abuses of prosecutorial power is so astonishingly benign as to almost imply that because poor black kids often don’t get fair treatment from the criminal justice system, rich (and not so rich) white kids should not get fair treatment either—no matter how innocent.

Cohan offers a breathtakingly misinformed (to put it charitably) argument dismissing as “a red herring” the charge that Nifong had hidden from defense lawyers exculpatory evidence that the DNA of four unidentified males (not Duke lacrosse players) and sperm from her boyfriend was found in or on Mangum. Why does Cohan deem it a “red herring”? First, he argues that Nifong did not try to hide the four males’ DNA. But mainly, he asserts that “it didn’t matter” because “Nifong had tried—and won—many rape cases without DNA evidence.”

Perhaps he had, either before DNA evidence was available or in cases in which its presence or absence proved little. But DNA was dispositive in the Duke lacrosse case. The absence of lacrosse players’ DNA on or in her body or clothing proved the innocence of the three indicted defendants. It’s almost inconceivable that they could have brutally raped, sodomized, and ejaculated in Mangum for anything close to 30 minutes, as she originally claimed, without leaving DNA. The evidence of the four unidentified males’ DNA was damaging to Mangum’s credibility, showing that she had concealed recent sexual activity from the police, among other points.

Even Cohan admits that if Nifong had released the state’s exculpatory analysis of the DNA evidence as soon as he had it either to the public or to defense lawyers (who would have made it public), it “would likely have doomed Nifong’s reelection [sic] effort” and been “the end of the case.” (This was the appointed DA’s first election.)

None of these actions by Nifong prevent Cohan from presenting him as a person of integrity who had made a few forgivable mistakes in his zeal to champion “my victim,” Mangum. While straining to make excuses for Nifong, Cohan sneers repeatedly at the players’ defense lawyers, whom he calls “masters at manipulating the media” (in the Cosmopolitan interview) for their “shock and awe” campaign and “fat retainers.”

Manipulating the media? The defense lawyers’ media campaign consisted of making public what Cohan never denies was truthful and probative evidence of innocence. And unless I missed something while slogging through this seemingly endless tome, Cohan does not cite a single intentionally false, misleading, or otherwise inappropriate statement that any defense lawyer for a lacrosse player ever made.

Cohan also seems at times to lose track of the flow of events, repeatedly contradicting on one page claims that he makes elsewhere. On page 572, for example, Cohan states that Nifong “never said he agreed with Cooper’s finding of innocence.” This flatly contradicts what Cohan writes on the preceding page, where he quotes Nifong’s above-referenced July 26, 2007 admission that “there is no credible evidence that [the three indicted players] committed any of the crimes for which they were indicted or any other crimes during the party.”

Although Cohan seems to try to libel-proof his book by pasting in, with little analysis, dozens of pages of material favorable to the lacrosse players (as well as much more material hostile to them, and much deadly dull filler), there are some telling omissions. Two come in his discussion of sexual assault nurse Tara Levicy, who—alone among the three doctors and five nurses who interviewed or examined Mangum after she reported to Duke University Hospital as a self-styled rape victim—expressed confidence that Mangum was telling the truth and claimed (falsely) that there was physical evidence to back her up. Levicy was not in charge of the physical exam.

Cohan dismisses claims that Levicy was biased in favor of rape complainants as based on nothing more than her time with Planned Parenthood, her enthusiasm for Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, and her strong feminist convictions. But the defense never attacked her for feminist convictions. It suggested that she was incompetent. And when others (including KC Johnson and me) stressed Levicy’s apparent bias, the most important evidence we cited was her highly revealing sworn deposition testimony that she had “never” doubted the truthfulness of any rape complainant and her pattern of changing her own analysis repeatedly to fit Nifong’s changing theories of the case. Cohan omits both.

A Scribner-Cohan press release also claims falsely that Levicy’s “report of what Mangum told her that night [actually, the next morning] is stunning and has never before been revealed.” (Cohan said the same on the April 14 Diane Rehm Show, two days after KC Johnson had exposed it as false on his blog.) In fact, Levicy’s report was obtained and summarized in detail more than seven years ago by numerous reporters and authors, including KC Johnson and me, and was publicly discounted as unconvincing by Attorney General Cooper’s distinguished investigators.

More generally, after endorsing many times Nifong’s assertions that the medical evidence supported Mangum’s rape claim, Cohan acknowledges that Cooper’s investigators had found that “[n]o medical evidence confirmed her stories.” They also found that Levicy had “based her opinion that the exam was consistent with [Mangum’s story] largely on [her] demeanor and complaints of pain rather than on objective evidence.”

How does Cohan manage to fill 621 pages? He stuffs them with long, long, often repetitive quotations from his interviews with Nifong, news articles, op-ed columns (including two of mine), blog posts, and other previously published remarks. He also goes on for dozens and dozens of pages detailing and lamenting the well-known culture of underage binge drinking, overemphasis on athletics, and flaccid academic standards at Duke and other prestigious colleges.

These temperance lectures would be harmless, and even of some value, but for the author’s underlying campaign. He is remarkably indulgent, on the whole, of the disgraceful rush to judgment against the Duke lacrosse players by Robert Steel, by Richard Brodhead, the cowardly Duke president, by other top administrators, and by almost 100 Duke professors.

The great mystery here is why a skillful, highly successful author and journalist would stoop so low. Dreams of a movie deal, perhaps? One also wonders why, to take one of many possible examples, Cohan didn’t bother to check his facts with James Coman or Mary Winstead—an elementary precaution for any responsible journalist or author—before trumpeting Nifong’s false claim that Cooper had “sandbagged” them when he exonerated the lacrosse players. Was the best-selling author of this “definitive, magisterial account”—which I would call deeply dishonest—afraid of letting stubborn facts spoil sensational stories?
1
The panel was also concerned about Nifong’s refusal even to look at highly exculpatory evidence that defense lawyers tried to present to him; his use of rigged identification procedures to frame the three defendants; and his rush to indict them based almost solely on Mangum’s wildly changing stories.
2
The Urban Dictionary lists “Nifong” as a quasi-synonym for “bully,” and defines “to Nifong” as, among other things, “to knowingly undermine set professional standards to further ones [sic] career, on the back of innocent people.” And based on Nifong’s ravings to his admirer Cohan, his name could also be cited as a quasi-synonym for “rabid” in the next edition.)

The post The Many Ways in Which The New Book About the Duke Lacrosse Case is Wrong appeared first on Stuart Taylor, Jr..

The facts are otherwise. They also suggest that Duke University’s ugly abuse in 2006 and 2007 of its now-exonerated lacrosse players — white males accused by a black stripper and hounded by a mob hewing to political correctness — reflects a disregard of due process and a bias against white males that infect much of academia.

In September, far from taking pains to protect its students from false rape charges, Duke adopted a revised "sexual misconduct" policy that makes a mockery of due process and may well foster more false rape charges by rigging the disciplinary rules against the accused.

Meanwhile, none of the 88 guilt-presuming professors has publicly apologized. (Duke’s president, Richard Brodhead, did — but too little and too late.) Many of the faculty signers — a majority of whom are white — have expressed pride in their rush to judgment. None was dismissed, demoted, or publicly rebuked. Two were glorified this month in Duke’s in-house organ as pioneers of "diversity," with no reference to their roles in signing the ad. Three others have won prestigious positions at Cornell, Vanderbilt, and the University of Chicago.

(Disclosure: I co-authored a 2007 book on the case, Until Proven Innocent, with historian KC Johnson of Brooklyn College and the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. His scrupulously accurate blog details the events summarized here.)

The two stated reasons for the revised sexual-misconduct rules, as reported in the student newspaper, The Chronicle, almost advertise that they were driven by politically correct ideology more than by any surge in sexual assaults.

"The first was… fear of litigation, as expressed by Duke General Counsel Pamela Bernard," as Johnson wrote in his blog, Durham-in-Wonderland. "Yet the policy Duke has developed seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen. The second factor was a development that those in the reality-based community might consider to be a good thing: Over a three-year period, reported cases of sexual misconduct on college campuses as a whole and at Duke specifically (slightly) declined."

But for many in academia, Johnson explains, "these figures must mean something else — that a plethora of rapes are going unreported." Indeed, Sheila Broderick, a Duke Women’s Center staff member, told The Chronicle without evidence that Duke had a "rape culture." And Ada Gregory, director of the Duke Women’s Center, said that "higher IQ" males, such as those at Duke, could be "highly manipulative and coercive."

The revised policy requires involving the Women’s Center in the disciplinary process for all known allegations of sexual misconduct and empowers the Office of Student Conduct to investigate even if the accuser does not want to proceed.

Duke adopted a revised "sexual misconduct" policy that makes a mockery of due process and may foster more false rape charges.

Duke’s rules define sexual misconduct so broadly and vaguely as to include any sexual activity without explicit "verbal or nonverbal" consent, which must be so "clear" as to dispel "real or perceived power differentials between individuals [that] may create an unintentional atmosphere of coercion" (emphasis added).

The disciplinary rules deny the accused any right to have an attorney at the hearing panel or to confront his accuser. The rules also give her — but not him — the right to be treated with "sensitivity"; to make opening and closing statements; and to receive copies of investigative documents.

The revised policy, among other things, shows that Duke is still in the grip of the same biases, indifference to evidence, and de facto presumption of guilt that led so many professors and administrators to smear innocent lacrosse players as rapists (and as racists) for many months in 2006 and 2007. The centerpiece was the full-page ad taken out by the "Group of 88" professors, as critics call them, in The Chronicle on April 6, 2006, about three weeks after the woman claimed rape.

This ad stopped just short of explicitly branding the lacrosse players as rapists. But it treated almost as a given the truth of the stripper’s claims of a brutal gang rape by three team members amid a hail of racist slurs. It praised protesters who had put lacrosse players’ photos on "wanted" posters. It associated "what happened to this young woman" with "racism and sexism." It suggested that the lacrosse players were getting privileged treatment because they are white — which was the opposite of the truth.

And in January 2007, after the fraudulence of the stripper’s rape claim and of rogue Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong’s indictments of three players had become increasingly evident, most of the 88 also signed a letter rejecting calls for apologies while denying that their April 2006 ad had meant what it seemed to say.

Among the most prominent signers of both the ad and the letter were Karla Holloway, an English professor, and Paula McClain, a political science professor. They also slimed the lacrosse players in opaquely worded, academic-jargon-filled individual statements full of innuendo.

This disgraceful behavior apparently did not trouble Duke’s Academic Council, which in February 2007 made McClain its next chairwoman — the highest elected position for a faculty member.

And just this month, the university’s in-house organ, Duke Today, heaped special attention and praise on Holloway and McClain and featured their photos in a gushing five-part series titled "Diversity & Excellence," focusing on Duke’s efforts to hire more black faculty members.

Academia’s demand for more "diversity" may interact with the small supply of aspiring black professors who are well credentialed in traditional disciplines.

None of the five articles mentioned the roles of Holloway, McClain, and most of the African and African-American studies faculty (the vast majority of whom signed both the ad and the subsequent letter) in smearing innocent Duke students — not only the lacrosse players but also the many others whom the letter fatuously accused of fostering an "atmosphere that allows sexism, racism, and sexual violence to be so prevalent on campus."

The three Group of 88 signers hired away by other leading universities are Houston Baker, Grant Farred, and Charles Payne.

Vanderbilt was so proud to have signed up Baker, a professor of English and African and African-American studies at Duke, in April 2006 that it prominently featured a photo of him on its website for months. This was shortly after Baker had issued a March 29, 2006, public letter pressuring the Duke administration to dismiss the lacrosse players — whom he deprecated 10 times as "white" — and all but pronouncing the entire team guilty of "abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white, male privilege" against a "black woman who their violence and raucous witness injured for life."

For such conduct, the official Vanderbilt Register admiringly characterized Baker as Duke’s "leading dissident voice" about the administration’s handling of the rape allegations.

In June 2006, Baker falsely suggested that Duke lacrosse players had raped other women. In a pervasively ugly response to a polite e-mail from the mother of a Duke lacrosse player, he called the team "a scummy bunch of white males" and the woman the "mother of a ‘farm animal.’ "

In 2007, Cornell proudly lured another of the 88, Grant Farred, with a joint appointment in African studies and English.

This, after the following events: In September 2006 and before, Farred produced such faux scholarship as a nonsensical monograph portraying Yao Ming, the Houston Rockets’ Chinese center, as representing "the most profound threat to American empire." In October 2006, Farred accused hundreds of Duke students of "secret racism" for registering to vote against Nifong, who was subsequently disbarred for railroading the indicted lacrosse players. In April 2007, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper declared the players innocent. Then Farred smeared them again, as racists and perjurers.

Cornell elevated Farred this year to director of graduate studies in the African-American studies department.

Also in 2007, Chicago gave an endowed chair to Charles Payne, who as Duke’s chairman of African and African-American studies had inappropriately authorized use of university funds to pay for the Group of 88 ad.

The fact that these five people of questionable judgment have subsequently won glorification by Duke or advancement to other prestigious positions may reflect the interaction of academia’s demand for more "diversity" with the small supply of aspiring black professors who are well credentialed in traditional disciplines. These factors, amplified by politically correct ideology, have advanced many academics who — unlike most African-Americans — are obsessed with grievances rooted more in our history of slavery and racial oppression than in contemporary reality.

Try imagining a white male professor who had smeared innocent black students enjoying a similar path of advancement in academia today.

This article appeared in the Saturday, December 19, 2009 edition of National Journal.

The post The Rot At Duke — And Beyond appeared first on Stuart Taylor, Jr..

Never mind that hiring strippers violated no law or university rule. Never mind that nobody had made a fuss about the 20-plus stripper parties that other Duke athletic teams, fraternities, and sororities held that year. Brodhead and other officials and professors continued to express horror long after the supposedly "privileged" lacrosse players had abjectly apologized. To underscore its horror, the university adopted a new rule: "Strippers may not be invited or paid to perform at events sponsored by individual students, residential living groups, or cohesive units."

So, some might be surprised to learn that on this year’s Super Bowl Sunday, Duke University played host to a group of strippers, prostitutes, phone-sex operators, and others in a "Sex Workers Art Show" to display their "creativity and genius." The university spent $3,500 from student fees and various programs to pay the performers and cover expenses.

One account of the February 3 show in the on-campus Reynolds Theater-from which I have redacted the more repulsive particulars-was posted on the Internet by Jay Schalin, of the conservative-leaning John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

"The performers did not just take their clothes off-and the actual nudity part of the show was rather tame. But mere nudity could hardly compare with a show that began with the Art Show’s founder and director, Annie Oakley, imploring the audience to stand up and shout ‘I take it up the butt!’ …

"A transvestite, naked except for some strategically placed tape, with the words ‘F___ Bush’ painted on his chest, kneeled on all fours and lit a sparkler protruding out of his rectum with ‘America the Beautiful’ playing …

"A stripper, in the guise of a U.S. flag-draped Lady Justice, … yanked a string of dollar bills out of her posterior as the sound system played Dolly Parton’s version of ‘God Bless the U.S.A.’ She ended her act by saluting and holding up her middle finger to the crowd. The announcer referred to the performance as her ‘Infamous Patriot Act.’ Her most private area was kept covered by a small American flag …

"A dominatrix donned a large ‘strap-on’ male sex organ, and pretended to masturbate while the crowd was urged to shout ‘faster, faster,’ in Chinese."

The Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper, reported that the show "riveted a crowd of students and community members," with "rowdy cheers and awkward silences."

This event was sponsored by a student group called Healthy Devils, with co-sponsors including Duke’s Women’s Center, the Program for the Study of Sexualities, the Student Health Center, Students for Choice, the Campus Council, and Sexual Assault Support Services. The show has toured or will tour other campuses including Harvard University, the College of William & Mary, the University of Michigan, Wesleyan University, and the University of California (Davis).

Duke Provost Peter Lange, responding to my e-mailed questions, explained that the sponsors had followed normal procedures to get university funds and facilities. Duke "routinely hosts shows and speakers that some people find controversial or even objectionable," he wrote, as part of its "strong commitment to free speech and academic freedom." He added that the university takes no position on the views expressed.

Fair enough. But how can the Duke administration reconcile its solicitude for the right of some groups to pay strippers to perform with its disdain for lacrosse players who did the same?

"There is an obvious difference," Lange responded, "between strippers performing at a private party and a group of artists touring university campuses across the country to present a show with political discussion, musical theater, and displays of sexuality."

So people who take off their clothes and dance for money while others watch are not mere strippers, but rather "artists," if they go on tour, call it "musical theater," and toss in scatological and vulgar political effusions?

Another way of looking at it, Schalin’s article suggests, is that "inviting strippers to perform does not appear to be a problem as long as the intent is not to titillate men, but to shock a mixed audience with vulgarity and disparage mainstream American values."

Kenneth Larrey, a senior who founded Duke Students for an Ethical Duke to promote fair treatment of students by the university that had so savaged its own lacrosse players, skipped the Super Bowl to document the university’s hypocrisy. The show was, he says, "far, far more grotesque than we could have imagined."

To be sure, Annie Oakley did voice one coherent political message: Women are driven into the "sex industry" because the "only other option is working a minimum-wage job or less." But this theme was undercut by one performer’s admission that she had left a regular job to make more money for "my extravagant partying lifestyle" and by others who described choosing sex work after college.

While the show portrayed "sex workers" as both artistic "geniuses" and victims of society, males who pay strippers to perform had better have politically correct motives. The Sex Workers Art Show passed the political correctness test because, in the words of its website, it not only "entertains, arouses, and amazes" but also offers "scathing and insightful commentary on notions of class, race, gender, labor, and sexuality."

As if the nation’s campuses were not sufficiently steeped in such stuff already.

The lacrosse players, on the other hand, had no pretensions beyond titillation and male bonding. For this they were likened to slave masters of the Old South by many a professor and columnist. Professor Mark Anthony Neal, for one-a practitioner of what he calls " ‘gangster’ scholarship" and "intellectual thuggery"-accused the players of "hoping to consume something that they felt a black woman uniquely possessed." Never mind that the booking agency had told the players that one stripper would be white and one would be Hispanic.

Brodhead told the Durham Chamber of Commerce on April 20, 2006, "If our students did what is alleged, it is appalling to the worst degree. If they didn’t do it, whatever they did is bad enough." (Emphasis added.)

This was a dagger aimed straight at the hearts of sophomores Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty, who had been arrested on rape charges two days before. In his eagerness to trash two young men in their time of direst peril for having attended a stripper party organized by their captains, Brodhead ignored the strong, by-then-public evidence that both were entirely innocent of rape.

Such smears have so far cost Duke well over $10 million to settle a threatened lawsuit by the three wrongly accused players. (The third was indicted after Brodhead’s "bad enough" gibe.) Three other players have filed a lawsuit and 30-some others are threatening to sue.

But no Duke administrator or professor has been disciplined in any way. Indeed, the only one fired at Duke as a result of the bogus rape charge was Mike Pressler, the university’s lacrosse coach for 16 years and the 2005 NCAA Coach of the Year. Brodhead fired him in April 2006 while misleadingly suggesting that his players were a bunch of racists. This at a time when rogue District Attorney Mike Nifong, who has since been disbarred, was winning an election by spreading similar smears to Durham voters and potential jurors.

Less than a month later, a faculty committee that Brodhead appointed to investigate the coach’s leadership and the players’ characters found that Pressler had been blameless. It also found that the players-although far too prone to the alcohol abuse, noisy parties, and related petty misconduct that are endemic on campus-were otherwise an admirable group of student-athletes with no history of racist talk or behavior.

Despite all of this, Steel-who is also an undersecretary of the Treasury-and Duke’s board have strongly supported Brodhead’s handling of the lacrosse case. In December 2007 a board committee voiced what its chair, and board vice chair, Daniel Blue, called "overwhelming support for the leadership that the president is providing."

Brodhead and the board understand how the p.c. game is played. If only the lacrosse players had understood that, they could have lined up university funding to hire a better class of strippers: college-educated white people spouting vacuous political bromides and sporting dollar bills and sparklers in the right places.

The post Opening Argument – The University Has No Clothes appeared first on Stuart Taylor, Jr..

It garnered headlines across the country, stirred turmoil at one of the nation’s leading universities, and then fell apart completely. In the end, North Carolina’s attorney general announced that the three players — Reade Seligmann, Colin Finnerty, and David Evans — were innocent and called Mike Nifong, the local district attorney who brought the case, "a rogue prosecutor."

A new book by Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson called "Until Proven Innocent" takes a hard look at what happened. Stuart Taylor, a longtime legal journalist and currently a columnist for the National Journal, joins me now.

Welcome to you.

STUART TAYLOR, Legal Journalist: Nice to be with you.

JEFFREY BROWN: You suggest that the flaws in this case were apparent from the very beginning from the police investigation. Give us a good example.

STUART TAYLOR: The woman who ended up claiming she’d been raped didn’t say anything about it for 90 minutes. She first claimed she has been raped while she was being checked into a mental hospital for involuntary confinement. That was her ticket out.

As soon as she was out, she recanted the rape allegation and told Sergeant John Shelton, "No, I wasn’t raped." And while he was calling that in, somebody says, "Well, she’s changed it again. During the course of the night, she said she had been raped by 20 men, five men, three men, four men, take your pick."

And her story continued to be wild and crazy and inconsistent and implausible, self-contradictory and contradicted by all medical evidence from that point forward. None of the police at the hospital believed her.

JEFFREY BROWN: But somebody believed her or what? How did it take off?

STUART TAYLOR: A hospital nurse believed her, who turns out to have been a woman who’s in training to be a sexual assault nurse. She said, she later told defense lawyers, she had never disbelieved any rape complainant.

And then some bad cops, whether they believed her at first or not, decided that they were going to make a case out of this. And then a bad district attorney, the rogue District Attorney Mike Nifong, grabbed hold of it to try and win an election and, in the face of massive evidence of innocence, tried to put three innocent young men in jail for a long, long time.

JEFFREY BROWN: He’s now been disbarred. He’s been sued by the players. What do you conclude was his motivation? You said political. Does that mean…

STUART TAYLOR: I think it’s quite clear. He was about to lose an election that he was desperate to win. A woman named Freda Black was running against him. It was a May 2nd primary in 2006. This case comes to him on March 24th of 2006. The primary’s five weeks away or so.

It was his only opportunity to win the election, was to inflame the black vote by lying to the voters, and telling them that there had been a racially motivated rape, and inflaming the black vote. And he did it, and it worked, and he did it in the face of evidence that must have shown him long before the election, if not from the beginning, that this was all a big fraud.

JEFFREY BROWN: You write that Nifong’s persecution "may well be the most egregious abuse of prosecutorial power ever to unfold in plain view." How did he get away with it for so long?

STUART TAYLOR: Of course, a lot of the worst things he did were secret for a while, but one thing he did very overtly and publicly was proclaim these young men guilty from the moment he got involved in the case in a series of almost unprecedented media interviews, you know, inflammatory, false, "They’re all guilty," "The ones who didn’t do it are accomplices," "There’s a wall of silence," "It was a racial thing," lie, lie, lie, lie, lie.

But even if they hadn’t have been lies, even if it had been true, that’s unethical for a prosecutor to do. Everyone should know that. The media ignored that, and instead of saying, "Why is this man violating the rules of ethics?" They said, "He must have the evidence," and went charging ahead, which at first was perhaps understandable. But after the evidence that it was a fraud came pouring into the public record, many in the media barely slowed down.

JEFFREY BROWN: You look at the media a lot here as one of the institutions that you look at over the course of the year here. And generally you think that it did not perform very well. Why?

STUART TAYLOR: I think they didn’t perform well because many of them joined the rush to judgment. The New York Times…

JEFFREY BROWN: No, I mean, what do you think would have made them?

STUART TAYLOR: Their motivation?

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.

STUART TAYLOR: I think it was two things working in synch, old-fashioned media sensationalism — everybody knows what that was, as this is a sensational story — working together with political correctness, as I call it. You could call it something else.

Bias in favor of the idea that, well, the privileged white male athletes are accused of abusing the poor black woman, we love that. It’s in synch with all of our preconceptions and our ideology. Let’s pile on and make it a morality play. And an awful lot of people, including the New York Times, for example, were not a bit deterred by contrary evidence from making it a morality play of that kind.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, it’s one thing to say that they got the story wrong or they over-sensationalized. That happens a lot in our media. It’s another thing to say that it’s ideological. What’s the evidence for that?

STUART TAYLOR: The evidence is, first, the fact that they ignored the evidence so completely. Second, the way they wrote it. Selena Roberts is a sports columnist in the New York Times, not a reporter, but a columnist. Her columns seethed with class hatred.

I think the first one was headlined "Bonded in Barbarity." And it was full of "the privileged this, the white that." They wore that pretty much on their sleeves more in the columns than in the reporting. In the reporting, it was more a matter of going directly in the teeth of the evidence over and over and over again in almost every story they wrote for many, many months.

And then the question is, well, why would they do that? That’s the question you asked me, and I think that’s why.

JEFFREY BROWN: At the same time, you point out that this brought out the best in some people. You cite a number of other cases.

STUART TAYLOR: Yes. Yes, in fact, the late, great Ed Bradley of "60 Minutes," among others, did wonderful work on this, came in on the late side, but wonderful work.

Early on, two New York Times columnists, since I’ve been criticizing the New York Times, I should mention David Brooks and Nicholas Kristof both did distinguished work cutting against the biases of their paper generally. Dan Abrams of MSNBC did good work. There were others, reporters from the Raleigh News and Observer, Joe Neff.

There were a lot of people who did good work, but at the beginning, it was a chorus of condemnation and rush to judgment, with very few exceptions.

JEFFREY BROWN: The president of Duke University, Richard Brodhead, recently apologized for not standing by the students and the families as much as he thought he and the university should have.

STUART TAYLOR: He did apologize. I’m not sure that’s how I’d characterize his apology. If you go parse it, I think he apologized that he didn’t privately show them more support.

I don’t believe he apologized for not publicly showing them more support. And I’m quite sure he did not apologize for smearing them with misleading, defamatory statements over and over again in his own voice in public.

JEFFREY BROWN: You mentioned political correctness. Now, a number of reviewers have read the book and seen how you’ve carefully built the case in the Duke instance, but noted that you’ve tried to extrapolate that into a much larger case against academia, the media, the culture at large being too politically correct. Why take that one case and make something much bigger out of it?

STUART TAYLOR: Well, I know that criticism. I respect that criticism. And I respectfully disagree with it in this sense.

One of the most important reasons I wrote this book is that I think what happened to Duke says a lot, not only about what the Duke faculty and administration are like, but what the state of the American university is today. We generalize admittedly from that. And along chapter 25, readers of the book will judge for themselves whether we’ve made our case.

I might note that others — and not all of them conservatives, including some liberals — have made very similar cases in some excellent books over the years. So we’re not out there by ourselves.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right. The book is "Until Proven Innocent." Stuart Taylor, thanks very much.

STUART TAYLOR: Thank you. Appreciate it.

The post NewsHour: Author Discusses Duke Case – November 1, 2007 appeared first on Stuart Taylor, Jr..

The 24-hour sentence was imposed on Mike Nifong, the disbarred former district attorney of Durham, after a contempt-of-court trial last week for repeatedly lying to hide DNA evidence of innocence. His prosecution of three demonstrably innocent defendants, based on an emotionally disturbed stripper’s ever-changing account, may be the worst prosecutorial misconduct ever exposed while it was happening. Durham police officers and other officials aided Nifong, and the city and county face the threat of a massive lawsuit by the falsely accused former students seeking criminal justice reforms and compensation.

All this shows how the criminal justice process can oppress the innocent — usually poor people lacking the resources to fight back — and illustrates the need for reforms to restrain rogue prosecutors. But the case was also a major cultural event exposing habits of mind among academics and journalists that contradict what should be their lodestar: the pursuit of truth.

Nifong’s lies, his inflaming of racial hatred (to win the black vote in his election campaign) and his targeting of innocent people were hardly representative of criminal prosecutors. But the smearing of the lacrosse players as racist, sexist, thuggish louts by many was all too representative.

Dozens of the activist professors who dominate campus discourse gleefully stereotyped and vilified their own students — and not one member of Duke’s undergraduate faculty publicly dissented for months. Duke President Richard Brodhead repeatedly and misleadingly denigrated the players’ characters. He also acted as though he had no problem with Nifong’s violations of their rights to due process.

The New York Times and other newspapers vied with trash-TV talk shows hosted by the likes of CNN’s Nancy Grace, a biased wacko-feminist, and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, a right-wing blowhard, in a race to the journalistic bottom. The defendants — who endured the ordeal with courage and class — and their teammates were smeared nationwide as depraved racists and probable rapists.

To be sure, it was natural to assume at first that Nifong had a case. Why else would he confidently declare the players guilty? But many academics and journalists continued to presume guilt months after massive evidence of innocence poured into the public record. Indeed, some professors persisted in attacks even after the three defendants were declared innocent in April by North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper — an almost unheard-of event.

Brushing aside concern with "the ‘truth’ . . . about the incident," as one put it, these faculty ideologues just changed their indictments from rape to drunkenness (hardly a rarity in college); exploiting poor black women (the players had expected white and Hispanic strippers); and being born white, male and prosperous.

This shameful conduct was rooted in a broader trend toward subordinating facts and evidence to faith-based ideological posturing. Worse, the ascendant ideology, especially in academia, is an obsession with the fantasy that oppression of minorities and women by "privileged" white men remains rampant in America. Its crude stereotyping of white men, especially athletes, resembles old-fashioned racism and sexism.

Can this trend be reversed? The power of extremist professors will continue to spread unless mainstream liberal academics, alumni and trustees stop deferring to them and stop letting them pack departments with more and more ideologically eccentric, intellectually mediocre allies.

As for the media, the case shows the need for editors and watchdogs to remind journalists that they are supposed to be in the truth-telling business and that truth emerges from facts and evidence.

The case did feature one hero, who showed how academics as well as journalists should behave: Professor James Coleman of Duke Law School. Long a champion of liberal causes, Coleman broke ranks with his guilt-presuming colleagues after Brodhead named him to lead a committee investigating the team’s culture. Yes, the report Coleman’s committee issued in May 2006 said that some lacrosse players drank unlawfully or excessively and had committed such petty offenses as having noisy parties. But alcohol aside, the report was a stunning vindication. Team members had "performed well academically"; respected the Duke employees with whom they came into contact; behaved well on trips; supported current and former African American players; and had no history of fighting, sexual assault or harassment, or racist slurs.

The media long ignored this portrayal, which did not fit their mythical story line. Coleman later became the first — and for months the only — Duke figure to publicly denounce Nifong’s violations of the players’ rights. The media long ignored that, too.

Stuart Taylor is a National Journal columnist and Newsweek contributor. KC Johnson is a history professor at Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center. They are co-authors of "Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case."

The post Guilty in the Duke Case appeared first on Stuart Taylor, Jr..

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.

The post The Duke Lacrosse Team Rape Case appeared first on Stuart Taylor, Jr..

It was an extraordinary event in American legal history. Duke lacrosse teammates Dave Evans, Reade Seligmann and Colin Finnerty knew that North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper was going to drop the sensational sexual assault case against them. But how would Cooper explain it? Would he just say that the charges were not provable beyond a reasonable doubt-which some saw as the safest way out for the attorney general politically-and leave their reputations in limbo? Or would he say the word

It was an extraordinary event in American legal history. 

Duke lacrosse teammates Dave Evans, Reade Seligmann and Colin Finnerty knew that North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper was going to drop the sensational sexual assault case against them. But how would Cooper explain it? Would he just say that the charges were not provable beyond a reasonable doubt-which some saw as the safest way out for the attorney general politically-and leave their reputations in limbo? Or would he say the word they were waiting for?

Six paragraphs into his statement, Cooper ended their agony: "We believe these three individuals are innocent of these charges." Innocent. Watching on TV, the defendants and their parents, teammates and friends burst into cheers.

Cooper did not stop there. "We have no credible evidence that an attack occurred in that house that night," he said. "The eyewitness identification procedu…

It was an extraordinary event in American legal history. Duke lacrosse teammates Dave Evans, Reade Seligmann and Colin Finnerty knew that North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper was going to drop the sensational sexual assault case against them. But how would Cooper explain it? Would he just say that the charges were not provable beyond a reasonable doubt-which some saw as the safest way out for the attorney general politically-and leave their reputations in limbo? Or would he say the word

It was an extraordinary event in American legal history. 

Duke lacrosse teammates Dave Evans, Reade Seligmann and Colin Finnerty knew that North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper was going to drop the sensational sexual assault case against them. But how would Cooper explain it? Would he just say that the charges were not provable beyond a reasonable doubt-which some saw as the safest way out for the attorney general politically-and leave their reputations in limbo? Or would he say the word they were waiting for?

Six paragraphs into his statement, Cooper ended their agony: "We believe these three individuals are innocent of these charges." Innocent. Watching on TV, the defendants and their parents, teammates and friends burst into cheers.

Cooper did not stop there. "We have no credible evidence that an attack occurred in that house that night," he said. "The eyewitness identification procedures were faulty and unreliable. No DNA confirms the accuser’s story. No other witness confirms her story. Other evidence contradicts her story. She contradicts herself."

The attorney general had done what prosecutors almost never do, and what many of the falsely accused students’ supporters had feared could never be done: he gave them their reputations back.

Cooper’s special prosecutions unit took the case over on Jan. 13, after Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong withdrew to focus on defending himself against disbarment proceedings brought by the North Carolina State Bar. The bar’s complaint accuses Nifong of (among other things) scheming with his DNA expert to hide powerful scientific evidence of innocence from the defense and with lying repeatedly to the court, the defense, the public and the state bar itself. Cooper said that Nifong’s conduct "shows the enormous consequences of overreaching by a prosecutor," adding that "in the rush to condemn, a community and a state lost the ability to see clearly."

With Nifong leading the assault, the three young scholar-athletes had been smeared from coast to coast as thugs, racists and probable rapists-by dozens of their own professors, by black and feminist leaders and by many in the news media, for the better part of a year.

Nobody but cranks and haters will ever be able to hurl those lies at them again.

At a defense press conference later in the day, the three defendants and their lawyers mixed eloquent testimonials to one another with expressions of anger-forcefully articulated by defense lawyer Joseph B. Cheshire V-at the Duke professors, journalists and others who had so eagerly joined Nifong’s mob. But they also spoke thoughtfully of a broader lesson: if affluent young men able to afford the best legal talent in the business could be victimized in this way, imagine what must happen every day to countless poor defendants who lack the means to fight back against bad prosecutors and cops.

"This has opened my eyes up to a tragic world of injustice that I had never imagined," Reade Seligman told a ballroom full of reporters, teammates and others. "We all need to take a step back from this case and learn from it."

To prevent similar persecution of others, Roy Cooper called for a new law giving the state Supreme Court the authority to remove a case from a prosecutor who has shown himself unfit to continue handling it. Dave Evans and Colin Finnerty called for reforming the grand-jury system to make it a real check on prosecutorial abuses; under current law, grand juries are rubber stamps, because prosecutors control what evidence they can hear and allow no transcript that would help keep them honest.

"Sweet are the uses of adversity," added defense lawyer Wade Smith, quoting Shakespeare. "They have been tested in great fires," he said of the three defendants, "and something great will come of this."

The post An Unbelievable Day appeared first on Stuart Taylor, Jr..

If you’re the New York Times and the story is the alleged gang rape of a black woman by three white Duke lacrosse players–a claim shown by mounting evidence to be almost certainly fraudulent–you tone down your rhetoric while doing your utmost to prop up a case that’s been almost wholly driven by prosecutorial and police misconduct.

And by bad journalism. Worse, perhaps, than the other recent Times embarrassments. The Times still seems bent on advancing its race-sex-class ideological agenda, even at the cost of ruining the lives of three young men who it has reason to know are very probably innocent. This at a time when many other true believers in the rape charge, such as feminist law professor Susan Estrich, have at last seen through the prosecution’s fog of lies and distortions.

The Times took its stand in a 5,600-word, Page One reassessment of the case on Aug. 25, written by Duff Wilson, a sportswriter responsible for much of the paper’s previous one-sided coverage, and Jonathan Glater. The headline was “Files From Duke Rape Case Give Details But No Answers.”

Like the headline, the piece cultivates a meretricious appearance of balance. But its flaws are so glaring that it was shredded by bloggers within hours after it hit my doorstep. They were led by a Durham group called Liestoppers and by KC Johnson, an obscure but brilliant New York City history professor of centrist political views. Johnson alone has produced more insightful (if sometimes one-sided) analysis and commentary on the Duke case–about 60,000 words–than all the nation’s newspapers combined.

The Wilson-Glater piece highlights every superficially incriminating piece of evidence in the case, selectively omits important exculpatory evidence, and reports hotly disputed statements by not-very-credible police officers and the mentally unstable accuser as if they were established facts. With comical credulity, it features as its centerpiece a leaked, transparently contrived, 33-page police sergeant’s memo that seeks to paper over some of the most obvious holes in the prosecution’s evidence.

This memo was concocted from memory, nearly four months after the underlying witness interviews, by Durham police Sgt. Mark Gottlieb, the lead investigator. Gottlieb says he took no contemporaneous notes, an inexplicable and indefensible police practice. Gottlieb had drawn fire before the alleged Duke rape–perhaps unbeknownst to the Times–as a Dukie-basher who reveled in throwing kids into jail for petty drinking infractions, noise violations, and the like, sometimes with violent criminals as cellmates.

Gottlieb’s memo is contradicted on critical points by the contemporaneous notes of other police officers, as well as by hospital records seeming to show that the accuser did not have the injuries Gottlieb claims to have observed. The Times blandly mentions these contradictions while avoiding the obvious inference that the Gottlieb memo is thus unworthy of belief.

It is almost entirely on this Gottlieb memo that the Times rests its summing-up fifth paragraph:

[A]n examination of the entire 1,850 pages of evidence gathered by the prosecution … shows that while there are big weaknesses in [District Attorney Mike] Nifong’s case, there is a body of evidence to support his decision to take the matter to a jury.

A sly formulation. Whoever thought it up chose to focus on the legalistic question of whether Nifong can avoid having his case being thrown out before trial, while glossing over the more important question as to whether any reasonable prosecutor could believe the three defendants to be guilty and force them through the risk, expense, and trauma of a trial.

With all or almost all of the key prosecution evidence now public, the answer to that latter question is no. What we have here is an alleged 30-minute gang rape, plus brutal beating, taking place in a small bathroom by three men without condoms, at least two of whom supposedly ejaculated; a rape in which police found none of the defendants’ DNA on the supposed victim and none of hers in the bathroom. While the Times asserts that “experts say it is possible for a rapist to leave no DNA evidence,” it’s hard to imagine the crime alleged to have happened here leaving none.

The accuser first claimed rape while in the process of being involuntarily committed to a mental-health/drug facility as a danger to herself or others. Soon after her release to the hospital for a rape exam, she recanted the charge. Then she re-recanted and offered a succession of wildly inconsistent stories.

The other exotic dancer at the lacrosse party initially told police that they had been apart no more than five minutes and the rape claim was a “crock.” (She later hedged after Nifong gave her favorable treatment for a probation violation.)

The 23 pages of hospital reports by two doctors and four nurses show no vaginal or anal tearing, no significant bruises or signs of beating, and no visible injuries other than minor scratches on her knee and heel and a mild swelling of the vaginal walls that could have come from consensual sexual activities, including performing with a vibrator.

She identified none of her alleged attackers in two photo viewings. Then, on April 4, Nifong arranged an outrageously suggestive, pick-any-lacrosse-player session that grossly violated local and state rules and (in my view) the U.S. Constitution. She picked three, of whom at least one since-indicted defendant, Reade Seligmann, has an airtight alibi, including a video showing him at an ATM a mile away at the time of the supposed rape.

The Times piece mentioned most of this exculpatory evidence but understated its cumulative weight and gave unwarranted credence to contrary evidence of dubious credibility, such as the Gottlieb memo.

This fits the Times’s long-standing treatment of the case as a fable of evil, rich white men running amok and abusing poor black women. Sports columnist Selena Roberts helped set the tone in a March 31 commentary seething with hatred for “a group of privileged players of fine pedigree entangled in a night that threatens to belie their social standing as human beings.” All but presuming guilt, Roberts parroted false prosecution claims that all team members had observed a “code of silence.” (A correction ran six days later). She likened them to “drug dealers and gang members engaged in an anti-snitch campaign.”

The Aug. 25 Wilson-Glater piece is more measured in tone, but ultimately it’s equally off-base. A few of many possible examples:

Accuser’s inconsistent stories: The accuser told police and hospital personnel at least five inconsistent stories of being raped by five, three, two, and zero men (depending on the version). But the Times asserts that “aside from two brief early conversations with police, she gave largely consistent accounts of being raped by three men in a bathroom.”

Consistent? Just about the only consistent theme was her eventual settling on three attackers, while variously denying and then alleging that she was hit or kicked.

On March 14 the accuser told a sexual-assault nurse that the other dancer, Kim Roberts, had helped a lacrosse player drag her back into the party house to be raped and “took all my money and everything.” But on April 6, in her only written police statement, she claimed that “three guys grabbed” Roberts and “separated us … while we tried to hold on to each other.”

Identifying assailants: When Sgt. Gottlieb and Det. Benjamin Himan visited the accuser on March 16, Himan’s handwritten notes had her describing her rapists as (respectively) “chubby,” having a “chubby face,” and weighing “260-270.” These descriptions match none of the three subsequently indicted defendants and could not possibly refer to one, Collin Finnerty, who is 6-foot-4, thin, and baby-faced.

Enter Sgt. Gottlieb: In his only account of the same interview–prepared four months later, remember–the accuser’s descriptions contradict those recorded by Himan but miraculously match the three now-defendants almost perfectly.

Again, the Times notes the contradiction but avoids the obvious inference: Gottlieb’s version was made up to fit the defendants. That’s the only way to explain another fact omitted by the Times: Gottlieb’s police team did not include a photo of Finnerty–the only team member who fits Gottlieb’s account of a “baby-faced, tall, lean” rapist–in the 36 photos shown to the accuser later on March 16 and on March 21. Nor did she pick Seligmann and Evans until the rigged April 4 session, when she said she would be 90 percent sure that Evans had raped her if he had a mustache–which he has never had.

Medical evidence: The 23 pages of hospital reports described above, which offer little or no evidence of rape, are a crippling weakness in Nifong’s case.

Enter Sgt. Gottlieb again. The Times treats as established fact his memo’s less-than-credible claim that the sexual-assault nurse told him on March 21 that the accuser had been subjected to “blunt force trauma” consistent with a sexual assault. The piece also glosses over the contradiction between her supposed statement to Gottlieb and her own report. Under “Describe all signs of physical trauma,” she listed only nonbleeding scratches on the accuser’s right knee and heel.

DNA and innocence: The article quotes half a sentence from Nifong’s March 23 application for an order to obtain DNA samples from the 46 white lacrosse players–”Mr. Nifong’s office had written that the tests would ‘show conclusive evidence as to who the suspect(s) are in the alleged violent attack upon this victim.’ “–while omitting the first half: “The DNA evidence requested will immediately rule out any innocent persons.” Nor did the article explain how blatantly Nifong was to contradict this assurance after learning the DNA results.

Condoms, date rape: The Times cites Nifong’s suggestion in early April that the reason no semen had been found might be the use of condoms. It fails to explain how deceptive this was: Nifong’s own files showed the accuser saying her rapists had not used condoms and that she had spat semen onto the floor.

The article also mentions police speculation that the lacrosse players might have slipped the accuser a date-rape drug to incapacitate her. And Joseph Cheshire, Evans’ lawyer, noted in a recent e-mail exchange with me that the prosecution “has suggested to the media numerous times in the past that the accuser had been given such a drug.” Another deception? “A toxicology report that the defense was informed of last week was negative for any date rape drug in the accuser’s system,” Cheshire tells me.

Cheshire adds that the Times’ strong implication that defense lawyers have deceived the public is not only false but “especially ironic in an article about a prosecutor who has and continues to deceive the public about his case.”

Nifong must be praying for jurors as easily deceived–or as willing to see past the evidence to what they want to believe–as Wilson and Glater of the Times.

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