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http://www.cosmopolitan.com/advice/health/price-of-silence-duke-lacrosse

How the Duke Lacrosse Case Spun Out of Control
Heather Wood Rudulph

April 2, 2014

A new book investigates the scandal that consumed the university and the aftermath that still persists.

On March 13, 2006, two female strippers arrived at an off-campus party attended mainly by members of the Duke University men’s lacrosse team. What ensued over just two hours created a firestorm, with one of the women, Crystal Mangum, accusing three of the players of assault. Collin Finnerty, Reade Seligmann and David Evans were indicted on charges of first-degree forcible rape, first-degree sexual offense and kidnapping. Her claim: She was held against her will in a bathroom, gang-raped, strangled and sodomized.

Because Mangum and the other stripper that evening are African-American — and there is undisputed testimony to racial slurs being yelled that night — the case was labeled a hate crime by the Durham Police Department. The national media ran with it, making this one of the most explosive cases of the decade.

By April 2007, the case had been dismissed without ever going to trial. Magnum was labeled a liar. The prosecutor, District Attorney Mike Nifong, was disbarred, fired and put in jail for one day for contempt of court. Duke lacrosse head coach Mike Pressler, who had resigned less than a month after the allegations came out, reached an undisclosed financial settlement with the university. Each of the men accused in the case was reportedly given up to $20 million from Duke. Mangum is currently serving a 14- to 18-year sentence for murdering her boyfriend.

In his new book The Price of Silence, William D. Cohan, a Duke alumnus, investigates the scandal. Cohan spoke to Cosmopolitan.com about how he thinks campus culture, a voracious media and the issues of sex and race “turned justice on his head.”

When initial allegations came out, Mangum was heralded as a brave victim, spawning rallies, fierce media analysis and public outcry. By the time the case was over, everyone considered Mangum a fraud. How did things go so far and then shift so dramatically?

I think the first thing that went wrong is that the Durham police who first investigated didn’t take Crystal Mangum’s allegations seriously. They thought she was out of her mind, just non-credible. Then they didn’t search the house for three days. Once a new set of Durham officers got involved in the case — which some argued had it in for Duke students because of all the bad behavior happening in the neighborhoods for years — these officers took the other extreme. They believed everything that Crystal was telling them. And more importantly, they wrote it up that way in search warrants and documents that became public.

The lacrosse players started telling their side of the story, emphasizing how they felt victimized. How much did this influence the shift in public sympathy?

The defense was very skillful in finding procedural errors in the prosecution’s case — and they were masters at manipulating the media. Suddenly, nothing Mangum said was considered believable by the prosecutors or the media — and the media, of course, has a way of swaying public opinion. When the media stopped referring to her as the victim and started referring to her as the accuser, the whole narrative changed.

How do we balance our outrage over allegations such as these — and a desire to support the victim — with the fact that someone hasn’t been convicted?

The justice system is supposed to sort these things out. The vast majority of cases remain hidden from the public. This became incredibly high stakes — for Duke’s reputation, obviously for the kids whose lives were at risk of being ruined, for Crystal who made these allegations, and for the district attorney who had believed her and who was running for re-election in the middle of this case. The irony is that the justice system was never allowed to sort this out because there was never a trial.

The truth is, apart from what’s in my book, we’ll never know anything more. Records are sealed, there was no trial, the attorney general of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, who conducted the investigation refused to grant me an interview, refused to let me see his investigative files. My question is, if he’s so sure they’re innocent, why is he not allowing me to view his documentary evidence? I’d think he would be throwing it at me.

When the term “hate crime” is introduced, it’s pretty hard to shake, no matter the facts that are presented in the case. Whether or not sexual assault actually happened, do you believe a race-related crime took place?

That got out in the 911 call. It placed a stereotype immediately. Pretty much every fact of this story has been questioned, but one fact that has never been disputed is that these kids were hurling racial epithets at the women. There are racial and anti-Semitic elements that still exist in Southern culture. When you add binge drinking, these types of things come out.

What is it about the culture of an elite university such as Duke that fosters this type of behavior?

This is certainly a problem that persists at more places than Duke. But I can speak firsthand as a Duke alum that there’s this “work hard, play hard” element to the Duke culture. Athletes and certainly the lacrosse players were in a very exalted position. They had been allowed to get away with a lot of very bad behavior over the years. Not criminal behavior, but cocky, bad-boy behavior that people were aware of but they didn’t really do anything or challenge them on it. It was accepted.

After reporting this book, what have you learned about the culture of sexual assault and the related culture of silence on campuses?

I think certainly the awareness level of what constitutes sexual assault on campus has gone up exponentially in the last generation. It’s clear the number of [reported] sexual assaults on campuses across the country has risen exponentially. Part of that is awareness of what constitutes sexual assault. Part of it is a greater willingness of women to bring this behavior to the authorities. But there are constantly cases of women who bring charges and they are quickly declared responsible — it’s their fault, they’re too drunk to remember — a lot of victim blaming. By no means have we figured this one out. I think binge drinking really adds to it. It’s extreme alcohol consumption, which leads to extreme behavior. And when you have binge drinking and hookup culture together, you’re asking for trouble.

You make a strong argument in the book that drinking — particularly binge drinking — is largely to blame for the whole incident. Binge drinking is one of the biggest problems on college campuses. Is there any way to curb it?

The “work hard, play hard” idea applies to partying too. With it comes a lot of binge drinking. When the drinking age got raised to 21 in the late 1980s, it became a fundamental part of the problem. You can go to war, you can vote, you can smoke, but you can’t drink? It’s ridiculous. It turns drinking into a taboo. Since they can’t do it on campus, the parties and the drinking gets pushed into houses that have been rented off campus. That’s where this lacrosse party took place. I honestly believe that if we had kept the drinking age at 18, there would be no Duke lacrosse scandal, no case. There wouldn’t be all these parties in the neighborhoods. It just wouldn’t have happened.

What don’t we know about Crystal Mangum?

After reading all the news coverage about her, I thought that she was basically a moronic and deranged individual. But in fact, she’s quite poised, quite intelligent, quite articulate and quite clear thinking.

Crystal had some of the worst personal backstory that is imaginable — she was abused her whole life, one horrible thing after another — but despite all of that she tried to pull herself up by her bootstraps. She was dancing because she had three kids. She was a single mother. She was trying to put herself through North Carolina Central University — the predominantly black college in Durham — and she successfully graduated. She’s not an idiot, but she gets treated like an idiot.

She’s now serving a sentence for murder. You talked to her at the prison. What does she say about the case today?

She still believes something happened. She 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. I am convinced something happened.