Free Republic

The woman at the center of the scandal that rocked Duke University, Durham and the lives of the three lacrosse players plans to return to the city next week to promote her new book. Crystal Gail Mangum is scheduled to hold a news conference at the Know Bookstore on Thursday to promote, “The Last Dance for Grace: The Crystal Mangum Story.” Magnum will donate $1 from the purchase of each book to help battered women, according to Vincent Clark, a representative for Fire! Products Inc., a film studio that is representing her. Mangum was a student enrolled at North Carolina...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong says he still believes a woman hired to perform as a stripper at a Duke lacrosse team party was raped, apparently dismissing questions raised about his case by the defense. "None of the 'facts' I know at this time, indeed, none of the evidence I have seen from any source, has changed the opinion that I expressed initially," Nifong said in an e-mail to Newsweek, which appears in a story to be on newsstands Monday.

There's no doubt that many black women were raped by white men in America and never were held liable for it. When slavery was "legal," "rape" was an exercise of a property right instead of a crime. But (1) slavery ended long ago, (2) none of the Duke lacrosse players ever owned slaves, and (3) no innocent person ought to be convicted on a phony rape charge in order to "atone" in some perverse way for slavery or white racism, or as punishment for the stupidity of attending a party at which strippers of whatever color were the "entertainment." As...

I called it back in April. When a black stripper claimed three white Duke University lacrosse players gang-raped her at a party, I knew instinctively it was a lie. The tale reeked of Tawana Brawley-like fabrications. At 15, Brawley claimed that six white men abducted and raped her, smeared her with feces and wrote racial epithets on her body. The media loved it. It turned out that Brawley lied to get out of trouble for skipping school to see a jailbird ex-boyfriend. The media glommed on to the Duke rape story in a similar man-bites-dog fashion. Since news accounts of...