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The Long Shadow of a Lie: The Duke Lacrosse Rape Hoax, 20 Years Later
Crystal Mangum walked out of a North Carolina prison last month, 15 years after she fatally stabbed her boyfriend Reginald Daye. Five years before her murder conviction, however, Mangum made national headlines when she accused members of Duke University’s lacrosse team of raping her. The accusation was false, but the furor surrounding that 2006 case provoked a firestorm that had a radicalizing effect on many students at Duke, including President Donald Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller. Twenty years later, we live in a world shaped to a remarkable degree by a lie told by a stripper.
David Evans, a 23-year-old economics major from Bethesda, Maryland, was one of four captains of the Duke lacrosse team. Because of the team’s competition schedule, the players had been forced to skip spring break and stay on campus. So the team captains came up with the idea of having a party and inviting strippers to entertain the players. As events would prove, this was a very bad idea, and college boys everywhere ought to be taught this lesson. Hindsight is always 20/20, of course, but when the team captains called up an escort service to send over a couple of strippers to their off-campus house, they had no idea what they were getting themselves into.
March 13, 2006, was a Monday night, and one might suppose that the Allure Escort Service in Durham, North Carolina, would have had many adult entertainers available for the occasion. For some reason that was never adequately explained, however, while the lacrosse team captains had reportedly requested white strippers, the two performers sent to 610 North Buchanan Boulevard were a 31-year-old mixed-race woman, Kim Roberts (half-black, half-Korean), and Ms. Mangum, a black woman who was then 27. This contributed a racial aspect to the subsequent controversy that had a magnetic effect in attracting national media attention.
Here it must be pointed out that, although Duke University sits amid the thriving urban Research Triangle region of North Carolina, it is nevertheless still in the South, and there is nothing that the national media loves so much as to cover a “racial incident” in the South. As I wrote in 2020:
A perverse hatred toward the South is routinely manifested in coverage of the region by the New York Times. … If a bunch of white college boys were accused of sexually assaulting a black stripper, the mere fact that Duke was located in North Carolina was sufficient for the editors of the New York Times to presume the accusation must be true. Never mind, of course, that the lacrosse players were from up north. Merely by attending school in the South, they became complicit in the blood-guilt melodrama of “institutional racism.”
It was the New York Times that played a central role in turning the Duke lacrosse rape hoax into a national story, and even if you had no other reason to despise the New York Times, this would be wholly sufficient. Yet consideration of media bias puts us ahead of the story of what happened on the night of March 13, 2006.
The behavior of the Duke lacrosse players that evening was not exactly dignified, to say the least, but when college jocks hire a couple of strippers for a house party, does anyone expect proper etiquette and decorum? And there was apparently a certain element of disappointment involved in their misconduct. The team captains had agreed to pay the performers $400 each, and what the Allure Escort Service delivered was not what they had expected. The lacrosse players were drunk and rowdy, and here is what ensued, according to Wikipedia:
Before arriving at the party, Mangum, by her own admission, had consumed alcohol and Flexeril (a prescription muscle relaxant). Mangum and Roberts traveled to the party separately. Roberts drove herself and arrived first, and Mangum was later dropped off by a man.
According to the team captains, while the strippers were dancing, a player asked if the women had any sex toys. Roberts responded by asking if the player’s penis was too small. The player brandished a broomstick and suggested that she “use this [as a sex toy].” At this exchange, the women stopped their performance, and left the living room, shutting themselves in the main bathroom of the house. While the women were still in the bathroom, players Seligmann and Finnerty left the house. When the women eventually came out, Mangum began roaming around the yard, half-dressed and shouting.
According to Mangum, the women were coaxed back into the house with an apology, at which point they were separated. She later asserted that she was dragged into a bathroom and raped, beaten, and choked for a half hour. Later, police received a 9-1-1 call from a woman complaining that white men had gathered outside of the house where the party took place, had called her racial slurs, and threatened to sodomize her with a broomstick.
Some of the party attendees expressed displeasure that the strippers had delivered a very short performance, despite being paid several hundred dollars apiece to perform. The team captain who had hired the strippers tried to convince the women to go back inside and complete the performance. Both women returned inside, but upon being approached by the player who had earlier brandished the broomstick, again refused to perform, and once again locked themselves in the bathroom. By this point, a number of the party guests had left. House residents, including Evans, asked the remaining guests to leave because they were concerned that the noise would cause neighbors to complain to police. When the strippers left the bathroom, and the house, for the second time, a resident locked the door so they (and the guests who had left the house) could not return.
Around 1:00 a.m., while attempting to leave the party, Mangum and Roberts called the partygoers “short [penis] white boys,” and jeered about “how he couldn’t get it on his own and had to pay for it.” One player responded, “We asked for whites, not [plural racial slur].”
That the behavior described here was rude and crude, there can be no doubt — but had a crime been committed? Mangum alleged “she was dragged into a bathroom and raped, beaten, and choked for a half hour” at the party, and the Durham Police Department was obligated to take this accusation seriously. There was an investigation. A search warrant was issued. DNA samples were taken. Witnesses were interviewed. And then the case was presented to Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong.
Nifong had been in the job less than a year, appointed by Gov. Mike Easley to fill the job after the governor picked the previous DA to fill a vacant judicial seat on the state’s superior court. In March 2006, Nifong was a candidate for his first shot at being elected as district attorney, and the Democratic primary was just two months away. North Carolina was then, as now, a “swing” state. Although George W. Bush in his 2004 reelection had carried North Carolina by a comfortable 12-point margin statewide, Durham County went more than 2-to-1 for Bush’s Democratic opponent, John Kerry, who got 68 percent of the vote in the county. In other words, if Nifong won the Democratic primary, he was practically guaranteed to be elected district attorney in this liberal bastion, but Nifong was opposed by one his own assistants, Freda Black, in the primary. Nifong’s job was very much at stake when the rape accusation against the Duke lacrosse players landed in his lap.
Meanwhile, word of the case had spread across town and was reported in the March 24 edition of the Raleigh News and Observer. The same day, it was announced that Duke’s lacrosse team would forfeit its next two games. University President Richard Broadhead issued a statement saying that the players were “presumed innocent until proven guilty,” but adding that it was “already clear that many students acted in a manner inappropriate to a Duke team member.” The next day, despite the scheduled lacrosse game against Georgetown being canceled, some protesters showed up at the stadium waving signs that read “Real Men Don’t Protect Rapists,” and one of the protesters told a reporter for the student paper: “I am fully aware a crime was committed by someone. It is too bad the rest of the team won’t fess up.” That night, “more than 175 incensed community members gathered for a candlelight vigil“ in front of the house on North Buchanan Boulevard where the incident had allegedly happened.
Already, a narrative had begun to develop — the lacrosse players were protecting their guilty teammates, and the university wasn’t doing enough. What none of the “incensed community members” knew, however, was that the cops were having a difficult time with the accuser, Crystal Mangum. By March 24, she had already viewed two different photo lineups without identifying the men she said had sexually assaulted her. So on April 4, there was another photo lineup, and this time Mangum identified two players, Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty. She claimed to be “100 percent certain” that Seligmann had “forced her to perform oral sex,” and that Finnerty had raped her both vaginally and anally. She further claimed to be “90 percent certain” that the team captain Evans had also sexually assaulted her.
While the police and prosecutors were still dealing with Mangum, before any charges had been made or any players arrested, the university announced it was cancelling the rest of the lacrosse season, and the New York Times jumped on the story. “Rape Allegation Against Athletes Is Roiling Duke“ was the headline on their March 29 article, which emphasized the racial aspect of the case and quoted the prosecutor, sounding very certain about what had happened:
The incident on March 13, which occurred at an off-campus house owned by the university, has brought into sharp relief long-simmering tensions between the private university and the city. The woman is black, most of the team members are white and law-enforcement officials say they are investigating allegations that racial epithets were shouted at the woman….
Michael B. Nifong, the Durham County district attorney, criticized team members for not coming forward.
“The thing that most of us found so abhorrent, and the reason I decided to take it over myself, was the combination gang-like rape activity accompanied by the racial slurs and general racial hostility,” Mr. Nifong said Tuesday in a telephone interview.
“There are three people who went into the bathroom with the young lady, and whether the other people there knew what was going on at the time, they do now and have not come forward. I’m disappointed that no one has been enough of a man to come forward. And if they would have spoken up at the time, this may never have happened.”
Is the narrative clear enough? Nifong stated as a fact that “gang-like rape activity” occurred in the bathroom, with three perpetrators. According to the district attorney, the problem was that none of the other players had “been enough of a man to come forward” and identify the culprits.
The actual problem was something else: It’s hard to find witnesses for a crime that never happened. Crystal Mangum was lying. No rape had occurred at the house party, but the reader of that first New York Times article about the case was given no reason to suspect that the whole thing was a hoax. The paper did, however, quote a statement attributed to the lacrosse team captains: “We have provided authorities with DNA samples. The understanding is that the results of the DNA testing will be available sometime next week. The DNA results will demonstrate that these allegations are absolutely false.”
Many Duke faculty members were not hesitant to proclaim that “a social disaster” was taking place on campus, with 88 of them signing on to an ad placed in the student paper that ran on April 6:
Regardless of the results of the police investigation, what is apparent everyday now is the anger and fear of many students who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism; who see illuminated in this moment’s extraordinary spotlight what they live with everyday. …
The students know that the disaster didn’t begin on March 13th and won’t end with what the police say or the court decides.
The “Group of 88” ad was reportedly authored by Wahneema Lubiano, a professor in Duke’s African and African American Studies program, and expressed a fundamental hostility toward white male students that has since become typical on elite university campuses that have made the quest for “diversity” a 21st-century crusade. The signatories saw nothing wrong with declaring that the mere presence of young white men at Duke was sufficient to inspire “anger and fear” among their classmates “who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism,” an attitude that these Duke faculty members considered justified no matter “what the police say or the court decides.”
Keep in mind that this ad was published in the campus paper before any suspects had been publicly named. Yet this consideration was not enough to stop the editors of the New York Times from continuing to whip up a national media firestorm. After the first story on March 29, the Times followed up the next day with another story (“Duke Players Practice While Scrutiny Builds”) and a sidebar (“911 Calls Lead the Police to Duke’s Lacrosse Team”), and then on Sunday, March 31, added two more stories (“New Strain on Duke’s Ties With Durham” and “Lawyers for Lacrosse Players Dispute Accusations”) plus a column by a sports writer (“When Peer Pressure, Not a Conscience, Is Your Guide”). As if to add an exclamation mark to emphasize the importance of the story, on Monday, April 1, the Times outdid itself with an article headlined “A Team’s Troubles Shock Few at Duke,” which got to the point in the third paragraph: “[S]tudents, professors and members of the Duke community said they were not surprised to hear that trouble had found the lacrosse team, a clubby, hard-partying outfit with roots in the elite prep schools of the Northeast.”
Editors of the nation’s “newspaper of record” had decided that a stripper’s accusations against a bunch of jocks at a university nearly 500 miles from New York City deserved saturation coverage, and the rationale of that decision has never been satisfactorily explained by anyone at the New York Times, perhaps because it’s simply inexplicable. Long-term media critics have seen this many times in the two decades since the Duke lacrosse story became national news. In recent years, the United States has averaged around 20,000 homicides a year, and very few of those crimes ever get national media coverage. A certain selectivity is involved in these editorial choices. To cite two high-profile examples, why did the deaths of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, or Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, get plucked out of the thousands of shooting deaths annually to become national news? The reasons are probably not unrelated to the factors that led the New York Times to devote so much coverage to the rape accusations against the Duke lacrosse players.
It was a complete hoax. Everyone knows this now that the accused players have long since been exonerated and Crystal Mangum has recanted her lies, but in those early spring days of 2006 when the New York Times was piling onto the story, what did these professional journalists think they were doing? Regardless of what they thought, what they were actually doing was destroying their institutional credibility. If we now live in an age where “misinformation” is a danger, where many young people (and quite a few not-so-young people) get their news from dubious podcasters and YouTubers, from Reddit forums and sketchy social-media “influencers,” whose fault is that? If supposedly objective journalists are willing to whip up a lynch mob over a blatant hoax — which is what happened with the Duke lacrosse case — why should anyone trust the media about anything?
Yet we have once again raced ahead of the story as it unfolded back in 2006. The lacrosse team’s coach was forced to resign and, on April 12, less than a week after the “Group of 88” ran their ad in the Duke Chronicle, a columnist for the student newspaper weighed in:
When our peers are accused of heinous acts, we should be the first to demand they be given the presumption of innocence-their immutable right.
Instead, from the first day, many immediately presumed the lacrosse players’ guilt and called for their punishment. …
How many times in the last several weeks have you heard that the only reason the lacrosse players haven’t been charged, the only reason the University has not disciplined them, the only reason they’re still walking the streets as free citizens is because they are white and their victim is black? …
If the treatment of the lacrosse players represents the protection of so-called “white privilege,” I think it’s a benefit all the team members would gladly relinquish.
Regardless of the players’ guilt or innocence, the manner in which this situation has been handled reaffirms a horrifying precedent. You will be hung in the gallows of public opinion regardless of, or even in spite of the facts, if the alleged crime can be converted into a case for institutional racism.
That columnist was Stephen Miller, who was then just 20 years old and a junior at Duke. In those early days of the media firestorm around the Duke lacrosse story, Miller was a “lone voice crying in the wilderness,” insisting that the players must be presumed innocent and portraying them as the targets of politically correct witch hunt. His adamant defense of the lacrosse players earned Miller guest appearances on Fox News Channel and in other media outlets. Years later, when he’d become a top Trump adviser, Miller explained that the rush to judgment against the lacrosse team reminded him of “some of the more totalitarian tendencies in parts of the new left that I’d seen growing up” in Southern California, where “my experiences in high school, in which I was used to being unfairly labeled, unfairly maligned, gave me the thick skin that I needed” to withstand hostile questioning.
On April 18, Seligmann and Finnerty were charged with first-degree rape and kidnapping. Attorneys for the accused players told the media that DNA tests had failed to match either their clients or any other lacrosse team members, and Seligmann’s lawyer quickly made public evidence indicating that his client was not even at the house party at the time the alleged crime occurred.
This ought to have been seen as a red flag warning that something was wrong with Nifong’s case. If Mangum was “100 percent certain” that Seligmann had forced her to perform oral sex, but he had an air-tight alibi — records showed he stopped by a bank ATM on his way back to his dorm at the time Mangum claimed she was being raped in a bathroom at the house party — how credible was her accusation? The DNA tests hadn’t linked any of the players to Mangum, and her testimony was apparently the only basis for the arrests. But the prosecutor was undeterred:
He issued a statement Tuesday saying that he hoped to gather enough evidence to charge a third person in the case.
“It had been my hope to be able to charge all three of the assailants at the same time, but the evidence available to me at this moment does not permit that,” Nifong’s statement said. “It is important that we not only bring the assailants to justice, but also that we lift the cloud of suspicion from those team members who were not involved in the assault.”
The third lacrosse player Nifong was targeting, of course, was the team captain, Evans, whom Mangum had said she was “90 percent certain” had participated in raping her. While the investigation continued, however, on May 2, Nifong won his primary election by a margin of less than 900 votes, getting only 45 percent of the total, effectively guaranteeing he would be elected in November for a full term as the Durham County DA.
On May 15, the day after he received his diploma from Duke, Evans was arrested and charged, and proclaimed that the entire case against himself and his teammates was false: “I am innocent. Reade Seligmann is innocent. Collin Finnerty is innocent. Every member of the Duke lacrosse team is innocent…. You have all been told some fantastic lies.” Evans said he was looking forward to watching these lies “unravel in the weeks to come,” and this prediction proved prophetic, although the unraveling took a matter of months, rather than weeks. Over those ensuing months, as defense attorneys for the three accused players filed their motions in the case, criticism of the prosecution mounted.
Social media was not yet a factor in public controversies, but the Duke lacrosse case was widely scrutinized on blogs, including the “Durham in Wonderland” blog started by Brooklyn College history professor K.C. Johnson. By December 2006, evidence was mounting that Nifong had engaged in gross misconduct in his handling of the case, and newspapers were editorializing that the charges should be dropped against the Duke players. On Dec. 22, Nifong dropped the rape charges, but not the kidnapping charge, and this only incited further denunciations of the district attorney. The state bar association filed ethics charges against Nifong, while the New York Daily News editorialized that the prosecutor had perpetrated “a gross miscarriage of justice” in the case.
The walls came crashing down on Nifong quite suddenly. In January 2007, he asked North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper to take over the Duke lacrosse case. Three months later, Cooper declared that Seligmann, Finnerty and Evans were innocent, saying his own office’s investigation led “to the conclusion that no attack occurred,” that the falsely accused Duke players were victims of a “rogue prosecutor,” and concluded: “I think a lot of people owe a lot of apologies to a lot of people.” In June 2007, the state bar association revoked Nifong’s law license, after a disciplinary committee found that his actions in the Duke case involved “dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation.” A judge ordered him removed from office, and in August he was held in contempt of court for his wrongdoing in the case.
Meanwhile, Duke University announced in June 2007 it had agreed to a settlement in the lawsuit that Evans, Finnerty, and Seligmann brought against the school. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but one hopes it was enough to cover the players’ considerable legal costs. “We welcomed their exoneration and deeply regret the difficult year they and their families have had to endure,” the university trustees said in announcing the settlement, saying that the players had “conducted themselves with great dignity during their long ordeal.”
The dignity shown by the falsely accused lacrosse players stood in stark contrast to the cowardly way the media skulked away from the mess they had helped to make. Likewise, it stood in contrast to the “Group of 88” Duke faculty members who’d signed onto that ad in the student newspaper, only three of whom ever apologized for it, as K.C. Johnson noticed.
The institutions of media and academia that had disgraced themselves in the Duke lacrosse rape hoax did not even seem to learn a lesson from their blunders. In 2014, another rape hoax was perpetrated at the University of Virginia, with an emotionally unbalanced young woman claiming that she had been brutally attacked at a fraternity house, a crime she blamed on an imaginary frat member she called “Haven Monahan.” The university immediately suspended fraternity activities on campus, as feminists proclaimed that the story in Rolling Stone magazine proved the existence of a rape epidemic among college students nationwide. Rolling Stone was found guilty of defamation, and the mysterious “Haven Monahan” was never found.
How many hoaxes has the news media helped promote since then? Somewhere there may be a full list, but certainly the “Russian collusion” hoax during Trump’s first term stands out in memory, and then there was the Christine Blasey Ford claim of a long-ago gang rape during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. The lack of accountability — nobody yet has gone to prison for their role in the “Russian collusion” hoax, and most in the media won’t even admit that Kavanaugh was the victim of an outrageous lie — is what frustrates so many people who’ve grown tired of such shenanigans, which have an obvious political agenda. Stephen Miller was correct in remarking on the “totalitarian tendencies” of the ideologues who rushed to condemn the Duke lacrosse players, just as they have so often baselessly accused Trump of wrongdoing.
The wrongly accused Duke players have all gone on to productive and law-abiding lives, Trump has beaten his enemies to return for a second term as president, and Stephen Miller is still advising him. Somehow, there must be a lesson in all this — “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” we are told — just as there must be some reason why Trump turned his head just in the nick of time to dodge a bullet that afternoon in Butler, Pennsylvania. Maybe there was some larger purpose for the ordeal those Duke athletes underwent, but I am not appointed to speak on God’s behalf, although I am at liberty to quote Him: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.”
It was in December 2024, while she was still imprisoned for murder, that Crystal Mangum finally admitted she lied about what happened at that 2006 party. She finally left prison two weeks ago, having served her sentence, but the rest of us are living in a world changed by her lie.
READ MORE by Robert Stacy McCain:
Gooder and Harder, New York
The Dangerous Delusion of ‘Equality’
Dots and Patterns: What History Can Teach Us
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