Nostalgia is a mild form of depression. Four and a half decades after the March on Washington, a downbeat mood of pensive longing sets the tone of every NAACP summer gathering and every Urban League convention. With every passing year the graying civil rights gerontocracy grows more shrill, more vituperative, more demanding of our attention, even as their moribund bureaucracies lapse into obsolescence. The melancholy yearning for some splendid yesteryear when they were relevant renders these old warriors figures of pathos.
These aging black folks insist on the past; they back into the future with their eyes fixed on an unchanging 50s America – a crystallized anachronism that never fails to reflect a youthful and flattering image of them as crusaders for a holy cause. Worse yet, the geezers have handed younger generations a version of Black History as seen through the distorting prism of their self-regarding reminiscence. At historically black colleges the curricula are heavy with mandatory courses in black nostalgia for a time when things were starkly “black and white” and black folks were unquestionably on the side of the angels.
What is lost in this chorus of self-congratulation is the reason the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s made any headway at all: white America acknowledged the rightness of black America’s complaint. Shelby Steele informs us that “. . . black protest taught America that it could not be a legitimate democracy unless race ceased to be a barrier to individual freedom. This was instructive protest of the highest sort because there was parity between its accusations against America and the wrongs which America could grudgingly acknowledge. It said America was a racist society and it clearly was. Thus King, out in front of a movement with a near-perfect equilibrium between what it charged and what was acknowledged, gave black protest an unquestioned integrity and authority. By the late ‘60s, protest represented a permanent vision of authenticity in black America. Not only did it carry glamour and authority, it also became the core of a new black identity.”
The civil rights vanguard were steeped in an intoxicating glamour and felt empowered by a heaven-sent moral authority. Who could give that up? Who would ever want those feelings to end? Mr. Steele observes that “America took King seriously and made great progress in the struggle to eliminate race as barrier to individual freedom. Today whites know that progress has been made, and this knowledge means something profound for blacks: that black protest has essentially ceased to be instructive. It tells no one anything they haven’t already acknowledged. There is no longer parity between what blacks accuse and what whites acknowledge.”
Speaking of Dr. King’s moral authority, Mr. Steele tells us that “King towered by standing atop a near perfect equilibrium; no black leader since has matched his stature because white America has made it impossible. By weakening race as a barrier to freedom, whites can no longer sincerely acknowledge wrongdoing commensurate with what black leaders accuse them of. Black protest has become bad theater – shrill, unconvincing.” (Wall Street Journal, 9/9/03)
When Jesse Jackson hollers that a local labor dispute at Yale University is the equivalent of Selma, then the moral currency of the civil rights movement has been severely devalued. Jackson has lost his charisma because he has nothing new to tell us; his protestations are no longer instructive, they are merely commonplace complaints. Jackson and his eager mimic, Alfred Sharpton, have been cheapening the moral capital of the civil rights movement for years. In 1987, they hijacked the movement’s good reputation and flushed it down the toilet.
That’s the year Glenda Brawley and her fifteen-year-old daughter Tawana concocted the horrid fiction that Tawana had been savagely gang raped by white police officers. They did this to spare Tawana a brutal ass whipping at the hands of Glenda’s live-in boyfriend Ralph King. Ralph had a nasty temper; he had warned Tawana to mend her party-girl ways; he had done prison time for murder. Now Tawana was trying to return home after days of partying with friends and she was fearful.
In a world without racial profiteers this local crime story would have been quickly resolved by state investigators. That’s not the world we live in. An account of the alleged crime made the local newspaper, then word got around. The combustible mix of sex and race and violence attracted journalists eager for any bit of hearsay.
On December 14, 1987, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan led one thousand chanting marchers through Newburgh, New York, in support of Tawana. On February 10th, Bill Cosby put up a $25,000 reward for information leading to “the truth,” and revealed his darker side with a series of vile racist generalizations about white people. On April 4th, 1988 the Reverend Al Sharpton and career activist Pete Seeger kept things boiling at a big protest rally in support of Brawley at the State Capitol in Albany. A big women’s march paraded through midtown Manhattan in support of Tawana. Mike Tyson, by then a convicted rapist of a black woman, gave Tawana a diamond-studded Rolex watch. Phil Donahue broadcast live from a pro-Tawana rally. Every day for seven months, while the grand jury was investigating this case, protestors were bussed in to chant and rant outside the courthouse, often led by the Reverend Sharpton personally.
A grand jury patiently listened to seven months of testimony. They heard from one hundred eighty witnesses; they examined two hundred fifty exhibits. There were six thousand pages of testimony. Finally, the jury released a one-hundred-seventy-page report that exposed the entire Tawana Brawley abduction-and-rape story for what it was: a carefully staged hoax.
Tawana had claimed that she had been repeatedly raped and sodomized by six burly white men over a four-day period and yet not a single sperm cell was found in her vagina and not a single Caucasian pubic hair was found on her body or clothing. Tawana’s claim to have been the victim of repeated violent anal rape by six big men fell flat when a medical examination revealed that her anus was perfectly intact, without the slightest abrasion. Her sex organ was likewise declared to be in honeymoon fresh condition. The words “NIGGER” and “BITCH” that were written on her torso with some kind of prepared charcoal paste were upside-down, as though Tawana had written the words on her own chest. Investigators could find traces of this charcoal paste nowhere else other than under Tawana’s fingernails. The excrement on her body, at first claimed to be of human origin, later proved to be animal excrement. DNA testing proved that the poop was from a collie named Remi, who frolicked in a yard near Tawana’s mother’s home – not in the far-away woods where Tawana claimed to have been defiled. Joyce Lloray had witnessed Tawana climbing, unassisted, into a big trash bag. Tawana had cotton wads in her nostrils to stave off the stench of the dog poop. Were these wads a tender-hearted gift from her mad-dog rapists? An examination of Tawana’s body and clothing did not produce any evidence that Tawana spent four days in the woods; there was no plant matter whatsoever. Tawana was, however, covered with abundant debris that perfectly matched debris from an apartment that the Brawley clan had recently vacated – an apartment to which Tawana still had a key.
Tawana’s friends called her a party girl. Was she partying for those four days? Was she hiding? Her mom’s boyfriend, Ralph King, had warned her about staying out late. Tawana would need an amazingly good explanation to avoid a nasty beat down. All that stuff about her being attacked by white policemen would make her cover story more appealing to Glenda Brawley’s cop-hating ex-con boyfriend.
The street-smart Al Sharpton knows all of these facts. His claim to believe Tawana’s story is, in itself, a hoax. The grand jury found Tawana’s story to be unsupported by any evidence; they found her story to be preposterous; they found it to be defamatory.
Tawana’s brain trust, Sharpton and attorneys C.Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox, had pointed the finger of guilt at a part-time policeman named Harry Crist, Jr. who had committed suicide a few days after Tawana was “found” in her trash bag. Crist had been depressed over a series of career setbacks and he killed himself only hours after the collapse of a relationship with a woman he loved intensely. Based on no evidence whatsoever, the ever reckless Al Sharpton proclaimed that Harry Crist was one of Tawana’s attackers. When alibi witnesses appeared to redeem Harry Crist’s good name, Sharpton instantly declared that these witnesses must also have been participants in Tawana’s alleged gang rape. In a heartbeat, Al Sharpton had accused State Trooper Scott Patterson and Assistant District Attorney Steven Pagones of being sex criminals, based on no evidence at all. Sharpton strode out before an expectant news media and proclaimed that Pagones had murdered Harry Crist to keep his crime against Tawana a secret. Sharpton was reaching down into his dark little soul and saying whatever he thought would serve his purposes best at that moment. Mason, Maddox and Sharpton declared that there was a connection between Governor Mario Cuomo and organized crime, as well as the Ku Klux Klan. It was Sharpton at his most berserk. “Mr. Pagones and his organized crime cronies are suspects!” he ranted on ABC’s Geraldo Rivera Show. Phil Donahue, Nightline and numerous other programs eagerly gave Sharpton a platform on which to showcase his invented slanders. Sharpton and his sidekicks repeatedly depicted Steven Pagones, an upright husband, father and law enforcement officer, as a depraved racist sexual predator. After describing Pagones as a sex criminal at a nationally covered news conference, the morally decrepit Alton Maddox declared, “If I didn’t have direct evidence, I wouldn’t be sitting here saying that.” It was all a lie.
Sharpton taunted Steven Pagones and dared him to sue the loud-mouthed trio. Pagones had taken enough of their lying crap. He sued.
There was a lengthy civil trial which Sharpton, Mason and Maddox kept at a rolling boil with their signature boastful antics. After an exhaustive review of the evidence, the court found that Tawana’s claim that she had been abducted and raped was complete rubbish. In Judge Hickman’s words: “It is probable that in the history of this state, never has a teenager turned the prosecutorial and judicial systems literally upside-down with such false claims.”
The court awarded punitive damages against the lying Tawana Brawley of $180,000. Alton Maddox was suspended from practicing law in 1990 because he refused to participate in an ethics investigation of his role in the Brawley case. C.Vernon Mason was barred from practicing law in 1995 because of “a pattern of professional misconduct.” When last heard from he was a seminary student. Perhaps he will reappear as yet another racial racketeer and shakedown clergyman like Jesse Jackson or Jackson’s attentive student Alfred Sharpton.
In 1998 Sharpton was ordered to pay Steven Pagones $65,000 in damages. Sharpton refused to pay the judgement. With accumulating interest and penalties the judgement swelled to $87,000. By January 2001, Steven Pagones had only collected $15,000 by having Sharpton’s salary garnisheed. Then a group of wealthy black men stepped in to pay Sharpton’s debt.
This clutch of rich blacks included veteran race baiter Bill Tatum, publisher of the Amsterdam News and two men who have profited handsomely from Jesse Jackson’s non-stop shakedown machine: Percy Sutton, the head of Inner City Broadcasting and attorney Johnnie Cochran, who had spent his professional life dealing from a deck full of race cards. Sutton was quoted in the New York Post as saying, “There were enough people who thought it should be done to insulate [Sharpton] from any further controversy,” which is comical. Insulate Al Sharpton from controversy? Al Sharpton lives to generate controversy and social discord. What Percy Sutton really meant was that too many people were now taking too close a look at the small group of black men who had become fabulously wealthy by banding together and sharing the profits from the racial shakedown racket. Sharpton was one of their soul mates.
Did black Americans learn anything from this shameful episode, from this preposterous attempt to make Tawana Brawley’s and Al Sharpton’s squalid lies into a metaphor for race relations in America? Apparently they haven’t. The black babies who were born the year so many vocal black celebrities blew their moral bankroll on Tawana are now past high-school age. Many of them are now enrolled in colleges that offer courses in African American nostalgia – a flattering mythic epic of the civil rights struggle of yesteryear. Some professors claim, even today, that Tawana’s tall tale was “true” on some higher plane where black folks “just know” stuff. So it’s no wonder that thousands of these black youngsters were suckers for the weepy tall tale told by a black stripper and part-time “escort” who claimed that she had been gang raped by “privileged white men” at a frat-house party.
The Hideous Duke Rape Hoax
On the evening of March 13, 2006, Kim Roberts, 31, arrived at the appointed time. She had been hired through an escort service to perform a striptease at an off-campus fraternity party at 610 North Buchanan Boulevard in Durham, North Carolina. The frat house was rented by three captains of the Duke University lacrosse team. A second stripper sent by the escort service, Crystal Gail Mangum, 27, arrived a half hour late. The lacrosse players had agreed to pay each stripper four hundred dollars for two hours of performing their stage acts. The escort service had chosen the two strippers, who did not know one another. The boys had no idea who was coming.
Upon entering the frat house the women were offered mixed drinks. Ms. Roberts declined hers. Ms. Mangum clumsily knocked over her drink when it was half gone and then downed Ms. Roberts’ drink. When the two women began their performance around midnight, Ms. Mangum was clearly in trouble. “She started stumbling,” recalled Ms. Roberts. “When I think back on it, she had a glassy look in her eyes.” Ms. Roberts shot Ms. Mangum “a look that said, ‘C’mon, girl, what’s going on?” Ms. Mangum did not respond. It was Ms. Roberts’ recollection that the performance lasted only ten minutes; the fraternity brothers said it was closer to three minutes, or about twenty-dollars’ worth of the $800 they had agreed to pay for two hour’s work.
The lacrosse players were in the habit of carrying cell phones: the kind that take time-stamped photographs. The photo documentation began almost immediately. The tardy Ms. Mangum arrived at the frat house around 11:45 p.m. A neighbor, Jason Bissey, gave the police a statement that he saw Ms. Mangum and Ms. Roberts calmly chatting outside the frat house shortly before midnight and then going inside. Mr. Bissey noted that “I had looked at my cell phone, and I was sure they had gone into the house at 12.” Cell phone records indicate that Ms. Mangum was speaking to someone from 11:25 p.m. to 11:32 and from 11:36 until 11:39. The two strippers were almost naked by midnight. A photo shows them doing their bump and grind at 12:03 a.m. Minutes later, no one was smiling. Ms. Mangum had smacked one of the frat boys who had crudely suggested that she use a broom handle as a sex toy.
There is no audio recording, but we can reasonably assume that angry words were exchanged. The women locked themselves in a bathroom.
The frat boys then began to slip greenbacks under the bathroom door in an effort to cajole the women into leaving. At 12:20 a.m. the strippers were hoofing it to Ms. Roberts’ parked car.
By 12:30 a.m. Ms. Mangum had returned to the back door of the frat house. She was wearing a skimpy red and white outfit and only one shoe. In a photo she appears to be smiling. The lacrosse players refused her entry. The next door neighbor reported that he heard a woman say she had forgotten her shoe and had seen the woman walk back toward the frat house. The neighbor also confided hearing heated words about money – possibly a dispute over payment due.
A photo, time stamped 12:37 a.m., shows Ms. Mangum lying on the back stoop. She looks dusty and scraped; her ankle is cut and bleeding. At 12:41 Ms. Mangum is digitally captured getting into Ms. Roberts’ car assisted by a lacrosse player.
About 1:30 in the morning of March 14th Durham police sergeant John Shelton rolled into the parking lot at Kroger’s, a mile from the Duke campus, where he came upon Crystal Gail Mangum slumped over on the passenger’s side of Ms. Roberts’ Honda. The sergeant tried to rouse Ms. Mangum with an ammonia capsule. Mangum tumbled out onto the pavement. She had no ID. She was dressed in a red see-through outfit and one shoe. She later told Shelton that she was a stripper who had been hired to put on a show. She said she had been groped, but that no one had forced her to have sex. Ms. Mangum was a familiar face to the Durham police.
Later, Kim Roberts would tell ABC News that “The trip in that car from the house . . . went from happy to crazy. I tried all different ways to get through to her [Ms. Mangum].” The interview aired on Good Morning America on October 30, 2006. Ms. Roberts recalled that they drove to a nearby grocery store. As the Associated Press reported: “Unable to get [Ms. Mangum] to leave her car, Roberts said she pushed on the woman’s arm and leg to try to force her out.”
At that moment, Ms. Roberts recalled, Mangum said: “ ‘Go ahead. Go ahead. Put marks on me. Go ahead. That’s what I want. Go ahead.’ And it chilled me to the bone.” (AP, 10/31/06) The police transported Ms. Mangum to the Durham Access Center for involuntary commitment.
When Crystal Gail Mangum finally sobered up she found herself nicked, bruised and without the four hundred dollars she would have earned if she hadn’t fumbled her way through a clumsy few minutes of inept striptease and then assaulted one of the partygoers. The money the frat boys had given her was more than fair compensation for her lousy performance, but she wanted more . . . much more. It was then that she told the cops that she had been gang raped at the frat house.
The police promptly escorted Mangum to the Duke University Hospital emergency room, where the on-duty sexual-assault nurse examined her. The nurse reported that Mangum had “diffuse edema of the vaginal walls,” which means the lining of her sex organ was swollen by an accumulation of fluid. The nurse drew no conclusion as to the cause of the edema. The medical report noted a scratch on her knee and a laceration on her heel, neither of which was bleeding. More than 15 months later North Carolina’s attorney general, Roy Cooper, would release a report that concluded that Ms. Mangum’s scrapes, bruises and laceration were the consequence of her being so “significantly impaired” by alcohol and/or drugs that she stumbled and fell during her brief striptease. The report said she had returned to the frat house and pounded on the door demanding to be readmitted, shouting “I’m a cop.” Then she passed out on the back porch.
Ms. Mangum repeatedly asserted that she endured violent penile penetration. She said this to the first doctor who attended her, she repeated it to the sexual-assault nurse and the sexual-assault doctor and to the detectives, and in a handwritten statement to the police. She graphically reported being forced down to her hands and knees and being raped from behind. Ms. Mangum was unequivocal that she had been raped by three of the partygoers, that the rapefest had lasted for half an hour and that her attackers had not used condoms. The lacrosse team’s three co-captains confirmed that only team members were at the party.
DNA samples were taken from all of the team’s white players and from Ms. Mangum and these samples were compared to DNA taken from Ms. Mangum’s sex organ and underwear. These DNA tests were so highly refined that they were capable of evaluating the DNA signature of a single sperm cell. The tests did not find even one match to any of the 46 white lacrosse players. What the tests did find was plenty of joy juice from several men, all of whom had made a deposit in Ms. Mangum’s sex organ in such a short time that she had not found the time to douche it out. Could the penile pounding and thrusting of all these unknown men have caused Mangum’s vaginal swelling? You bet. Mr. Jarriel L. Johnson, 32, described to police how he drove Mangum around the Raleigh-Durham area shortly before the frat-house party. He recalled that Ms. Mangum met with “clients” at three hotels. Crystal Gail Mangum “told police that she performed for a man and a woman at a hotel using a small vibrator.” (N.Y.Times, 6/12/06, pg. A13) So Mangum was a sex worker. Throughout the gush of publicity that would attend Ms. Mangum’s lurid accusations the media went to comical extremes to avoid saying outright that Crystal Gail Mangum was a prostitute.
Enter the Panderer
In short order Crystal Mangum’s accusations came to the attention of Durham County’s district attorney, Michael B. Nifong. Mr. Nifong had been appointed to an elective office. When Durham’s previous district attorney, Jim Hardin, Jr. was appointed to a judgeship, Governor Mike Easley brought Mike Nifong up from traffic court to finish Hardin’s term of office. Nifong was then in the midst of his first election campaign. Forty-five percent of Durham’s population is of African descent and one of Mr. Nifong’s political opponents was an African American. Mr. Nifong understood that his best chance of being elected lay in an aggressive pursuit of whomever Crystal Gail Mangum fingered as a rapist.
On March 27th, after a flurry of raucous protests, Democrat candidate Mike Nifong personally took charge of the headline-grabbing case, beginning what would become over fifty interviews in which he reiterated the lie that Duke students had not cooperated with police investigators. Nifong attacked the manhood of the Duke students. He told the New York Times, “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.”
Nifong obligingly performed for television cameras how he imagined the “victim” was restrained by her attackers. He floated the speculation that a date-rape drug had been used. He implied that by seeking legal advice, the Duke students were behaving like criminals: “One would wonder why one needs an attorney if one was not charged and had not done anything wrong.” And so on. For over 390 days Michael Nifong became a walking-talking echo chamber of the black community’s ingrained resentments and prejudices.
Henceforth, all public utterances about Crystal Gail Mangum would describe her as “a single mother of two” (later, three), or as a student or as an “exotic dancer.” Sometimes she was called a stripper, but that’s as harsh as it got. Professor Mary Francis Berry of the University of Pennsylvania was quick to tell a public radio audience that “there is nothing immoral about being a stripper.” Geraldo Rivera gravely intoned that “It is not always the nuns that get raped. Sometimes it’s the strippers that get raped.” No one called Crystal Gail Mangum a drug-addled whore.
Mike Nifong was eager to vilify the Duke students: “There’s no doubt in my mind that she was raped and assaulted at this location,” Nifong had spouted on national television after the case made headline news in March of 2006. Nifong characterized the lacrosse team members as “hooligans” who had aided, abetted or covered up for savage rapists.
Clearly, Mr. Nifong was pandering to the black community; he was indulging in political theater. During a court hearing on October 27th, 2006, seven and a half months after the frat party, Mr. Nifong disclosed that neither he nor his assistants had questioned the accuser about the facts of the case. “I’ve had conversations with [Ms. Mangum] about how she’s doing. I’ve had conversations with [Mangum] about her seeing her kids. I haven’t talked with her about the facts of that night . . . We’re not at that stage yet,” said the district attorney.
In other words, Nifong was pressing a case and making inflammatory and derogatory statements even though he had no idea what the accuser’s story was. Nifong said he met with Mangum on April 11th, 2006, but didn’t discuss details of the case. Nifong said Mangum wouldn’t make eye contact with him. “She probably did not speak fifteen words during the meeting,” he recalled (AP, 10/28/06). Not since Al Sharpton refused to have a candid chat with rape-accuser Tawana Brawley has so prominent a public figure doomed his own future credibility.
When up-for-election Mr. Nifong finally got around to presenting Crystal Mangum with photographs of possible assailants he made sure the procedure was rigged against the lacrosse players. According to a New York Times report of December 23, 2006 : “The police showed her three sets of photographs during the first three weeks of the case, one with 24 lacrosse players, one with 12 and, after she failed to identify any suspects, one with all 46 white players.
“She identified only one person with 100 percent certainty in two photo arrays as having been present at the team party. But that person, Dan Ross, was not there. He was 24 miles away in a dorm room in Raleigh.
“The woman also identified the wrong player as having held up a broomstick while making a sexually crude remark to the two dancers.
“As previously reported, she did not identify two of the defendants – Mr. Seligmann and David F. Evans – as attackers when she saw their pictures in the first photo arrays. She said it was harder than she thought because ‘the people in the photos looked alike,’ police investigators wrote. Yet she later identified Mr. Seligmann with 100 percent certainty and Mr. Evans with 90 percent certainty, saying he ‘looks just like him without the mustache.’ Mr. Evans has never had a mustache.
The final identification procedure contained photographs the police had taken of all 46 white lacrosse players. By not including any filler photographs of people who could not possibly be involved the procedure appeared to violate Durham police, state and national standards for photo lineups and was called by the defense “a multiple-choice test in which there were no wrong answers.”
The police further prejudiced the identification process by telling Mangum that all the photos were those of the frat-house partygoers. Right about then the socially “sensitive” students at Duke, together with a collective of politically-correct professors and a host of racial racketeers who had hurried to Durham, were whipping themselves into a self-righteous frenzy.
The Indignation of the Ignorant
At Duke University, President Richard Brodhead set the tone for the on-campus liberal lords of discipline. The highly-ranked Duke lacrosse team, the Blue Devils, was 6-2 and a favorite to win the national title when President Brodhead cancelled the remainder of their season on March 28th, 2006.
After sixteen years as the coach of Duke’s excellent lacrosse team, Coach Mike Pressler was told that he had until the end of the day to leave the Duke campus. That was on April 7th. President Brodhead then launched a Campus Culture Initiative empowered to review issues of “respect” between the genders and the races and folks from families that maybe earned more or less than folks from other families. Brodhead proved himself to be the perfect model of a modern commissar of politically-correct liberal apologetics.
The liberal media interpreted Brodhead’s dictates as an admission of guilt or at the very least the admission of guilty self doubt about the campus culture at Duke. The university had once been a bastion of white privilege, but had been working hard for years to recruit minority students. What really stung Richard Brodhead was the lousy timing of the black stripper’s accusation: the weekend of March 25th included the Black Student Alliance Invitational, during which prospective African-American students visit the Duke campus. To poison the atmosphere even further, on March 27th and 28th Durham district attorney Mike Nifong drew national attention to the case by comparing the frat party to cross burnings and to a recent quadruple homicide. He strongly implied that the lacrosse team was engaging in a conspiracy of silence for not blabbing about the party. Nifong tarred the lacrosse team as “a bunch of hooligans.”
It was all a lie. When the police arrived at the frat house the lacrosse team captains – Dan Flannery, David Evans and Matt Zash – gave them a tour. When the cops asked if they would come to the station house to be interrogated, they readily agreed. The cops hauled away four computers, three digital cameras, bath rugs and sundry other items.
At the police station all three Duke students offered to take a polygraph test. The cops said, “No.” The guys were questioned and then sent to a hospital to offer up samples of their DNA. None of the guys had a lawyer at his elbow. Sergeant Mark Gottlieb emphasized that the lacrosse players had cooperated with the police.
For liberals the facts of the case were less important than the golden opportunity the case offered them to luxuriate in soul searching and deep feelings. Liberals “just knew” that the accuser was an endearing victim of bestial white racism. A vigil was held to show solidarity with the accuser by some 200 Duke students and faculty members, as well as religious and neighborhood groups. On March 29th more than 300 people gathered in the residence hall at North Carolina Central University, about three miles from Duke, in support of the accuser who attended classes at the historically black college. Democrat candidate Mike Nifong journeyed to N.C. Central to assure blacks that his presence there meant that this case would not fade away. A student at North Carolina Central expressed the mood of the protestors when he told Newsweek that he wanted to see the Duke students prosecuted “whether it happened or not. It would be justice for things that happened in the past.” Durham resident Faye Tate echoed this sentiment when she told the News & Observer that “This thing has so many ‘isms,’ if you will. The racism, the sexism, the elitism. It just takes you so far back.” Of course it does . . . if you want to go there. The past is a priceless treasure for some folks: black mythology insists on the past. For many blacks stepping into a brighter future means casting off the ennobling mantle of past victimhood. Living in the present is too horribly humdrum for them to even consider.
On April 6th the Duke student newspaper, the Chronicle, published a “listening statement” signed by 88 self-righteous faculty members that characterized the accusation by a drug-addled prostitute as “a disaster” and intoned: “To the students speaking individually and to the protesters making collective noise, thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard.”
Nothing cheers a liberal academic more than left-liberal “collective noise.” College is supposed to be a maturing experience, but here were eighty-eight professors applauding students for acting precipitously on the basis of an accusation alone. The professors were cheering the posting of defamatory “Wanted” posters featuring photographs of the lacrosse players. When lacrosse families and fans arrived on the Duke campus for a game against Georgetown they were met by demonstrators with signs with slogans such as “Don’t be a fan of rapists.” A witch hunt was brewing. The liberals were bonding.
The Racial Buccaneers
Not to be outdone, a paramilitary contingent of the Black Panther Party rolled into Durham. On May second they trooped to the frat house wearing their signature combat fatigues and black berets. There, in a militarized echo of black-Baptist call-and-response, group leader Malik Zulu Shabazz called out: “How do you find the two defendants in the case?” His troops and fellow travelers responded, “Guilty!”
On April 15th, five days after it was revealed that DNA samples taken from the lacrosse team on March 24th had not produced a single match to any of the many sperm samples taken from Ms. Mangum’s sex organ, Mr. Jesse Jackson, with great fanfare, announced that he and/or his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition would pay the accuser’s college tuition. From Jackson’s perspective it was money well spent: the announcement rescued Jackson from obscurity and made him seem somewhat relevant. Jackson had been the target of black demonstrators who wanted a piece of the millions of dollars in corporate shakedown money he had collected in their name. Paying Mangum’s tuition was a cheap way to quiet his critics.
Then again, maybe it was more than that. In the 395 days that Mangum’s hoax lasted, the single mom of two gave birth to a third child. (Defense lawyers insisted on a paternity test, which cleared the Duke students.) Jackson himself was the daddy of an out-of-wedlock child and he was also born to an unwed sixteen-year-old down in Greenville, South Carolina. Jackson has spent his entire life building a personal myth around a number of falsehoods. First of all, his autobiography Up from the Ghetto is a load of crap. For the record: Mr. Jackson did not grow up in dire poverty “on the wrong side of the tracks.” His adoptive father, Charles Jackson, was rightly proud of how well he provided for his family, including little Jesse, who took Jackson’s last name at the age of thirteen. Stories about how “I used to run bootleg liquor, bought hot clothes. I had to steal to survive,” were pathetic lies Jesse told to get some much-needed street cred. He lied about his father being a janitor and his mother being a maid. In truth, Jesse’s dad was a career postal worker and his mom worked as a beautician. The Jacksons had telephone service in the early 1950s, when many whites did not. An embarrassed Charles Jackson had to explain to reporters that “We were never poor. We never wanted for anything. We’ve never been on welfare, because I was never without a job. We never begged anybody for a dime. And my family never went hungry a day in their lives.”
Jesse Jackson is a veteran hoaxer. His story of holding the dying Martin Luther King in his arms is a preposterous lie. The bloody shirt he claimed was stained with Dr. King’s blood is a gruesome and totally fake stage prop of racial political theater. Even his claim to be a reverend has been unmasked as a self-serving lie. Jackson dropped out of seminary school after only six months and never returned. So hoaxing is a Jackson tradition. The last time Jackson blundered into a splashy sex hoax was in 1987 when he was running for president of the United States and just couldn’t stop himself from bringing his dopey racial perspectives to the Tawana Brawley hoax. Twenty years later he couldn’t resist sharing those same perspectives in an essay titled Duke: Horror and Truth. It’s easy to imagine him wearing out his 1975 videotape of Mandingo and then setting his fevered brain to work on it. A sample:
“Black women; white men. A stripper and a team blowout. The wealthy white athletes – many from prep schools – of Duke, and the working-class woman from historically black North Carolina Central. Race and class and sex. What happened? We don’t know for sure because the Duke players are maintaining a code of silence.
“The history of white men and black women – the special fantasies and realities of exploitation – goes back to the nation’s beginning and the arrival of slaves from Africa. The patterns associated with this history arouse fears and evoke too many bad memories.”
And:
“But Duke is alas probably no worse than other schools in the way African American women are too often perceived. As Rebecca Hall of the University of California in Berkley, who studies images of African American women in the culture, states, ‘Turn on a music video. A black woman is somebody who has excess sexuality . . . it’s excess sexuality that white men are entitled to.’”
Huh? The fantasy that the sons of the white upper class harbor a secret longing to get close to black women may be flattering to some black people, but there is scant evidence of this longing in our society at large. Certainly the Duke frat party was not an example of it. Let’s review the facts. The strippers were selected by the escort service; the Duke students did not know the strippers would be African American. The striptease lasted only a few minutes as one drug-addled stripper stumbled through her brief performance. The festive mood ended abruptly when Crystal Mangum slapped one of the partygoers. After that, the white males did their best to get the black women out of their frat house and on their way to somewhere else. The white guys locked the door behind the departing women and they refused to readmit Ms. Mangum, who was insisting that she was a cop.
Decades after the abolition of anti-miscegenation laws, interracial marriage continues to be unusual. Whether interracial rape is considered a crime of lust or rage, the fact remains that white-on-black rape continues to be as rare as some of the more unusual sexual perversions. For example, in the year 1988, when the Tawana Brawley hoax was still new there were 9,406 reported instances of black-on-white rape and fewer than ten reported cases of white-on-black rape. The following year a researcher concluded that black men raped white women thirty times as often as white men raped black women. The total number of interracial rapes committed by black men would be vastly greater if the population of black men wasn’t less than one-sixth the number of white men. Clearly, in 1988 the very much smaller population of black men perpetrated over a thousand times as many interracial rapes as did the larger population of white men. To put that another way, at their 1988 rate of commission, it would take the vastly larger population of white males over one thousand years to commit as many interracial rapes as black men committed in just one year. If any population is harboring “special fantasies” of sexual exploitation it’s the American black male population.
Crime statistics for the year 2005 tell us that of the 111,590 white victims of sexual assault, 33.6 percent were victimized by black men. In that same year virtually 100 percent of the 36,620 black victims were victimized by black men. By “zero percent white offenders” the statisticians mean fewer than ten incidents nationally, due to a statistical margin of error. In shirtsleeve English, these crime statistics mean that in 2005 white females were sexually assaulted by black men 37,460 times and fewer than ten black women were sexually assaulted by white men. Jesse Jackson is silent about this continuing black-on-white rape epidemic. Also strangely silent about this rape epidemic were the feminists who stomped around the Duke campus excoriating the non-existent menace of “privileged white males.”
Back in 1988, when Tawana Brawley had been exposed and the crime statistics revealed that white-on-black rape was virtually non-existent, the hard-left Nation magazine told its readers to ignore the jury verdict because Tawana’s charges expressed the essential nature of white men’s treatment of black women in America. This sentiment was echoed by blacks at the North Carolina Central University vigil for the accuser – they wanted the lacrosse players to be punished even if they didn’t rape the stripper so as to even the score for some past indignities suffered by some other black women.
These expressions reveal the essential emotionalism, the essential anti-intellectualism, of the modern Left; please don’t bother them with the facts. At Duke University, the annual Take Back the Night rally attracted some 500 folks who chanted, “Out of the dark, into the street, we won’t be raped, we won’t be beat!” Was the deeply racist epidemic of black-on-white rape, that has been increasing for five decades, mentioned even once? Of course not. These are liberal feminists who read the screeds of other liberal feminists, which keeps their minds comfortably tucked inside a closed data loop of approved liberal perspectives. Criticizing black men would make these liberals uncomfortable. So would reading the Department of Justice publications Criminal Victimization in the United States for the years 1987 and 2005. It is obvious from their behavior that liberal white women are emotionally unequipped to grasp the reality that in America today interracial rape is virtually a black man’s monopoly. Each year thousands of racist black men specifically target white women for degradation and the white liberal feminists keep silent about it. In their minds black men are the real victims. In truth, these feminists have become rapist enablers.
So Jesse Jackson is talking nonsense. The near total absence of white-on-black rape in America is proof that white men are rarely sexually predatory toward black women. As for whites oppressing blacks, fully seventy-five percent of black folks are now middle class. Opinion polls taken among black youth indicate that few of them have been hindered by racial animus. The employment prospects for educated black women are very bright. The greatest threat to the future prospects of black women is the short supply of educated and motivated black men.
Devaluing women is a way for many men to shun the hard work of becoming mature men. If women were valued, then women would be worth holding on to, but holding on to a woman means building a life together and that requires diligent skills acquisition. But if women are devalued, if they are just “bitches and hos,” then women are disposable trash and the hard work of acquiring skills, morals, manners and maturity is unnecessary. Behind the swagger of these men lies the insecurity of knowing that they would get failing grades as fathers and husbands and bread winners. This self-knowledge is the wellspring of their rage, a rage that may find expression in the sexual abuse of women.
Enter Big Al Sharpton
No splashy interracial rape hoax would be complete without a guest appearance by Alfred Sharpton. Mr. Sharpton told FOX Channel’s Bill O’Reilly, “What I don’t accept is for people to act like this young lady, no matter what her profession – and I think people need to know she is a mother, a divorced mother of two and a student – that we ought to be putting her on trial rather than these two that are getting indicted.” Really? That isn’t the tune he was singing back in 1989.
During the night of April 19, 1989 a large roaming pack of young black males committed a series of felony assaults in New York’s Central Park. Among that night’s victims was a female investment banker who became known as the Central Park Jogger. This woman was raped, sodomized, beaten with a pipe, dragged and left for dead in a deep coma. Such gang attacks were common enough in New York City to have acquired their own name: the city’s “minority youth” called this pastime “wilding,” which was not to be confused with “whirling,” their name for group sexual assaults on young women in New York City’s public swimming pools.
There were arrests and in a flash New York’s master of charismatic racism was hogging the spotlight. Al Sharpton and his loyal followers immediately heaped scorn upon the near-dead victim. Based upon no evidence whatsoever, Sharpton declared that the victim’s boyfriend had raped and beaten her almost to death. At rallies the Sharpton claque chanted: “The boyfriend did it!” None of this squared with the detailed confessions of the defendants, but that didn’t matter to Sharpton. The Sharpton gang assembled at the courthouse and screamed that the nearly murdered woman was “a whore.” They shouted her name again and again. Decent publications refused to print any rape victim’s name, but several black-owned publications splashed it around. As a final slimy touch, Sharpton brought Tawana Brawley to the trial of the Central Park rapists and introduced her to the confessed sex criminals. She greeted them warmly. A signature Sharpton moment came when the Reverend Al requested that a psychiatrist examine the victim. Said the Rev.: “We’re not endorsing the damage to the girl . . . if there was this damage.” What can one say? The man is a prize pig.
So, in 2007 Sharpton wants to deflect all scrutiny toward the Duke students and away from the accuser who, among other things, is also a drug user, a heavy boozer, a sexual exhibitionist and a hard-working prostitute. Sharpton wants us to ignore Crystal Mangum’s history of assault, battery, resisting arrest and car theft. In June of 2002 Mangum had pleaded guilty to larceny, speeding to elude arrest, assault on a government official and driving while impaired. Sharpton would also have us ignore that in 1996 Mangum had accused three other men of gang raping her in 1993. She sounded a lot like Tawana when she told the Creedmoor police that she had been attacked at an “unspecified place” where she had been raped and beaten by three men “for a continual time.” Sharpton also hopes you are too young or too forgetful to remember his disgusting verbal abuse of a horribly damaged gang-rape victim back in 1989. [For more details, see Gang Rape in the Park, in this series.]
The Defense Responds
While the Duke professoriate was provoking a lynch-mod frenzy and the Durham DA was busy garnering black votes by stoking the fires of black sex fantasies, the attorneys for the defense had been patiently accumulating evidence of their client’s innocence. There was lots of evidence.
Crystal Mangum had made five detailed statements; she had been interviewed by a sexual-assault nurse and detectives; her remarks during a photo lineup were recorded; she gave a hand-written statement; she was interviewed by investigator Linwood E. Wilson. Each of her statements contradicts parts of the others.
In her later statements she says she arrived at the frat house at about 11:10 p.m. and that she was assaulted starting about 11:40. She said she endured the penile penetration of her mouth, vagina and anus. She said her attackers did not use condoms and that at least one of them ejaculated.
And yet, time-stamped photos show her dancing between midnight and 12:04 a.m. Everyone agrees the performance lasted from three to ten minutes. Ms. Mangum slapped a rude partygoer; there were heated words; the women retreated to a bathroom and locked the door.
At 12:20 a.m. the strippers are walking to Ms. Roberts’ car. At 12:30 Mangum has returned to the frat house to retrieve her lost shoe. She is refused admittance. Another photo, stamped 12:37 shows Mangum lying on the back stoop. At 12:41 she was photographed getting into Ms. Roberts’ Honda. At 1:30 a.m. a policeman reported Ms. Mangum as “passed out drunk” at the Kroger’s parking lot. Ms. Roberts has said that Mangum was out of her sight for no more than five minutes during their time inside the frat house. Ms. Mangum had claimed to have endured thirty minutes of violent sexual abuse. In her single police interview Ms. Roberts is on record as calling Mangum’s rape allegation “a crock,” and swearing she was with Mangum the entire time.
Crystal Mangum was shown 24 photos of Duke lacrosse players and she had not identified anyone. Five days later she was shown more photos – and still no identifications. After days of noisy street protests, the pandering prosecutor made certain that Crystal was presented with a photo lineup that included all of the 46 white Duke lacrosse players. Crystal was made to understand that, according to her accusation, her three “attackers” must be among the photos in front of her. No filler photos were included in the photo array. This time the 27-year-old accuser fingered Reade Seligmann, 20, Collin Finnerty, 20 and David Evans, 23.
Less than 48 hours after Reade Seligmann was handcuffed and charged with first-degree forcible rape, sexual offense and kidnapping, his lawyer produced evidence that Seligmann was not at the alleged crime scene. There was a time-stamped photo of Crystal ending her brief performance at 12:03 a.m. Between 12:05 and 12:24 a.m. Seligmann dialed at least eight separate calls on his cell phone. The trip log of taxi driver Moez Mostafa recorded a call for a cab at 12:14 a.m. Phone records show that Seligmann made this call. Mostafa recalled that Seligmann and a friend were laughing and joking at about 12:19.
The cabbie drove the two young men to an ATM where Seligmann swiped his ATM card, leaving a record of the transaction. He was also captured on the ATM surveillance video. Then the cabbie drove them to a fast-food restaurant where they were given a time-stamped receipt and then to Seligmann’s school dormitory where Seligmann gained entry by swiping his student ID card at 12:46 in the morning.
When Seligmann’s alibi data were made public, Crystal Gail Mangum suddenly “remembered” that the gang rape “really” happened between 11:35 and midnight – before she was photographed smiling and dancing. She also had a recovered memory of a white towel that helpfully explained away the absence of the mouthful of semen she had said she spat onto the bathroom floor. None of her DNA was found in the bathroom.
In any case, Mangum’s cell-phone records show that she was gabbing on her phone during part of the time she says she was being kicked, raped and sodomized. Telephone records also document that Seligmann received a call on his cell phone during Crystal’s revised time frame.
The defense complained that Mangum had given the prosecutor at least a dozen different versions of her story. Her conflicting accounts had included between three and twenty attackers and different ways in which she was supposedly abused. Defense lawyer Joe Cheshire observed that “She’s made so many different statements that anything she says is exculpatory, simply because it’s inconsistent with everything else she said.” North Carolina attorney general Roy A. Cooper would later summarize Nifong’s case this way: “No DNA confirms her story. Other evidence contradicts her story. She contradicts herself.”
Crystal Mangum’s assertion that defendant David Evans had shaved off his mustache made her seem comical. Evans had never sported a mustache. Defense lawyers asserted that Collin Finnerty had left the party before the striptease began. Mike Nifong’s defamatory smear that the boys had slipped Mangum a date-rape drug was disproved by toxicology testing of Mangum’s blood. Then, after repeatedly giving lurid accounts of how she had been violently penetrated by many a penis in three of her orifices, Ms. Mangum said she wasn’t really certain she had been penetrated by even one penis. Under North Carolina law, penile penetration is a necessary dimension of the crime of rape. No penetration, no rape.
Ms. Mangum’s sudden uncertainty came on the heels of sophisticated DNA tests that revealed lots of male genetic material in her sex organ and underwear – none of which matched DNA samples taken from every white Duke lacrosse player. At that moment Mike Nifong might have salvaged the remains of his professional reputation and his personal dignity by declaring the entire episode to have been a hideous hoax perpetrated by a spiteful sex-trade freelancer. But Nifong was beholding to Durham’s black community for his narrow win in the Democrat primary election on May second, so he pressed the case even after sensitive genetic tests came back negative: Nifong chose to continue the case based on nothing more than the ever-changing fantasies of a drug-addled hooker. Black voters showed their appreciation by returning Nifong to office in the November 7th general election.
During pretrial testimony on December 6th, 2006 the director of the DNA laboratory confessed under oath that he and the district attorney had conspired to conceal the fact that Ms. Mangum’s body and underwear were soiled with the semen of lots of men – none of whom played lacrosse at Duke University.
North Carolina’s discovery laws require prosecutors to give defense lawyers all exculpatory evidence in their possession. Clearly, Mr. Nifong, in his eagerness to pander to Durham’s black community, had wandered off the reservation.
On December 22nd, Nifong was forced to dump the rape charge after Crystal announced her doubts about having been penetrated by even a single penis at the frat party. Undeterred, the DA continued to pursue the Duke students with felony kidnapping and sexual assault charges. Soon, even lawyers began to think Mr. Nifong was behaving like a nut.
On December 28th the North Carolina bar filed a professional misconduct complaint against Mr. Nifong. On January 13th, 2007 the state attorney general relieved district attorney Nifong of his duties in this case. On April 11th, North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper dropped all charges against Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty and Davis Evans.
Black Fantasies and Liberal Bias
In January, North Carolina Attorney General Roy A. Cooper began a review of the prosecution. His report concluded that neither Mike Nifong nor his deputies had ever challenged the accuser about the glaring contradictions in her accounts. Regarding a March 29th interview with Ms. Mangum, the report stated that “This was apparently the first time these questions of inconsistencies had been asked formally” of the woman who had a history of drug abuse and mental health problems. Six days later, while being interviewed by Cooper’s investigators, Ms. Mangum was high on at least four prescription drugs, including methadone, slurring her words as she spun yet another graphic version of her fantasy rape ordeal. Cooper’s report stated that during the March 29th interview Ms. Mangum “changed her story on so many important issues as to give the impression that she was improvising as the interview progressed, even when she was faced with irrefutable evidence that what she was saying was not credible.”
Not that any of this mattered to the howling chorus of irate liberals: they didn’t care about Crystal Gail Mangum as a real person; they were wildly enamored with her as a close approximation of their internalized archetype of the black-woman-as-victim-of-white-male-patriarchy. For liberals this stereotype has the emotional power of an epic myth. Crystal had given the liberals a golden opportunity to marinate in the heady broth of their own self-righteousness. Crystal Mangum had cast herself in the role of suffering black victim and the liberals were only too eager to cast the lacrosse players in the role of “privileged white bigots.”
Duke literature professor Wahneema Lubiano captured the pre-packaged liberal mindset when she declared: “The members of the team are almost perfect offenders” because they are “the exemplars of the upper end of the class hierarchy . . . and the dominant social group on campus.” She pigeonholed the white guys as members of “the politically dominant race and ethnicity [and] the dominant gender.” In other words, the white men were to be stripped of their individual identities to feed the liberals’ hunger for “exemplars” of class hierarchy.
The notorious statement signed by 88 Duke professors that thanked Duke students “for not waiting” for the facts before vilifying the lacrosse players was drafted by Wahneema Lubiano. Having heard no more than an accusation by an African American prostitute, the liberals immediately presumed the guilt of the accused. Making matters worse was faith-based feminist crusader Wendy Murphy who remarked on MSNBC that, “I have never, ever met a false rape claim . . . My own statistics speak to the truth.”
Ms. Murphy did not share these personal statistics. She is a professor at the New England School of Law and a frequent cable-news commentator. During the Duke rape hoax she poisoned the atmosphere by falsely asserting that there had been other allegations of sexual offenses by the accused men. Professor Murphy floated the falsehood that Crystal Mangum had been violated with a broomstick. She falsely reported that Ms. Mangum had genital tears. The professor indulged herself in a wild speculation that there were photographs of the alleged rape. She pushed the fantasy that Ms. Mangum had been slipped a date-rape drug. She aired her opinion that the presumption of innocence was overrated. The liberals lapped it up.
Professor Gail Dines of Wheelock College in Boston lashed out at CNN for airing a spot that was sympathetic to the lacrosse team. The spot aired in January of 2007, after the most serious charges had been dismissed. The professor just had to vent her “anger at the way the media humanized these men as victims and dehumanized the woman as the perpetrator of a lie.” Professor Dines remained confident that Mike Nifong would bag the less-than-human white boys – she cited Wendy Murphy as her “go-to source.”
The
Duff Wilson proceeded to make the Times’ coverage a national laughingstock. DNA be damned – full speed ahead! The editors hadn’t learned anything from experience – it was the Jason Blair fiasco all over again: the prosecutor’s version was just too good to check. When emerging facts began to undermine Mike Nifong’s version of events, Duff Wilson and his sidekick Jonathan Glater rode to the rescue with an epic 5,600-word, full-page story that was chock-full of dubious tidbits of hearsay and unsubstantiated defamatory remarks aimed at the youthful defendants. It was a masterwork of deliberate omissions and selective presentations, complete with errors of fact and a false chronology.
The New York Times staff toned down their sanctimonious presumption of guilt only after their grotesque distortions became fodder for the bloggers and even screechy polemicists like Susan Estrich had thrown in the towel. By that time the Times’ defense of Mike Nifong hung on the tenuous legalism of whether Nifong could keep his deteriorating case from being pitched out before trial. The New York Times scrupulously avoided the moral question of whether a prosecutor with such a weak case should subject three young people to the trauma and the enormous expense of a trial.
At that moment no reasonable person would have believed that a 30-minute three-orifice gang rape, plus a nasty beatdown, by three big athletes without condoms could have taken place in a small bathroom without leaving a trace of the defendants or the accuser’s DNA.
Crystal Mangum made her first accusation as she was being involuntarily committed to a mental-health facility. Then she recanted the rape charge. Then she re-recanted. Then began her long-running series of inconsistent sex fantasies. Crystal’s best-hope eye witness was stripper Kim Roberts, who told the cops that the rape accusation was “a crock” and that she and Mangum had been together all the while they were in the frat house. Two doctors and four nurses had provided twenty-three pages of documentation that Mangum had no vaginal or anal tearing and no contusions or other indicators of a beating. She had some minor abrasions and a puffy vaginal lining that could easily have resulted from her activities as a prostitute, included her admitted performance with a vibrator shortly before the frat party.
The New York Times downplayed all of this because it contradicted their ideologically-driven scenario about privileged white guys abusing poor and struggling black women. Their sports columnist Selena Roberts got things rolling with a hate-drenched diatribe that tarred the lacrosse team as “a group of privileged players of fine pedigree entangled in a night that threatens to belie their social standing as human beings.” She eagerly promoted the lie that the lacrosse team was observing a “code of silence.” She said the boys were like “drug dealers and gang members engaged in an anti-snitch campaign.” She was silent about how the team captains had invited the police to search the frat house, had given the cops a tour of the place and had spontaneously volunteered to take lie-detector tests without benefit of legal counsel.
The day after the alleged rape, Crystal Mangum told a sexual-assault nurse that the other stripper, Kim Roberts, had helped a lacrosse player drag her back into the frat house where she was raped and “took all my money and everything.” On April 6th Mangum gave a written statement in which she swore that “three guys grabbed” Roberts and “separated us . . . while we tried to hold on to each other.”
Mangum told the police and medical personnel not fewer than five mutually conflicting tales of how she was raped by two, five, three and zero men. Here’s how the New York Times reported Mangum’s tale spinning to its readers: “. . . aside from two brief early conversations with police, she gave largely consistent accounts of being raped by three men in the bathroom.”
Detective Benjamin Himan’s handwritten notes of March 16, 2006 have Mangum describing her rapists as “chubby,” having a “chubby face,” and weighing “260-270,” which does not match any of the three accused Duke students. During the rigged April 4th, 2007 photo-lineup session Mangum fingered David Evans, but insisted Evans had a mustache – which he never had.
The New York Times carefully clipped a sentence from Mike Nifong’s March 23rd application for an order to compel the 46 white lacrosse players to submit DNA samples. The Times wrote that “Mr. Nifong’s office has written that tests would ‘show conclusive evidence as to who the suspect(s) are in the alleged violent attack upon this victim.” But the Times deliberately omitted the first half of that same sentence which declared that “The DNA evidence requested will immediately rule out any innocent persons” [Emphasis added]. The Times showcased Nifong’s suggestion that no semen was found because the guys must have used condoms, even as Nifong’s files had the accuser swearing that her “attackers” did not use condoms, were ejaculating like mad and that she had spat a mouthful of semen onto the bathroom floor.
The Times also showcased the pure speculation that Mangum had been slipped a date-rape drug, which toxicology tests proved was not true.
Even more twisted was the New York Times’ repeated implication that defense lawyers Wade Smith, Kirk Osborn, Joe Cheshire, Brad Bannon, Robert Ekstrand and Doug Kingsbery were trying to deceive the public and were, therefore, untrustworthy sources of information. The Times used this slander as a justification for its wholehearted endorsement of the prosecutor’s presumption of guilt and its constant downplaying of exculpatory evidence. All that was left was for Mike Nifong to scrape together twelve jurors who were as determined to ignore the evidence as were the editors of the “newspaper of record.” There were plenty of prospects in Durham’s black community where a vengeful contagion of lynch fever had swept the pandering Mike Nifong to primary and general-election victories. The New York Times had indulged itself in a yellow-press trial-by-newspaper and issued its between-the-lines verdict well in advance of any possible trial date.
These liberals dared not question the credibility of an accuser who was sanctified by the liberal’s holy trinity of minority race, lower-class station and female gender. Nifong’s phony lineups were designed to avoid testing the accuser’s credibility. As Thomas Sowell observed: “When a prosecutor acts like he has made up his mind and doesn’t want to be confused by the facts, that is when the spirit of the lynch mob has entered the legal system.”
The public performances by the liberal media, by the racial racketeers, by the leftist academics and by the chanting demonstrators were all so weirdly formulaic and so tribal as to suggest that none of these people had engaged in a search for the truth. Crystal Mangum’s lurid lies had simply offered them an eagerly-awaited opportunity to luxuriate in intense emotion, to disguise their class envy behind pompous moralizing and to come together in groups for ritualistic expressions of a shared orthodoxy.
Most entertaining of all was the way in which so many blacks revealed their own deepest insecurities while pontificating about what they imagined to be white men’s fantasies about black women.
Here’s the truth: few white men spend any time fantasizing about black women; it’s just not a common white-guy pastime. That’s why annual nation-wide white-on-black rapes can be counted on your fingers. That’s why the two most popular skin magazines include no more than enough token black women to make the magazines seem urbane and “inclusive.” Jesse Jackson may get palpitations about “the history of white men and black women – the special fantasies and realities of exploitation,” but the age of the average lacrosse player is about twenty years: he has no memories of the Vietnam War, much less the Civil War. In his world, the world of today, all the cotton is picked by machines and the black folks he knows drive Volvos.
In any case, on the occasion of the frat party the Duke students had almost immediate buyer’s remorse: the striptease quickly degenerated into a drunken stumble. Then the guys had the burden of getting the two women out of their house, into a car and moving somewhere else. No one had requested black strippers – that choice had been made by the escort service. The notion that such a large group of white guys would spontaneously and unanimously jettison their ingrained notions of white-girl good looks and suddenly elect to blow eight hundred dollars on two strippers from a racial group with a less familiar standard of beauty, stretches the limits of credulity: the behavior of large groups is far more predictable than the behavior of individuals – that’s why insurance companies make a profit. Three guys might make such a choice on a whim, but not scores of guys whose notions of feminine beauty were locked in place by age six. If this case has taught America’s white guys anything, it is to avoid even thinking of “exploiting” any black strippers for two hundred dollars an hour.
The Damage That Was Done
The lacrosse team’s only “crime” was wanting to have a good time. They were alpha-class party guys. Unfortunately, in the suffocating hothouse of liberal Duke U and the Durham black community, all it would take to make their lives a horror was one phony rape accusation by a drug-soaked sex worker.
Eighty-eight Duke professors reflexively put their signatures on a proclamation damning the lacrosse team and vowing to “turn up the volume” against the falsely accused. The New York Times threw all its prestige behind the rape hoax and continued to do so long after other howling liberal media voices had been reduced to fretful murmuring. As late as August 25th, 2007 the Timeswas still trying to save Mike Nifong’s rotten political ploy with such rubbish as, “The full files, reviewed by The New York Times, contain evidence stronger than that highlighted by the defense.” It was a lie.
Much later, F.Lane Williamson, chairman of the disciplinary committee that would strip Mike Nifong of his state law license, would observe, “This matter has been a fiasco. There’s no doubt about it.” This committee would declare that Nifong rigged the investigation to enhance his chances of winning his first election to office. Nifong was pandering to black racial prejudice. The committee report called Nifong’s manipulations “a clear case of intentional prosecutorial misconduct” that employed “dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation.” The report recalled how, in the early days of the case, Nifong had confidently proclaimed to blacks that he wouldn’t allow Durham to become known for “a bunch of lacrosse players from Duke raping a black girl.” Williamson said that the three-judge panel “. . . can draw no other conclusion that those initial statements he made were to further his political ambitions.” The same could be said of the racially inflammatory statements made by Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who sought to increase their own political capital by pouring gasoline on the fire and further damaging the reputations of three innocent young men.
Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty were indicted on April 17th. They were arrested on April 18th, 2006 and charged with first-degree forcible rape, first-degree sexual offense and kidnapping. Mike Nifong announced that he was trying to identify a third suspect.
Shortly before five in the morning, a sheriff’s car brought Seligmann and Finnerty to the Durham County Detention Facility in handcuffs. They were photographed and fingerprinted. They were later released on $400,000 bonds posted by their parents. They both insisted they were innocent.
Later, Reade Seligmann waived his right to be in court to hear a reading of the charges. Collin Finnerty was present, sitting in the middle of the courtroom with his father, surrounded by dozens of tripod-mounted news cameras pointed in their direction. Father and son sat for more than half an hour as Judge Stephens conducted the sentencing hearing of a convicted child molester whose teenage victim described how horribly he had hurt her and how intensely she hated him.
When his case was finally called, Collin Finnerty moved forward. He signed a paper. When the judge asked if he was Collin Finnerty he answered firmly, “I am.”
Both Seligmann and Finnerty were suspended from Duke the day of their arrest, two weeks before final exams. Team captain David Evans was indicted on May 15th.
Predictably, the New York Times was quick to point out that “The disparity of wealth between the players and their accuser, who was working her way through college as a stripper, is stark. Mr. Finnerty and Mr. Seligmann grew up in million-dollar homes in affluent communities and attended all-boys Roman Catholic prep schools.” The word “affluent” was tossed around as though the families of the falsely accused students could easily afford legal fees reportedly totaling more than a million dollars per family. Reade Seligmann’s father had to appeal to a friend for a $400,000 loan to secure his son’s release.
Mike Nifong never had a real case to make. His star witness was a chemically screwed-up mental case whom he refused to interview. Her recollections were constantly changing. Nifong didn’t want to interview the accused either. They had all passed polygraph tests. The star witness was stained inside and out with the DNA of several men, none of whom had attended the March 13th party. Nifong was simply playing to Durham’s blacks, who repaid the political novice with a 10-point margin of victory in the November ’06 election.
“It’s been 395 days since this nightmare began,” said David Evans, his voice choking with emotion. “And finally today it’s coming to closure. We’re just as innocent today as we were back then. Nothing has changed, the facts don’t change.”
Reade Seligmann recalled the moment he told his mother of the charges lodged against him: “It was like the life was sucked out of her.” In the many months since, he has become accustomed to stares and become nostalgic for his old life. “It’s there in the morning, and it tucks me in at night,” he said, and “I miss more than anything staying up and worrying about a miserable midterm.” He promised his father that this horrible ordeal would not ruin his life. Seligmann opined, “I always believed that the truth would trump everything.”
When the radiant crusade of the self-righteous Left was finally unmasked as prosecutorial fraudulence, political pandering, racial profiteering and a hooker’s drug-inspired hallucination, the sanctimonious poseurs who had done so much harm did their best to save their soiled reputations.
Duke University’s craven president, Richard H. Brodhead, issued a statement welcoming the exonerations and praising the players. “They have carried themselves with dignity through an ordeal of deep unfairness,” Brodhead announced. He made no mention of his own contribution to the deep unfairness of that ordeal.
The North Carolina chapter of the NAACP stopped its fevered yapping. Its erstwhile mouthpiece, law professor Irving Joyner, offered the meek closing statement, “Based on my personal knowledge of him and high respect for him [North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper], I accept his conclusions.” The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network also expressed confidence in the attorney general’s decision to drop all charges against Seligmann, Finnerty and Evans.
Al Sharpton hasn’t mentioned the case since Crystal Gail Mangum’s gang rape accusation was revealed to be just as phony as that of Tawana Brawley. The Black Panther Party’s propaganda minister has fallen silent. Jesse Jackson remarked in parting, “We just hope this traumatic experience for all involved ends with a minimum amount of damage.”
Just to be clear: the only people traumatized by this hoax were the members of the Duke lacrosse team, their families, and their veteran coach of sixteen years. All of the other spotlight-hogging actors, including Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Michael Nifong and the Duke faculty, were enthusiastic tormentors of the falsely accused.
Two months after North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper dismissed all charges against the Duke students, Durham County district attorney Mike Nifong found himself in a courtroom facing ethics charges. Katherine Jean, a state attorney prosecuting the ethics case portrayed Nifong as a politically motivated, overzealous man who lied to the public, the news media, the defense attorneys and the courts in his eagerness to promote a case with virtually no credible evidence. Roy Cooper had called Nifong “a rogue prosecutor.”
Benjamin Himan, the Durham detective who was the lead investigator on the case, testified that Nifong had acknowledged that the case was weak. Himan was disbelieving when he was told that Nifong intended to indict two Duke students. “With what?” detective Himan had responded.
Defense attorney Joe Cheshire called Mr. Himan’s testimony “chilling” and said that it demonstrated the power of unrestrained state agencies to destroy people’s lives. He said of prosecutor Nifong: “In his search for a false conviction, this is a man who appealed to racial and class hatred.”
During a lunch break at the ethics hearing, Victoria Peterson, a black activist from Durham, accosted the mother of a falsely-accused Duke student. Peterson announced that people still thought her son did something wrong and should have stood trial for something. Ms. Paterson was removed from the courtroom and ejected from the courthouse.
As for Crystal Gail Mangum – she got away free and unpunished. The official reason for not pursuing the accuser was the attorney general’s perception that Mangum could not distinguish reality from her own fantasies. Some commentators hinted that Cooper’s real purpose was to dampen the inflamed racial hysteria of Durham’s black community.
As a final gesture, Duke University’s president invited Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty to return to Duke after the rape charges were dumped. They both declined the offer. David Evans had graduated the day he was charged.
Reade Seligmann was a high school All-American and an excellent student at Delbarton. He was sought after by almost all the top tier universities, including all the Ivies, to play lacrosse or football. He was an honor student at Duke and a member of the Atlantic Conference academic honors team. His Duke teammates called him “Frazzle” because he fretted terribly about small errors or misbehaviors. His family joked that Reade would worry for weeks if he thought he hadn’t given someone a good enough handshake. Seligmann chose to live apart from his teammates because he didn’t want socializing to disrupt his studies.
Reade Seligmann had befriended Yani Newton, the only black member of the women’s lacrosse team. They often ate breakfast together before an 8:30 class. Yani knew Reade as the only white student in his African American studies class. When she was asked if Reade had ever given any indication of harboring racist sentiments she responded: “Oh my God, absolutely no, a resounding no. The idea is just laughable.”
Thomas Clough
Copyright 2007
August 21,2007