By Mary Katherine Ham
Wednesday, March 16, 2016
On the evening of March 13, 2006, a fateful party at a
house in Durham, N.C. plunged the nation and its media into a frenzy of assumptions,
social crusading, and miscarried justice. When the Duke men’s lacrosse team
hired two exotic dancers during a night of drinking, one of the dancers accused
three team members of a brutal gang rape in the bathroom of a run-down rental
house just off of Duke’s tree-lined East Campus.
The story scratched every social-justice itch, and
everyone seemed more than happy to scratch away, despite a lack of evidence. A
little more than a year after the alleged assault, North Carolina Attorney
General Roy Cooper took the unusual step of declaring the three accused men
“innocent,” after a “tragic rush to accuse and a failure to verify serious
allegations,” and prosecuting Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong was
disbarred and convicted of contempt.
I grew up in Durham, blocks from the rental house in
question. I understood the community and the media environment into which this
“Molotov cocktail,” as one local columnist called it, had been tossed. I
followed the story closely, and still was re-amazed by the many misdeeds in the
ESPN 30for30 documentary, “Fantastic Lies,” which aired on the 10-year
anniversary of the party.
Forthwith, 10 moments from the Marina Zenovich film that
will remind you how truly appalling it was.
1. When Nifong
Went Hear-No-Evil
Nifong conducted frequent media interviews after the
story went national—Fox News, CBS, MSNBC, Newsweek—describing
players as uncooperative and worse, and assuring their conviction as part of
his primary election campaign. What he didn’t do was talk to the accuser,
Crystal Gail Mangum, about her story. How closed off was he from alternative
theories of the case?
“We tried to convince him that we had a story to tell
ourselves. Mr. Nifong put his hands over his ears and said I don’t want to hear
it,” said Wade Smith, attorney for accused player Collin Finnerty.
“He literally put his hands over his ears,” said Jim Cooney,
lawyer for accused player Reade Seligmann.
Seligmann’s mother Kathy added: “You don’t speak to the
accuser and you don’t speak to the accused, but you’re positive something
happened?”
2. The
Rule-Violating Photo Line-Ups
“There were three photographic lineups presented to
Crystal Mangum,” according to the documentary and other reporting, all of which
violated rules about photo line-ups. They featured nothing but lacrosse players
who were present at the party.
“She can’t pick out the wrong person because there’s no
one in the lineup other than people she’s been told were actually at the
party,” said Joe Cheshire, attorney for accused player Dave Evans.
3. When the
Accused and Families Came to Grips With the Situation
The players on the Duke team maintained their innocence,
but also their media silence as they waited on their legal fate. “Fantastic
Lies” gives to the wrongly accused what media coverage did not at the time of
their accusation—their humanity. Seligmann’s mother told a heart-wrenching story
of her son delivering the news that he had been accused.
“Mom, I need you to be stronger than you’ve ever been in
your entire life. Mom, she picked me,” Kathy recounted in the documentary..
Cooney also emphasized the seriousness of the accusations
to Seligmann: “Reade, whatever life you had before March 13 is over. That life
is never going to happen,” he said.
4. When Team
Captain Dave Evans Publicly Professed Their Innocence
Mangum had named three men in her version of events.
Finnerty and Seligman, both 20 at the time, were indicted first, and the rest
of the team waited anxiously to see who would be named the third “attacker.”
Upon the announcement that it was senior and team captain Dave Evans, he made a
passionate profession of innocence to national media.
“First I want to say I’m absolutely innocent of all the
charges that have been brought against me today, that Collin Finnerty and Reade
Seligman are innocent of all the charges that were brought against them. When
the police first came to my home, I fully cooperated and have continued to try
to cooperate with them. When they entered in and read the search warrant, my
roommates and I helped them find evidence for almost an hour and told them that
if they had any questions, we would gladly answer them to show that nothing
happened that night…
I am innocent. Reade Seligmann is innocent. Collin
Finnerty is innocent. Every member of the Duke University lacrosse team is
innocent. You have all been told some fantastic lies.”
5. When NYT’s
Public Editor Explained the Media’s Inability to Cover This Fairly
New York Times Public Editor Dan Okrent diagnosed the
media coverage of the case in the documentary as journalists excited to find
all their pet social-justice issues in one story.
“It was white over black, it was male over female, it was
rich over poor, educated over uneducated. All the things that we know happen in
the world coming together in one place and journalists, they start to quiver
with a thrill when something like this happens,” Okrent said.
6. When Social
Justice Protesters Didn’t Understand Due Process
One of the most frequently spotted protest signs in
Durham in the wake of the Duke lacrosse case indictments was “Get a Conscience,
Not a Lawyer.” The signs were a reference to the alleged “wall of silence” the
players had employed to protect the team.
The residents of the house where the party occurred had
been cooperative with a search warrant. The entire team submitted to DNA
samples. But they were accused by police, Nifong, and media of being
obstructive because team members denied accusations and acquired lawyers to get
them through the process, as anyone accused of a crime should do.
A poster featuring all of the lacrosse team members’
pictures was distributed widely on campus and around town with the headline,
“Please Come Forward.” There was, it turns out, nothing to come forward about.
7. When the
Accuser and Accused Were Not In One Place at One Time for 10 Minutes
The three defense teams for the accused put together a
timeline for the night in question using cell-phone records, receipts,
eyewitness reports, and the accuser’s story. It became clear that there was no
time during the window alleged in which all three young men and Mangum were in
the same place for long enough for an attack to happen.
“[Seligmann] was literally on video a mile away from the
site at the time of the alleged assault,” said teammate Rob Wellington, who had
left the party with him to get cash at an ATM a mile from the party, where
Seligmann is visible on security footage.
8. When a Coach
Stood By His Players and Lost His Job
Coach Mike Pressler had been coaching Duke’s lacrosse
time for more than 15 years. During that time, the team had made many NCAA
tournament appearances and an appearance in the championship game in 2005. When
the story broke about the party and alleged assault, he stood by his team,
arguing the season should not be canceled until evidence emerged. They had been
expected to be national championship contenders.
The university fired Pressler. He went on to settle with
Duke for wrongful termination. He is now the head coach at Bryant University
and coached the national men’s lacrosse team in 2010.
“I was actually advised to distance myself from them and
at that time that was like blasphemy,” Pressler said in the documentary.
9. When a Young
Lawyer Had a Perry Mason Moment That Revealed a Conspiracy
Nifong had a private DNA lab process samples after the
state’s public lab came up empty, producing conclusions more favorable to
Nifong’s case.
“I was pretty curious to know, how could our state crime
lab and this private lab come up with two pretty fundamentally different
conclusions,” said attorney Brad Bannon.
Nifong handed over 2,500 pages of raw, technical DNA data
to the defense. Bannon bought a book on Amazon about forensic DNA and went to
work. He discovered unidentified DNA for numerous men in and on Mangum and her
clothing that hadn’t been reported. He found notes indicating lab director
Brian Meehan’s DNA was also present.
“So a Ph.D doing everything he can not to contaminate the
DNA leaves more DNA in this rape kit than the entire Duke lacrosse team put
together,” Cooney said.
At a hearing nine months after the party, Nifong tried to
take the defense by surprise, presenting Meehan as his DNA expert before they
had prepared to cross-examine him. The defense team decided to have Bannon
question him on the spot.
“It became fairly clear about 10-15 minutes into it that
the expert realized that Brad [Bannon] knew what the hell he was talking
about,” Cooney said.
The defense team confronted Meehan with whether he had
agreed with Nifong to withhold some DNA results: “There’s only one answer to
this question, and that answer being yes. Because we did not report the
reference profiles of those specimens and we did talk about not reporting
those,” Meehan said.
There was applause in the courtroom.
10. When the
Falsely Accused Players Showed More Maturity Than Their Professors and the
Media
All of the accused players are involved with the
Innocence Project, which uses DNA evidence to overturn wrongful convictions.
Said Reade Seligmann, upon his exoneration:
“This entire experience has opened my eyes to a tragic
world of injustice I never knew existed. If police officers and a district
attorney can systematically railroad us with absolutely no evidence whatsoever,
I can’t imagine what they’d do to people who do not have the resources to defend
themselves.”
To this day, most of the Duke faculty and leadership who
prejudged the lacrosse players remain in their positions and have never
apologized. Media figures who apologized or retracted are few and far between.
Instead, most coverage offered grudging reporting on the dismissal of charges.
Ten years later, despite a recent lesson in humility with
the Rolling Stone UVA rape story,
some of that grudging tone remains, as in Slate’s write-up on the documentary:
“[I]t’s a bizarre experience to watch a documentary that expects the viewer to
root for a bunch of accused rapists.”
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