The Further Vindication of the Duke Lacrosse Players

National Review Online

Tuesday, December 17, 2024

 

Slowly and quite reluctantly, Democratic political operatives are coming around to the notion that the misfortune that befell their party on November 5 is attributable to the excesses of identity politics in the age of “wokeness.” But it shouldn’t have taken an electoral shellacking to see the injustice encouraged by a movement that strips individuals of their agency and treats them as abstract avatars of a particular tribe. Indeed, Democrats could have learned that lesson nearly two decades ago.

 

In 2006, Duke University men’s lacrosse team members hired Crystal Mangum, an erotic dancer, to entertain a private party. Mangum later claimed that she was raped by several attendees, including university students. The allegation proved a sensation. It captured the attention of the national press and the political class alike, the members of which appeared to take Mangum’s accusations at face value.

 

The students were portrayed in the press as “privileged, racist brutes prone to binge drinking,” according to the Washington Post, who were as titillated by Mangum’s performance as they were by the opportunity to degrade a young black woman. “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,” Jesse Jackson wrote at the time. Duke president Richard Brodhead suspended the team even without any formal charges against its members. Local prosecutor Mike Nifong eventually charged some of the Duke lacrosse players, but the prosecution soon fell apart.

 

A forensic analysis of Mangum’s body and the scene of the alleged crime did not substantiate the accuser’s claims, and the discovery that Nifong had withheld exculpatory evidence (he would later resign and be disbarred) sealed the case’s fate. “Based on the significant inconsistencies between the evidence and the various accounts given by the accusing witness,” said then-attorney general and current North Carolina governor Roy Cooper, “we believe these three individuals are innocent of these charges.” Sixteen months after the infamous party, Duke University agreed to settle a dispute with the players it had disparaged.

 

That should have been the end of this saga. But rather than admit that their worldview had misled them so, those who are partial to a collectivist theory of justice insisted that the Duke lacrosse players took advantage of the inequities inherent to the American justice system. Those intrepid few who still clung to the belief that American perfidy shielded Duke’s players from true justice just had the rug pulled out from under them by Mangum herself.

 

“I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t, and that was wrong,” Mangum recently confessed during an interview from the correctional facility where she’s serving a maximum 17-year sentence for the 2011 murder of her boyfriend. Mangum said she “made up a story that wasn’t true” in the pursuit of “validation” from those around her. “I want them to know that I love them, and they didn’t deserve that,” she said of those she falsely accused. “I hope that they can forgive me.”

 

Mangum led a troubled life prior to and after the lie that made her a celebrity. We can only hope her pursuit of penance is sincere. But the tragedy she engineered would not have been possible in the absence of the incentives for “validation” at large in the culture that Mangum correctly identified. She was a beneficiary of what Hillary Clinton later described as an article of faith among social justice activists. “I want to send a message to every survivor of sexual assault,” she wrote in 2015. “You have the right to be believed.” It was the perfect distillation of the conflict between social justice and actual justice — between a philosophy that believes virtue is conferred by the accidents of one’s birth and an outlook that ascribes responsibility for individual acts to the individual.

 

Mangum wasn’t the only fraudster who preyed on the Left’s uncharitable assumptions about young white men, in particular, but non-minorities broadly. Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely followed a similar path when she penned a (literally) unbelievable tale of gang rape as an initiation ceremony at a University of Virginia fraternity in 2014. The same assumptions were on display during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, in which a shockingly large number of credentialed and productive members of American society exposed the depths of their prejudice toward those who shared the justice’s demographic traits. “A lot of white men don’t know what it’s like to feel threatened, powerless, and frustrated,” said Hillary Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, at the time. But there was no compassion in this observation. “As we go through the reckoning of this lopsided power balance,” she warned, “there’s going to be a lot more of this.”

 

Indeed, there have been too many examples of this kind of injustice. It was a product of unquestioned fealty to the notion that white men, in particular, were due a karmic reckoning. “If there’s ten people who have been accused, and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, it seems better to get rid of all ten people,” said Jared Polis, currently the governor of Colorado, turning Sir William Blackstone’s ratio on its head. “I’ve seen this go down, and there really is no winning once the accusation is made,” he added. “Someone who is wrongfully accused needs to do their best to put it behind them and move on.”

 

Polis has a point there, sordid though it may be. The young men Mangum accused will never get back what her unfounded accusations and a credulous media landscape took from them. Their reputations were besmirched. The faces of the falsely accused were printed on “wanted” posters that were distributed broadly on Duke’s campus. Some found it difficult to secure and retain employment. One Duke lacrosse player felt compelled to change his name.

 

For true believers in the cult of social justice, even Mangum’s confession will not disabuse them of their belief that those who are born into the wrong identities are the illegitimate beneficiaries of generational theft. Fortunately, the American justice system is blind to emotional blackmail and ideologically motivated reasoning. May it ever be thus.