Duke Lacrosse Hoax at 20: Guilty Until Proven Innocent
Naming and shaming the demoralization agents in the media, academia, and judicial system responsible for the 2006 Duke Lacrosse Hoax - unsung hero Steven Miller at the end
Comrades: The 2006 Duke Lacrosse Scandal destroyed innocent until proven guilty. It was patient zero of the #MeToo #BelieveAllWomen hoaxes and hysterias like UVA fraternities, Brett Kavanaugh, Trevor Bauer, Matt Araiza, Brian Banks, and countless others. 18-year-old boys and girls who weren’t born when the Duke scandal unfolded are entering college campuses that were forever scarred by it.
Newsweek’s cover is one of the most heinous ever printed:
Duke Lacrosse is the case study of how the smear machine force feeds lies and The Narrative. The same playbook of digital, judicial, and physical attacks has been deployed many times since then. What should have never happened again has only gotten worse because no one was held accountable. If you are wondering how we got here, this is where it started. The only way to end this madness is to subvert the subverters and destroy the destroyers of our society, or else they will keep doing it until they rule over an ash heap. Today I will name and shame the demoralization agents in the media, academia, and judicial system who carried out this travesty.
The Big Lie
In March 2006, a stripper named Crystal Mangum accused three Duke Lacrosse team members of raping her after she performed at an off-campus party. On her word alone and no evidence, Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong and a grand jury indicted them on charges of first degree forcible rape, first degree sexual offense, and kidnapping. The media went into hysteria, driving the narrative that these privileged white men gang raped an oppressed black woman. Duke President Richard Brodhead cancelled the team’s season, forced the accused players to leave campus, and fired Duke Lacrosse Coach Mike Pressler because he refused to throw his team under the bus.
The inconvenient truth was that no crime had been committed. All of the evidence exonerated the accused, yet Nifong covered it up and the accuser was never punished for her false accusation. In the 5 days after the players were arrested in 2006, there were 160 major TV news stories. When their accuser was convicted of murdering her boyfriend and sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2013, there were only 3 major TV news stories. That is a 50x difference in coverage between a real crime and a fake one. The damage had been done to the players, their families, Duke, and our country’s discourse which has only worsened since then.
Justice System: Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong
Mike Nifong used the case to boost his election campaign. In May 2006, a month after the indictments, he won a tight primary race with strong support from black voters. In November 2006, he won the general election. In December 2006, he dropped the rape charges due to the inconsistencies in Mangum's story and lack of evidence. In April 2007, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper declared all 3 players innocent and dropped the remaining charges, saying that they were victims of a "tragic rush to accuse”.
Nifong is the only villain who faced any accountability. He was disbarred after being found guilty of a battery of ethics violations for his handling of the investigation. The laundry list includes fraud, dishonesty, making false statements of material fact before a judge, and lying about withholding exculpatory DNA evidence. However, he was only jailed for one day. The exonerated players then sued him into bankruptcy.
Academia: Group of 88 - Houston Baker, Charles Payne, Sally Deutsch, et al
88 Duke professors known as the Group of 88 signed this inflammatory open letter in the school's student newspaper. Unsurprisingly, the department with the highest proportion of signatories was African and African-American Studies with 80%. Second place went to Women's Studies with 70%, followed by Cultural Anthropology with 60%. No faculty members from the Pratt School of Engineering or full-time law professors signed it.
Not a single member of the Group of 88 was held accountable. Worse yet, many were promoted at Duke or elsewhere. One of the signatories, African and African American Studies Houston Baker, continued to call the players "hooligans, rapists," and e-mailed one of their moms that she was "the mother of a farm animal." He is now a Distinguished University Professor at Vanderbilt:
Charles Payne (muzzled below), who violated Duke rules by authorizing departmental funds to pay for the Group of 88’s ad, became a Professor at the University of Chicago and served as Chief Education Officer for Chicago Public Schools. Duke promoted three other Group members to Deans: Sally Deutsch, Lee Baker, and Srinivas Aravamudan.
Duke continued to bring in the worst DIE commissars after the scandal. In 2008, Duke hired Harvard’s Professor J. Lorand Matory to chair the African-American Studies Department. In the summer of 2005, Matory was one of the leaders of a group calling for a faculty vote of no-confidence in University President Larry Summers. That was a major domino that led to Harvard’s ideological capture by DIE commissars like Claudine Gay. Duke has also hired Eric Deggans, an NPR pronoun commissar who wrote a book called “Race-Baiter”, to teach a class on media and race:
After the players were declared innocent, the Group of 88 issued a gaslighting statement expressing its defiance in not apologizing or retracting:
The ad has been read as a comment on the alleged rape, the team party, or the specific students accused. Worse, it has been read as rendering a judgment in the case. We understand the ad instead as a call to action on important, longstanding issues on and around our campus, an attempt to channel the attention generated by the incident to addressing these. We reject all attempts to try the case outside the courts, and stand firmly by the principle of the presumption of innocence.
As a statement about campus culture, the ad deplores a "Social Disaster," as described in the student statements, which feature racism, segregation, isolation, and sexism as ongoing problems before the scandal broke, exacerbated by the heightened tensions in its immediate aftermath. The disaster is the atmosphere that allows sexism, racism, and sexual violence to be so prevalent on campus. The ad's statement that the problem "won't end with what the police say or the court decides" is as clearly true now as it was then. Whatever its conclusions, the legal process will not resolve these problems.
There have been public calls to the authors to retract the ad or apologize for it, as well as calls for action against them and attacks on their character. We reject all of these. We think the ad's authors were right to give voice to the students quoted, whose suffering is real. We also acknowledge the pain that has been generated by what we believe is a misperception that the authors of the ad prejudged the rape case. We stand by the claim that issues of race and sexual violence on campus are real, and we join the ad's call to all of us at Duke to do something about this. We hope that the Duke community will emerge from this tragedy as a better place for all of us to live, study, and work.
Media: New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Amanda Marcotte, and AWFLs galore
Warren St. John and Joe Drape coauthored The New York Times smear that “A Team’s Troubles Shock Few”. Warren is now the President of Patch, the hyperlocal news network that was formerly part of AOL. Joe remains employed by the Grey Lady.
Serial race hustler Al Sharpton went down to campus to stir up a mob. It was so egregious that even Whoopi Goldberg told him to apologize via NPR, but he never did.
Feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte declared on her blog that people who defended the wrongly accused Duke students were "rape-loving scum". When Nifong received ethics charges, she doubled down: “I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and fucked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out. Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.” Predictably, she is now a senior politics writer for Salon. In a sane world, she would never have a journalism job again and would also be sued into bankruptcy.
HLN anchor Nancy Grace: "I'm so glad they didn't miss a lacrosse game over a little thing like gang rape! "Why would you go to a cop in an alleged gang rape case, say, and lie and give misleading information?" She neither apologized nor lost her job.
Legal commentator Susan Estrich; "I teach criminal law. But what are we dealing with here? The mafia, or a sports team from a first-class university. Instead, they hire them lawyers to trash the victim and the prosecutor." She previously served as campaign manager for Michael Dukakis. In a dark twist, she is now a partner at Boies Schiller Flexner and represented Leon Black, a billionaire investor and associate of Jeffrey Epstein.
Former prosecutor Wendy Murphy: "Nifong should be rewarded for respecting the defendants' rights by not leaking the type of evidence that could help him personally respond to criticism… I never, ever met a false rape claim, by the way. My own statistics speak to the truth."
Washington Post columnist Mike Wise: "It's hard to embrace everyone as a victim. With all due respect to those 'INNOCENT' bracelets worn around Durham this year, this isn't "To Kill a Mockingbird II."
Chicago Tribune columnist Philip Hersh: "The idea that the Duke lacrosse team's success is a feel-good story makes me ill... it would be a bigger mistake to believe (the dropping of charges) means Duke's lacrosse team was innocent of assault against common decency."
Only one journalist apologized:
Duke Athletics and Duke Women’s Volleyball hoax 2022
If you do not punish witch hunts, you will get more witch hunts. In 2022, Duke Volleyball player Rachel Richardson accused BYU fans of racial slurs. USA Today and other MSM propagandists reported it as fact before an investigation was completed. Following the exoneration of the BYU community, Duke assistant athletic director Nina King stated: "Duke Athletics believes in respect, equality and inclusiveness, and we do not tolerate hate and bias."
Similar to Mike Nifong, Richardson’s godmother Lesa Pamplin happened to be running for election for judge in the Tarrant County (TX) Criminal Court during the incident. Thankfully she lost, but she has a history of stoking racial animus:
Like Claudine Gay and many other DIE commissars, Nina King is a rebel in the streets but colonized in the sheets:
White Pill: Duke Lacrosse Coach Mike Pressler, Stephen Miller, Professor KC Johnson, and the parents and lawyers of the accused players
Duke Lacrosse Coach Mike Pressler was fired for disobeying Duke’s President and not throwing his players under the bus. He then coached Bryant from 2007 until his retirement in 2022. In 2010, he coached the United States men's national lacrosse team to a gold medal.
Captain Dave Evans shifted the narrative. Surrounded by his teammates and family, he made a brave stand at a press conference before surrendering to police and posting a $400,000 bond:
"I am absolutely innocent of all the charges that were brought against me. These allegations are lies. Fabricated. And they will be proven wrong…. I fully cooperated with police and continue to cooperate with them… Every member of the Duke lacrosse team is innocent. You have all been told some fantastic lies, I look forward to watching them unravel in the weeks to come - and they already have in weeks past. The truth will come out."
In the aftermath, the players brought a civil lawsuit against Duke. They called for criminal justice reform laws in a federal civil rights lawsuit filed against the City of Durham and its police department. No amount of money can repair a national smear campaign, but estimates put the settlement in the $10-20M range.
Trump’s homeland security advisor Stephen Miller was a Duke student at the time. He displayed more courage than the rest of the student body combined:
Brooklyn College Professor KC Johnson was the premier citizen journalist on the case. He created a blog called “Durham in Wonderland” that documented all of the malfeasance. “When I first started writing about the lacrosse case, at a joint historians’ blog called Cliopatria, I did so in reaction to the Group of 88 statement. Then (and now) I considered the statement an indefensible betrayal by professors of their own school’s students, an action that contradicted many of the basic values on which American higher education rests.”
The last serious journalism ESPN conducted before it went woke was a 30 for 30 Documentary called “Fantastic Lies”:
All of the commissars wanted the Duke Lacrosse players thrown in the gulag, at minimum. They are the same types who celebrate Charlie Kirk’s death and want anyone they disagree with to meet the same fate. The police chief of Duke’s city Durham, North Carolina smeared him. And they don’t know or don’t care about what happened to Iryna Zarutska, while Democrat Governor Josh Stein refuses to sign Iryan’s Law. What is happening in North Carolina?
Will there be justice for Adam Johnson?
This Duke alum has not forgotten that the Group of 88 were never held accountable.
For what it’s worth, Crystal Mangum is currently serving a far-too-short prison term for murdering her sugar daddy, after laughably claiming she was afraid for her life. I guess she thought playing the victim worked once, so why not again?