Ten months into one of the most dramatic racial rape hoaxes in American history, the suspects still can't get their lies straight.
By suspects, I do not mean defendants Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, or Dave Evans. They're the crime victims. The suspects are Durham, NC DA Mike Nifong who finally backed off on Friday asked North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper to appoint a special prosecutor in the case; Durham Police Sgt. Mark Gottlieb; Duke University President Richard Brodhead, various Duke administrators; the almost 100 professors (including the "Duke 88";) who sought to have the victims railroaded, and who incited hatred against them; the socialist MSM; hoaxer Crystal Gail Mangum; and assorted John and Jane Does.
It would easy for readers who have not obsessively followed the case to have filled in the gaps in their memories with something like, 'Well, the police and prosecutors thought there was a rape, but the case fell apart, and then they didn't want to admit it' So let me indicate at the outset the most important facts you need to know about this case.
I recommend those curious as to what transpired that night to consult the encyclopedic timeline provided by The Johnsville News, which shows that the defendants had no opportunity to rape the accuser, in conjunction with the police and medical reports on Mangum's conduct at Kroger's grocery, the Durham Access Center and Duke University Medical Center (DUMC) (see also here), and the negative DNA results.
As (former?) Nifong supporter, Durham criminal defense lawyer Mark Edwards, told the Raleigh News & Observer on June 23, "Unless [Nifong] has a player from the team who is going to testify that this rape occurred, there is no way he will win this case and there is no way this case should have ever been brought."
The various guilty parties are now in a mad dash to put new cover stories into circulation, and send their original stories down the memory hole, in order to protect themselves from public backlash, civil suits, and in some cases, criminal prosecution.
The rape charges were thrown out on December 22, and Prosecutor from Hell Mike Nifong is now defendant Nifong, charged by the North Carolina Bar with ethics violations.
So the Duke Three are home free … right? And even if the case goes to trial, they'll be acquitted by the jury in minutes, right?
Wrong and wrong. Reade Seligmann, Dave Evans, and Collin Finnerty, 20, 23, and 19 respectively, at the time of the March 14 non-rape, are still charged with first-degree sexual offense and first-degree kidnapping, and thus remain in danger of spending up to 31 years in prison.
Besides, it is not an acceptable response to prosecutorial misconduct to say, as some people have, including Duke University President Richard Brodhead, [send him mail] to let the trial be held and the players have the chance to be "proved innocent." As K.C. Johnson, the CUNY Brooklyn College historian who has been the Emile Zola of the Duke Rape Hoax observed, Brodhead et al., were "turning on its head 220 years of American constitutional history."
In the American criminal justice system, it is illegal for a prosecutor to charge anyone with a non-existent crime. And it is not the prerogative of any jury to decide the fate of falsely charged defendants.
The only "crime" the three defendants are guilty of, is of being white, heterosexual men. If those three young white men go to trial in Durham, they may suffer the obverse side of jury nullification—"heads we win, tails you lose"—being railroaded by a black-dominated, racist jury, with white jurors either excluded or too cowardly to do the right thing.
In case you suspect I am exaggerating the danger to the defendants, consider the words of Irving Joyner, [send him mail] a leading professor of law at accuser Crystal Gail Mangum's school, black North Carolina Central University (NCCU), in Durham. Joyner serves as the "case monitor" of the NAACP, which has continuously supported the railroading of the white victims.
In June, over two months after the prosecution's case had been publicly exposed as non-existent, Joyner told Sports Illustrated, "[Nifong] still has a viable shot at victory before a jury in Durham." When K.C. Johnson e-mailed Joyner, asking him why he had emphasized a jury in Durham, Joyner responded:
"A Durham jury may see things differently than would an Orange or Wake County jury because the Durham jury will probably have more African-Americans on it than would be involved in most other counties in North Carolina…. This case originated in Durham and should be tried here."
At the time, Joyner also bragged that the exculpatory evidence would be thrown out, because of the "rape shield law and other evidentiary barriers," and spoke approvingly of "the value of [Nifong's] evidence," even though Joyner had to know at that point that there was no crime and thus no incriminating evidence. (Duke Hoax chronicler and Nifong critic William Anderson detailed on July 22 how Nifong could use rape shield laws—yet another abomination we have feminism to thank for—to railroad the victims.)
"A viable shot at victory"—not, as Nifong critics K.C. Johnson and Mike Gaynor pointed out, a viable case.
"Evidentiary barriers." So much for forensics.
As K.C. Johnson pointed out on August 16, the NAACP has in the case of the Duke Three contradicted every position it had taken in recent years in defense of defendants' rights, including its support of a gag order, in order to stop the victims' attorneys from defending their clients in the face of Nifong's defamatory media campaign; in supporting Nifong's use of corrupted photo lineup identifications; and in opposing a change of venue, despite the jury pool having been hopelessly contaminated.
When Johnson wrote to the North Carolina and Duke University ACLUs three times each, to ask why the organizations have not protested Nifong's violation of the Duke Three's rights, they refused to comment.
The ACLU ceased being a civil liberties organization years ago.
And even with the rape charges thrown out, Sports Illustrated "legal expert" Lester Munson still seeks to keep the hoax alive:
Munson: From the beginning, the police and District Attorney Mike Nifong had no forensic or scientific evidence of a rape….
SI.com: What's next for the accused Duke players?
Munson: They still face some serious charges. There is little doubt that something unsavory happened at the party on March 13. After the dismissal of the rape charges, it will be easier for the accused players to attempt to settle everything with a guilty plea on lesser charges. The likelihood of a trial on any of these charges is now greatly reduced.
SI.com: Can the Duke athletes now consider any action against prosecutor Nifong or the accuser?
Munson: It's possible that the Duke athletes and their attorneys may discuss the possibility of a malicious prosecution lawsuit against Nifong or the accuser. The wiser course would be to drop any such idea and seek a final resolution of the remaining charges.
So, after they had then spent nine months successfully fighting for their lives against one of the most criminal prosecutions in American history, Munson [send him mail] thought the Duke Three should just surrender, and do whatever would save face for Mike Nifong.
Even if one had initially believed the highly-doctored official story that the players had raped Mangum, there was never any basis for the charges of first-degree kidnapping and first-degree sexual offense. Indeed, the remaining charges are so logically dependent on the rape charge, that they can no more be sustained after the rape charge's dismissal than one can remain up in a tree after sawing off the branch one is sitting on.
Only through extreme sophistry can dragging someone from one room to another within the same apartment be construed to constitute "kidnapping," and the sexual offense charge was redundant. As Paul Craig Roberts, the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice has often pointed out, lawless prosecutors today routinely pile on illegitimate and redundant charges, in order to coerce defendants, whether guilty or innocent, into accepting a guilty plea on one charge.
Munson's psychological trump card is the "something unsavory happened" line. There is no crime on federal or North Carolina law books against committing "something unsavory." Black racists and their white allies who want convictions, the law be damned, have favored variations on that vague phrase. When Munson used it, he was reaching out to racist, potential black jurors to convict men who have not committed any of the crimes they are charged with. And, as Munson is likely aware, "something happened" is also one of the lines that black supremacist supporters still use on behalf of racial rape hoaxer Tawana Brawley.
And why on earth would Seligmann, Finnerty, and Evans drop all thought of suing Nifong for malicious prosecution? Each already owes hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, will likely suffer from lifetime diminished earning power due to the stigma of the case, and in any event, has a legal and moral right to payment for his suffering.
The reason Munson wants the persecuted players to meekly submit to guilty pleas (and likely prison terms), is because the pleas would require that the players admit in court to having committed crimes they never committed, thus making it impossible for them to sue Nifong for malicious prosecution, and would greatly reduce the likelihood of Nifong being disbarred and/or criminally prosecuted. Munson's advice is wonderful for Mike Nifong!
I guess as far as Lester Munson is concerned, Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and Dave Evans don't count as human beings endowed with certain inalienable rights.
One has to understand that for people like Irving Joyner and Lester Munson, and organizations like the NAACP and the ACLU, lip-service to legal "principles" is just a cover for racial/ethnic, sexual, and political loyalties. For them, the point of all "principles" and laws is to help their friends and harm their enemies.
When, for instance, the NAACP has passionately supported proposed laws protecting defendants' rights, it did so because it believed that such laws would benefit black defendants. Since the Duke Three are all white, the NAACP has passionately supported the violation of those very rights.
Nothing short of dropping all of the charges against Seligmann, Finnerty, and Evans "with prejudice" (meaning the charges may not be reinstated) will be in the interests of justice.
Although no rape is now even alleged to have been committed, since Mangum's official story is one of rape and only rape, it is impossible to discuss the case without discussing her rape charges.
The multiple "rapes" are alleged to have taken place at some point between 12 midnight and 12:50 a.m. during the night of March 13-14, at a house rented by the Duke lacrosse team's captains at 610 North Buchanan Boulevard in Durham.
It was the beginning of spring break, and the players had hired two "exotic dancers," Mangum (who works under the name "Precious"), who is black, and Kim Roberts Pittman (who works under the name "Nikki"), black-Asian and then 31, from an "escort service" to perform for two hours, at an agreed upon price of $400 each. The players had asked for one white and one Hispanic stripper.
Mangum was able to perform for less than four minutes (from 12 midnight until between 12:03 and 12:04 a.m.), at which point the performance ended, due to her being in a state of extreme intoxication from having ingested the dangerous mix of the muscle relaxant Flexeril and alcohol. An argument ensued over the unsatisfactory performance. The women locked themselves in the bathroom from approximately 12:04-12:20 a.m., before leaving the house and spending the next thirty minutes outside.
If one consults the timeline provided by the The Johnsville News, replete with time-stamped photos from the party, and reports by Pittman and next-door neighbor Jason Bissey, 26, from their police and media statements, one will see that Reade Seligmann had no opportunity to rape Mangum between her entry into the house at 12 midnight and his stepping outside, a few minutes after 12:04 a.m., while she was locked inside the bathroom with Pittman. In any event, Seligmann was constantly talking on his cell phone, as he made nine calls between 12:05 and 12:16 a.m., and left in a taxi at 12:19 a.m.
The timeline also shows that the other men present lacked a window of opportunity during which to engage in a prolonged gang-rape alone in the bathroom with Mangum.
At 12:53 a.m., Durham police received an anonymous 911 call from a woman (Pittman), saying now that she and her "black girlfriend" had driven by, now that they had walked by the house where the lacrosse players were, and that one of the players had called the women the "n" word. (Pittman later admitted to the late Ed Bradley on the October 15 60 Minutes, having first said a racial slur to a white lacrosse player not from the Duke Three, before the player returned fire.)
Unbeknownst to the public and the eventual suspects until June—due to DA Mike Nifong's prosecutorial misconduct—Mangum's story—or rather, stories— unraveled that very night.
Pittman drove Mangum to an all-night Kroger's grocery. When Mangum refused to get out of her car, Pittman told a security guard that Mangum was unconscious, and asked him to call 911. At Kroger's, Durham P.D. Sgt. J.C. Shelton, the first officer on the scene, reported that Mangum was intoxicated and faking unconsciousness, and that Pittman had claimed that Mangum was a stranger she'd "picked up … after seeing white males yelling racial slurs at her."
In interviews that night with medical personnel at Durham Access Center and DUMC, Mangum told multiple, mutually contradictory stories. She said she was groped, but not raped. She said she was raped. There were twenty rapists, two, three… and then five.
Crystal Gail Mangum ultimately claimed that various players had locked her in a bathroom and, without using condoms, orally, anally, and vaginally raped her over the course of 30 minutes, that one or more had ejaculated inside of her, and that she had spat out semen.
At DUMC, when Sgt. Shelton confronted Mangum with her (raped/not raped) contradictions, she broke down in tears, and refused to talk to him any more. She only revived the rape story when an inexperienced registered nurse, Tara Levicy, who was only a probationary SANE (Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner) in training, directly asked her, in violation of good practices, "Were you raped?"
Kathleen Eckelt, a registered nurse and forensic nurse examiner, wrote at her blog, Forensics Talk, that an interviewer should have asked Mangum an open-ended question, such as "'Did something happen?' 'Do you want to tell me about it?' or 'Tell me what happened.' That puts it right back on the patient to say what did or did not happen. She's telling us. We're not telling her!"
Levicy's violation of good practices may have had an ideological basis. As K.C. Johnson wrote on January 9,
"Her undergraduate degree, from the University of Maine, came in women's studies-the discipline that produced copious Group of 88 members, and home of feminist law theory, which contends that women never lie about rape.
"She stated that one of her proudest moments in college came when she produced and directed a performance of Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues."
Since the heavily intoxicated Mangum emphasized "extreme vaginal pain" at DUMC, and when the doctor there would not prescribe her painkillers, she went to the University of North Carolina (UNC) Hospitals the next day, telling a new story of "neck and back pain and hitting her head." After one UNC doctor, concerned that her psychological history made her a prime candidate for "narcotics abuse" refused to write her a prescription, "A second physician prescribed the muscle relaxant Flexeril and 15 doses of Percocet, a powerful narcotic painkiller."
Eckelt hypothesizes that Mangum's journey began as an attempt to avoid an arrest for public intoxication and as "drug-seeking behavior."
To recap, the hoax was born of one crazy stratagem after another of Crystal Gail Magnum. First, she refused to get out of Kim Roberts Pittman's car. Then, faced with an arrest for public intoxication, she pulled a non-responsive routine. But that backfired; as Stuart Taylor observed, she was about to be involuntarily committed at the Durham Access Center, when she first figured that claiming she'd been raped might be the ticket out of that jam. Once that disaster was averted, she recanted her rape story, which had served its purpose. Then, argues Kathleen Eckelt, the rape story again looked useful at DUMC, when it appeared that it might gain Mangum her coveted narcotics.
Meanwhile, in the middle of the same three-week period when Mangum was doing the rounds of local hospitals complaining of horrible, incapacitating pain and seeking narcotics, as Raleigh News & Observer reporter Joseph Neff later revealed, a March 26 film showed her doing her normal, limber, pole-dancing routine.
Mangum's initial descriptions of her "attackers" to police investigators Benjamin Himan and Sgt. Mark Gottlieb on March 16 bore no resemblance to any of the players who would eventually be indicted one (Seligmann and Finnerty) and two months (Evans) later, respectively. Four months later, Gottlieb would fudge a 33-page report "from memory" that miraculously matched Mangum's rigged photo lineup identifications in April and May, but completely contradicted the report Himan had typed immediately after the March 16 interview, as well as the notes written by SANE Nurse Tara Levicy during or immediately following her rape examination of Mangum early on March 14. Gottlieb has claimed that his report was based on three pages of handwritten notes that he wrote at the time, but it has since been revealed that he wrote no notes at the time, thus robbing his report of all credibility.
Although Mangum claimed not to have had sex during the previous week, later DNA results (the ones Meehan testified that he and Nifong conspired to suppress) showed that there was semen in her vagina and on her panties from several men, but none from any of the lacrosse players.
In telling the D.A.'s office on December 21 that she no longer was sure she'd been raped, Mangum more or less came full circle to her original statement from March 14.
As with the 1987 Tawana Brawley Hoax, in which a 15-year-old, black, chronic runaway conjured up a racial kidnapping and gang-rape simply to avoid a beating at the hands of her mother's murderous boyfriend for running away for four days, with Mangum, the racial rape hoax was just an expedient to achieve an immediate goal.
As The Johnsville News showed on June 13, Nifong had determined already on April 6, through interviews with Mangum's "driver," Jarriel Johnson, that there was a reasonable alternate explanation, through Mangum's, er, work, for her vaginal swelling prior to her going to the lacrosse team's house: "that in the 48 hours before the party she had, by her driver's account, been on at least four one-on-one dates as an escort" (What, pray tell, does an "escort" do on a "one-on-one date"?)
As of March 13, Crystal Mangum was a full-time student with a "B" average at NCCU.
In 1996, Mangum claimed that she had been gang- raped by three black men three years earlier. Her father has disputed her claim and Mangum never pressed charges.
(Many observers have suggested that the 1993 case was a hoax and a prelude to Mangum's current hoax; I assume nothing of the sort. Some of Mangum's behaviors—emotional instability, promiscuity, inability to have a healthy relationship with a man—are consistent with those of people who were sexually abused as children. However, having been abused by some men in one's youth does not give someone the right to later terrorize a group of innocent men with false claims.)
While serving in the U.S. Navy, Mangum cuckolded her non-serviceman husband with another man, whose child she bore. After she was forced to separate from the service, she and her husband divorced, after which she bore the other man a second child. When the other man deserted Mangum and their children, she had to apply to family court to get his wages garnished for child support.
In April, bloggers, followed by the MSM, revealed that Crystal Gail Mangum and Kim Roberts Pittman were both convicted criminals.
In 2002, the first time Mangum supposedly worked as a stripper, she pickpocketed a taxi-driver customer's car keys; stole his cab; drove while intoxicated; fled arrest, taking police on a high-speed chase; and attempted to murder a policeman, by trying to run him down. And yet, by the time she pleaded guilty, the charges had been so reduced that Mangum spent only five days in jail, over the course of three weekends.
Mangum also has a problematic psychiatric history.
On November 4, Joseph Neff, Benjamin Niolet, and Anne Blythe reported in the Raleigh News Observer that H.P. Thomas, who had been the security manager at a club where Magnum performed, said that on March 18, Mangum "basically [told her colleagues] 'I'm going to get paid by the white boys' … 'I said, "Whatever," because no one takes her seriously.'"
Thomas also said that in the days following March 14, Mangum showed no signs of having been traumatized, which Pittman has also said about her behavior after leaving the players' house.
* * *
Pittman had been convicted in 2001 of embezzlement, for stealing $25,000 from a company where she had helped out with the payroll. She also got only probation, and did not serve time for her crimes.
Days after the alleged rape occurred, Roberts e-mailed a public relations firm, to see how she could spin the situation to her monetary advantage.
When someone comes to the authorities with horrific charges that are utterly contradictory on their face, the prosecutor must refrain from pressing charges against any "suspects." If the charges are then completely contradicted by the forensic evidence, as well by the only available witness (Pittman), the prosecutor must consider charges against the accuser.
A Desperate Man
DA Mike Nifong had never worked anywhere but in the Durham DA's office since graduation from law school. Appointed DA by Democrat North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley, when Nifong's predecessor was appointed to a judgeship, he was running for district attorney for the first time. He was in danger of losing the May 3 primary which was to decide the election. (At that point, the Democrat candidate would run unopposed). And with blacks making up 45 percent of Durham's residents, Nifong was desperate for black votes. And so he played Mangum's false charges for all they were worth, demagoguing racist black Durham voters. With their support, he won by a bare 883 votes (45 to 42 percent).
On March 27, Nifong began speaking on the record to the media. At that point, unbeknownst to the public, it was obviously unlikely that any crime had been committed, based on Mangum's March 14 statements, which the Durham PD found lacked credibility. Nifong had no suspects, let alone indictments. And yet, during the next approximately two weeks, Nifong would give some 70 interviews to local and national media, condemning the lacrosse team for erecting a "blue wall of silence," "stonewall[ing]" and refusing to cooperate with investigators. He threatened to bring charges of aiding and abetting against any players who did not come forward with incriminating statements against their teammates, and condemned the entire men's lacrosse team as "a bunch of hooligans" whose "daddies could buy them expensive lawyers."
The problem was that, to borrow from Mary McCarthy, every word Nifong said was a lie, including "and" and "the." The players had been forthcoming and cooperative. They knew they had committed no crime, save for underaged drinking, which at least half of the Duke student body was guilty of.
The Lies of Mike Nifong
D.A. Nifong has been caught telling so many whoppers, and engaging in so much deceptive behavior that an exhaustive list would leave room for nothing else in this article. The following list is necessarily partial. The most comprehensive list I am aware of, was prepared by Nifong critics John in North Carolina and Liestoppers.
And so, three men are in danger of spending over 30 years in jail, due to the expedient, ever-changing stories of two obvious pathological liars—Crystal Gail Mangum and Mike Nifong. Is this any way to run a criminal justice system?!
* * *
On December 21, nine months after Mangum had made her charges, Nifong interviewed her for the first time. (What's your hurry?) When she suddenly "wavered" as to whether she had in fact been penetrated by the penis of any of the players (the legal requirement for a rape charge), Nifong dropped the rape charges.
On December 28, the North Carolina Bar charged Nifong with four violations of state legal rules. The first three charges are variations on the theme of Nifong's having, through stating his personal opinion to reporters, prejudiced the public against the defendants, poisoned the jury pool, thus making it impossible for the defendants to get a fair trial. The fourth charge was that regarding the facts of the case, he "engaged in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation in violation of Rule 8.4(a) of the Revised Rules of Professional Conduct."
Between March and May, the Bar will hold a professional trial of DA Nifong, which could result in no sanctions being levied against him, in his being officially reprimanded and/or temporarily suspended from practicing law, or in his being disbarred.
One day after the Bar published its charges against Nifong, the seven officers of the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys signed a letter formally requesting of him that he "recuse" himself from the Duke lacrosse case.
As Betsy Newmark wrote on December 23, the conspiracy to withhold evidence that Brian Meehan's December 15 testimony indicated, has "brought into question every other prosecution [Nifong] has conducted in Durham County. If he'd violate the North Carolina code in a high profile case, what would he do in the hundreds of other cases that don't receive the public attention that this one has generated?"
The Durham PD
Under Nifong's direction, the Durham PD violated standard North Carolina lineup procedure, which requires that each picture of a suspect be grouped with seven non-suspects. (What in earth was a DA doing running a police investigation?) The DPD rigged photo lineups by including only pictures of white Duke lacrosse players. Thus, it was impossible for the alleged victim to go wrong.
And yet she still did. Although the rigged photo lineups were successful in eventually getting Mangum to "identify" Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty, when she "identified" Dave Evans as the third attacker, not only did she say she was only "90% sure," which was legally unacceptable, but she also claimed that Evans had worn "a mustache" on the night of the alleged attack. One of Evans' lawyers, Joseph B. Cheshire V, insisted that Nifong knew his client had never worn a mustache.
Durham PD Investigator Benjamin Himan made a false sworn statement in an application to the court for DNA testing, in which he misrepresented Mangum's examination at DUMC. I have already cited Sgt. Mark Gottlieb's misconduct.
The University, the Community, and the Media
Rather than respecting the presumption of innocence and the suspects' right to a fair trial, the Duke University administration and faculty did everything but organize a lynching party.
As K.C. Johnson recounted in November,
"On March 25, in an unprecedented move, the president cancelled (at the last minute) the lacrosse team's game against Georgetown, citing underage drinking at the party. Then, on April 5, Brodhead demanded Pressler's resignation, cancelled the lacrosse season, and issued a statement anchored by a lament on the evils of rape-at a time when the players were firmly denying any sexual contact, much less rape. These moves enjoyed enthusiastic support from Board of Trustees chairman Robert Steel. The president later issued a statement urging a trial, on the grounds that it would give the accused players an opportunity to be "proved innocent," in effect turning on its head 220 years of American constitutional history."
The Duke lacrosse program was, at that point, clean as a whistle, had a 100 percent graduation rate, more honor students than any other ACC sports team, and Mike Pressler was one of the most respected lacrosse coaches in the country.
When Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty were indicted on April 17, Brodhead immediately suspended them from school. He would have done the same to Evans, but Evans was only indicted on May 16—the day after he'd graduated.
In shutting down the entire lacrosse season, firing coach Pressler, and standing idly by as players were harassed and demonized, and Pressler endured death threats, Brodhead violated the players' presumption of innocence and right to due process at Duke. He was telling the world that the players were guilty as hell, thus poisoning the potential jury pool, and putting the players' and Pressler and his family's lives in danger.
K.C. Johnson has also reported that, according to his sources, Duke Dean Sue Wasiolek [send her mail] and various other as yet unnamed Duke administrators, acting on their own, violated the players' legal rights by, among other things, lying to them in conjuring up a non-existent "a non-existent 'student-faculty' privilege to encourage the captains to disclose any criminal activity…" while "Dean Sue Wasiolek arranged for a local lawyer, Wes Covington, to act as a 'facilitator' in arranging for a group meeting with police."
And yet, perhaps the most insidious acts of the Brodhead administration were the rewarding of professors from the "88," who had already violated the lacrosse players' rights, with additional, influential positions on groups such as the Campus Culture Initiative, that were themselves products of the rape hoax, and which permitted the professors to consolidate their power, and thereby do further damage to campus intellectual and social life.
Half-Baked
On March 29, Houston Baker, then Duke's George D. and Susan Fox Beischer Professor of English, one of America's most famous African American studies and English scholars (which puts him in the company of such luminaries as Leonard Jeffries and "bell hooks" [Gloria Watkins]), and a former president of the Modern Language Association, sent "Awaiting the Restoration of Confidence: A Letter to the Duke University Administration," to Duke administrators and to the media.
"How is a Duke community citizen to respond to such a national embarrassment from under the cloud of a 'culture of silence' that seeks to protect white, male, athletic violence and which apparently prevents all university citizens from even surveying the known facts?"
Baker spoke of "this horrific, racist incident."
"… [the players] may well feel they can claim innocence and sport their disgraced jerseys on campus, safe under the cover of silent whiteness [?!]. But where is the black woman who [sic] their violence and raucous witness injured for life? Will she ever sleep well again?... Young, white, violent, drunken men among us — implicitly boasted by our athletic directors and administrators — have injured lives….
"… abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed amongst us.
"… white athletes' violent racism … How many more people of color must fall victim to violent, white, male, athletic privilege…
"Surely the answer to the question must come in the form of immediate dismissals of those principally responsible for the horrors of this spring moment at Duke. Coaches of the lacrosse team, the team itself and its players, and any other agents who silenced or lied about the real nature of events at 610 Buchanan on the evening of March 13, 2006."
Blah, blah, blah.
In presuming the lacrosse players guilty, Houston Baker was guilty of gross professional misconduct, defamation, hoary racism, seeking to poison the jury pool, of helping to endanger the players' safety on campus and in Durham… and of horrible English! His conduct was also actionable.
Unfortunately, since he escaped Duke last fall for Vanderbilt University, Baker cannot be fired or otherwise disciplined by Duke for his misconduct. But each and every one of the 46 white men who played on the 2006 Duke men's lacrosse team still can and should sue him.
(Considering the frequency with which black college athletes are charged with violent crimes, including rape, and the relative infrequency of such charges against white athletes, Baker's talk of "white athletes' violent racism" is downright surreal.)
And now, K.C. Johnson reports that the mother of one of the unindicted lacrosse players wrote to Baker [send him mail] just before New Year's, "asking for your help."
"Over the past eight months, much of the evidence has revealed that the three falsely indicted young men have been the victims of rogue DA Nifong…. Whatever you believed in March, I am sure you must be questioning the actions of DA Nifong….
"Our paths may have been different, but I am sure all of us seek the truth and justice…."
Baker wrote back,
"LIES! You are just a provacateur [sic] on a happy New Years Eve trying to get credit for a scummy bunch of white males! You know you are in search of sympaathy [sic] for young white guys who beat up a gay man [sic] in Georgetown, get drunk in Durham, and lived like 'a bunch of farm animals' near campus.
"I really hope whoever sent this stupid farce of an email rots in .... umhappy [sic] new year to you ... and forgive me if your really are, quite sadly, mother of a 'farm animal.'" [Ellipses were inserted by Johnson.]
The mother had mistakenly thought that Baker had a shred of human decency, and had been concerned with discovering the truth and achieving justice. She didn't realize that for a conscienceless academic sociopath like Baker, as Tom Hayden argued at Yale in 1970, "The facts are irrelevant."
And yet, Houston Baker's mixture of hysteria, semi-literacy, pedantry and despicably racist misconduct is all too typical of the politically correct race/gender/class thugs who have taken over university English and social science departments across the country, and who were the raison d'être for the founding of hate and propaganda departments such as African-American, Women's, Gay (or is it "Queer"?), Chicano and Middle Eastern studies in the first place.
The Duke 88
On April 6, a full-page advertisement appeared in Duke's student newspaper, The Chronicle, signed by 88 people, almost all of them tenured, tenure-track, or visiting professors, and supported by three academic departments and 13 programs, strongly implying not only that then-unnamed and unindicted white lacrosse players had committed a brutal, racially motivated rape of a black woman, but that such was the character of the entire lacrosse team, and indeed, of most white men on Duke's campus.
"We are listening to our students. We're also listening to the Durham community, to Duke staff, and to each other. Regardless of the results of the police investigation, what is apparent everyday [sic] now is the anger and fear of many students who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism, who see illuminated in this moment's extraordinary spotlight what they live with everyday [sic]….
These students are shouting and whispering about what happened to this young woman and to themselves."
The advertisement followed with eleven anonymous quotes supporting the notion that the Duke campus was a cauldron of hatred against blacks and women, quotes which turned out to be from eight black female undergraduates, two recently graduated black females, and one black female Ph.D. student. The professors were listening, if at all, to cadres of black activists who, with their professors, comprised a racist echo chamber.
". . . We want the absence of terror. But we don't really know what that means . . . We can't think. That's why we're so silent … Terror robs you of language and you need language for the healing to begin."
"You go to a party, you get grabbed, you get propositioned, and then you start to question yourself."
The undergraduates were students of black African American Studies professor, Wahneema Lubiano, [send her mail] who had written the text that accompanied the quotations, and who placed the ad. Lubiano's text thanked the campus feminists who, beginning in March had constantly demonstrated, calling on the entire lacrosse team to "confess," putting up posters on campus with the pictures of 43 out of the 46 white lacrosse players saying "wanted" and calling them "rapists," carrying around banners saying to "castrate" the lacrosse team, and chanting, "they must be rapists!"
The quoted black students were lying, and projecting their own racism onto white men, who were not running around the Duke campus molesting black women. If the black coeds were being molested, it was by black men. (As to the feminist implication that being propositioned, harassed, and raped are morally equivalent, what is a sane person to say?)
The signatories of the advertisement were playing out a dog-eared script that one sees every time a new race hoax is perpetrated. The hoaxer's supporters immediately evoke a world of silent victims parallel to that of the accuser. And they do constitute a parallel—parallel fictions! The activists seem to have an intuitive feel for when someone has perpetrated a hoax, and always spontaneously run to support her.
Last spring, some Duke professors who taught classes that included members of the men's lacrosse team, went out of their way in class to incite hatred against the men players, and to otherwise discriminate against them. Kim Curtis, a visiting professor of political science, went so far as to single out the two unindicted men's lacrosse players in her class, and flunk them alone.
One of the players she flunked, senior Kyle Dowd, 22, would not have graduated, had Duke administrators not fudged things by retroactively granting him three additional transfer credits from his previous school. Four months later, Duke also changed Dowd's grade in Curtis' class to a "D," claiming the "F" had been due to a "calculation error."
On January 5, Dowd announced that he is suing Kim Curtis, [send her mail] charging her with engaging in "outrageous and unethical conduct" … "asking for the grade to be changed to a 'P' for passing, and want $60,000 in damages."
Dowd's lawyer, Joseph Zeszotarski Jr., said "Kyle Dowd and his family feel very strongly that he was given a grade not based upon his performance, but rather upon the political agenda of the professor." [Ex-Duke lacrosse player sues school | Graduate claims he got an 'F' because he was on team; accuser gives birth, AP, Jan 5, 2007]
In what K.C. Johnson called a first in American law, when the Duke Three's attorneys requested a change of venue, they specifically cited the poisoning of the jury pool undertaken by the defendants' own professors.
Nine months later, not only has none of the "Duke 88" renounced the document, but at least two signatories have sought to revise history, in order to cast themselves and the rest of the "88" as hero/victims. They are Cathy Davidson, a vice provost for interdisciplinary studies who has an endowed (e.g., superstar) professorship in English, and is interim director of an institute named after distinguished race hoaxer-historian, John Hope Franklin, and Karla Holloway, the Dean of the Humanities and Social Sciences and former director of African and African American Studies, who also has a superstar professorship. (Are there any tenured sexists or racists at Duke who do not have superstar professorships?)
Four Against 100
The only people at Duke who, to my knowledge, have publicly shown any respect for the defendants' due process rights are Kerstin Kimel, the women's lacrosse team coach, Steven Baldwin, a chemistry professor, Michael Gustafson, an engineering professor, and James Coleman, an African-American law professor who chaired one of five internal Duke investigations of the lacrosse team following March 14.
Coleman has repeatedly, forcefully argued since June that Nifong should step aside on behalf of an independent prosecutor. James Coleman is the biggest hero in the Duke Rape Hoax, because he came out early and often on the side of the law. [Vdare.com note: It must take special courage for an African-American living in Durham to defend the accused white men. Dr. Thomas Sowell has also written repeatedly about the injustice being done here—his indifference "what everybody thinks" is well-known.]
In June, Coleman said of Nifong,
"Either he knew what the facts were and misstated them, or he was making them up. Whether he acted knowing they were false, or if he was reckless, it doesn't matter in the long run. This is the kind of stuff that causes the public to lose confidence in the justice system," and
"You've got a prosecutor playing to race. It's disgusting. If he's willing to [make race an issue] to go after what he thinks are three white kids with influence, what will he do going against some poor black kid in a case where people are saying, 'You've got to convict somebody?' To me, a prosecutor who's willing to cut corners in any case is a prosecutor who's subverting justice.'"
And on October 24, the school's student newspaper, The Chronicle, published a column in support of the Duke Three by Steven Baldwin (who had months earlier written a letter to The Chronicle, defending the players' legal rights.)
"The faculty who publicly savaged the character and reputations of specific men's lacrosse players last spring should be ashamed of themselves.
"They should be tarred and feathered, ridden out of town on a rail and removed from the academy. Their comments were despicable. I suspect they were also slanderous, but we'll hear more about that later."
Now that the rape charges have been dropped, the N.C. State Bar had indicted DA Nifong, and President Brodhead has made supporting the Duke Three a safe enterprise, a number of other Duke professors (see also here) have suddenly discovered their courage.
Black Moral Collapse
Durham's black community, local NAACP, and the NCCU faculty, have remained united behind Mangum since the beginning, no matter how discredited her charges have been. Blacks in Durham and elsewhere have suggested, and one black student at Mangum's school, NCCU, Chan Hall, [send him mail] has said outright that it would be a good thing for innocent white men to be prosecuted, as a matter of historical revenge, "whether it happened or not. It would be justice for things that happened in the past."
Although, or perhaps because, Nifong had been thoroughly discredited by the November election, Durham's black community voted overwhelmingly for him, and decided the race in his favor.
The Media
Rather than seeking to free the wrongly jailed, and see to it that the guilty do not escape punishment, the journalism profession is today dominated by leftwing political operatives who proudly seek to free guilty blacks and punish innocent whites. Hence their promotion of hoaxes such as the racial profiling myth. For those operatives, as for their comrades in academia, the facts are irrelevant.
Countless alleged journalists, white and black alike, at white-owned and black-owned media outlets, have sought to aid and abet the railroading of the Duke Three by variously suppressing negative facts about the accuser, evidence exculpating the defendants, and the reality of race and rape, both at Duke and nationally.
Some scribes have gone so far as to "report" non-existent "facts," such as a non-existent conspiracy of white Duke men's lacrosse players (the New York Times' Selena Roberts called this a "code of silence"), and a non-existent national problem, whereby white men constantly sexually molest young black women (AP's Erin Texeira, using 2002 talking points from black supremacists who were angry that newly crowned Oscar-winner Halle Berry had been making movies in which she slept with or performed strip teases for white men). Other offenders include the Raleigh News & Observer's Ruth Sheehan, the New York Times' Duff Wilson and Jonathan D. Glater, The Christian Science Monitor's Patrik Jonsson, the Wilmington Journal's Cash Michaels, Jesse Jackson Sr., and Sports Illustrated's aforementioned Lester Munson.
On April 22, Pulitzer Prize-winning, black Miami Herald-based syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. argued,
"imagine the response if the woman were white and reported being raped by three black members of the basketball team. You'd have to call out the National Guard."
Not hard. Less than two months before the Duke case, a coed attending the University of Richmond in Virginia, really was gang-raped by student athletes. However, as Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Mark Holmberg pointed out on May 14, contra Pitts, since the victim was white, and the suspects four black students (including a former star quarterback from the school football team) from nearby black Virginia Union University (VUU), the national media ignored the case. [What propels rape stories to wide attention?, May 14, 2006]
No VUU professors called for railroading their own students, and no coaches were forced to resign. Even Richmond's local media initially refused to report the respective races of the alleged victim and the alleged rapists.
In November, two of the four defendants in the January 21 rape were convicted of rape and given token sentences, a third was convicted of assault and will do at most four months in jail, and the fourth was acquitted.
The AP has a history of perpetrating hoaxes, and is institutionally committed to misrepresenting the reality of interracial rape. Thus, as I showed on December 28, in its stories on the Baytown rapist, a young black man who targets young white men in that Texas city for rape, AP suppressed the race of the victims, and "reported" that they had nothing in common.
At Duke University in recent years, the white coeds cannot walk safely across their own campus at night without escorts, but that is not due to the predations of white lacrosse players. As Autonomist editor Rocco DiPippo showed last spring, in recent years, black Durhamites, including students at NCCU, have made a sport of targeting white Duke coeds for rape.
Thus has the rage of Durham's black community against the white lacrosse players been misplaced, to say the least. If anyone should be in a state of rage, it is Durham's whites, particularly its white women.
That feminists at Duke rose up in support of the hoaxer, and against the white lacrosse players, was an expression of the morally depraved deal white feminists have made for themselves. Although they are scared to death of black men—and with good reason—and have relatively little to fear from white men, white feminists have politically prostituted themselves, in exchange for power. Thus do they reflexively condemn innocent "privileged white males" while refraining from any criticism of black male rapists.
And yet feminists' black allies do not return the favor, by showing a like protectiveness towards white women.
Once the Duke case caught fire, VDARE.COM's Steve Sailer found three cases in a single week last April, in which minority college athletes were charged with violent crimes, including rape, all of which were ignored by the national media. And those cases were in addition to the black-on-white gang-rape of the Richmond University coed.
No mainstream reporter would mention the extraordinary character of the crime being alleged. Kathleen Parker was the only mainstream columnist who did—and feminists excoriated her for her columns exposing the Durham travesty.
As the U.S. Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Study (NCVS) has shown, between 2001 and 2003, there were, on average, 15,400 black-on-white rapes per year, while whites averaged only 900 white-on-black rapes per year (a black-white ratio of 17.1:1). As Parker noted, the proportion of single-attacker white-on-black rape is so rare as to be statistically non-existent (less than one-half of one percent).
Since there are five-and-one-half times as many whites as blacks in America, that means that blacks rape whites over ninety times as frequently as whites rape blacks. Except that the black-white interracial gap is actually much higher. The "white" figure (900) is inflated by Hispanic offenders being counted as white. And no reliable statistics for interracial prison rape were included in the NCVS. Thus, the real black-white ratio is likely 200:1 or higher.
But the Duke case was an allegation of white-on-black gang rape. As Roy Sievers at American Renaissance showed on April 24, quoting the state-of-the-art AR study, The Color of Crime, that crime hasn't been committed in years:
"In fact, whereas blacks committed 10,000 gang-rapes against whites between 2001 and 2003, the NCVS samples did not pick up a single 'white' [including Hispanic]-on-black gang rape."
Sievers: "There are undoubtedly more black-on-white hate crime hoaxes than white-on-black gang rapes."
* * *
The Duke Rape Hoax has historic ties to the two most notorious previous racial rape hoaxes in American history, the story of Scottsboro Boys, and the Tawana Brawley case.
It is the culmination of some twenty years of race hoaxes.
In 1931, in what would come to be known as the "Scottsboro Boys" case, two white prostitutes named Victoria Price and Ruby Bates falsely accused nine black boys and young men of gang-raping them on a train. The Scottsboro Boys—Haywood Patterson, Clarence Norris, the brothers Andy and Roy Wright, Willie Roberson, Charles Weems, Ozie Powell, Olen Montgomery and Eugene Williams—were railroaded by a racist white Alabama jury, and sentenced to die. It was not until 1950, after years of trials and retrials, unjust prison sentences, and in one case, a daring jail break, that all of the Scottsboro Boys had regained their freedom. But their lives had been destroyed.
In the Tawana Brawley case, the racial roles were reversed and the falsely accused were white police officers.
On May 4, black Kansas City Star sportswriter Jason Whitlock observed that the Duke case "seems like an updated re-enactment of 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'"
And when young white men are imprisoned in today's black supremacist-dominated prisons, it is often tantamount to a death sentence from gang rape and resultant AIDS, sandwiched around a life of sexual slavery. And that's without being convicted of gang-raping a black woman.
***
The most dramatic early campus race hoax was set in motion on March 22, 1987. As Thomas Short reported in the August 1988 Commentary, [A "New Racism" on Campus? ] in three separate attacks, a mob of seven young black men students and non-students beat up a total of five white Columbia University men students.
Following a by now dog-eared script, a group called Concerned Black Students at Columbia (CBSC), represented by "activist attorney" C. Vernon Mason, (later disbarred as a result of his participation in the Tawana Brawley hoax) claimed that "a mob of white students had kicked and stomped a single black student and then went on a rampage shouting, 'We're going to kill you fucking niggers!'"
Although 22 witnesses had already contradicted the black attackers' claims, the latter were never arrested, and indeed, demanded that their white victims be arrested.
When CBSC held mini-riots, in which as many as 50 supporters, black and white alike, were arrested, protesting "against racial violence" and against the failure of the NYPD to follow their demand that police arrest the white victims, Columbia responded by promising more affirmative action in admissions and faculty hiring.
The Columbia race hoax received months-long saturation coverage by the national media; once the hoax was exposed, the national media went silent.
As Thomas Short recounted, the combination of media support for the Columbia hoaxers, and the lack of legal consequences for their crimes, encouraged black students at six other East Coast university campuses, including Duke, to take over campus buildings in spring 1987. In each case, the black students decried "resurgent [white] racism" on campus, which in virtually all of the cases was non-existent, and demanded and got concessions from the institution in question in the form of expanded affirmative action for black student applicants and professors.
There was a campus racism problem, alright, but it was that of resurgent black racism.
In late 1987, C. Vernon Mason, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and attorney Alton Maddox, promoted the Tawana Brawley Hoax, in which a then-15-year-old, black chronic runaway, from a family of convicted criminals, claimed to have been kidnapped by "white cops" and held in the woods for four days, during which time she was gang-raped. A witness had reported seeing Brawley climb into the garbage bag in which she was found, and the rape nurse who examined Brawley had reported that the girl had not been raped by anyone.
By the summer of 1988, months after it had become obvious, even to civilians unaware of the media-suppressed rape kit and witness report that Brawley and her "advisors" had pulled off a hoax, a white socialist New York political operative told me, "You can't expect blacks to participate as equals in public discourse." Of course, the operative wouldn't dare say such a thing publicly.
Given the New York and national media support for every on and off-campus black race hoax to come down the pike since 1987, hoaxes that were often promoted by the same discredited, racist frauds (C. Vernon Mason, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, et al.), I have concluded that already in 1987, the media were actively trolling for race hoaxes to promote. The quaint Republican term, "liberal media bias" does not begin to capture such criminal connivance.
Campus race hoaxes are typically promoted by black and feminist faculty, administrators and staffers. Many of the hoax supporters are not only morally unfit, but intellectually unqualified for their jobs; they were hired through affirmative action (aka "diversity"), and have imposed on their respective campuses multiculturalism, an ideology directing racial and sexual hatred at white, heterosexual men, which was invented, as Arch Puddington observed circa 1990 in Commentary, in order to rationalize affirmative action.
Since campus minorities lead lives of privilege, it becomes necessary to constantly perpetrate and support race hoaxes, in order to provide "evidence" for the pervasive white racism that campus minorities constantly complain about. Affirmative action, multiculturalism, and race hoaxes thus comprise a mutually dependent, mutually reinforcing triad.
Race hoaxes flourish because the people promoting them are never punished for their misdeeds, and move on from one hoax to the next. Thus, it is not enough to scramble around, disproving each hoax as it comes—race hustlers can invent hoaxes too rapidly for anyone to ever catch up with them. What is required is to take the offensive—demanding firings, vigorous criminal prosecutions, initiating multimillion-dollar civil suits, and thereby breaking up universities' racist, sexist power structure. Lawsuits are the only thing that universities like Duke understand.
Duke President Richard Brodhead sought to cover for his malfeasance by calling, on December 22, for Nifong to step down as prosecutor, and on January 3, inviting Seligmann and Finnerty to return to Duke, but he was simply engaging in damage control, in order try and stanch losses in student applications and early acceptances that had arisen from his previous malfeasance, turn around a public relations nightmare, and seek to head off the inevitable lawsuits against him and Duke University. As of this writing, neither Seligmann nor Finnerty had responded to Brodhead's offer.
In addition to suing Duke University, the victims will need to sue Brodhead personally, and every professor and staffer who signed among the Duke 88, every professor who incited hatred against and/or discriminated against any members of the lacrosse team, and every Duke staffer and administrator who aided and abetted the campaign against the lacrosse players, for failing to respect the players' rights. And attorney Joe Cheshire, who represents Dave Evans, has assured the public that the players will be suing everyone in sight.
And if an independent, impartial, criminal investigation bears out the already published (and in one case testified to) charges of misconduct on the part of DA Mike Nifong, in addition to being disbarred and removed from office, Nifong must be referred for criminal prosecution variously in the state and federal courts under any or all of the following charges: Witness tampering, witness intimidation, conspiracy to withhold evidence, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and conspiracy to violate the due process rights and civil rights of Seligmann, Finnerty, and Evans.
And since in this case, the City of Durham led the charge, the victims must sue it, too.
Durham Police Chief Steve Chalmers, Sgt. Mark Gottlieb, and Investigator Benjamin Himan must also be investigated (Chalmers for negligence), and if the results warrant it, removed from office or fired and/or criminally prosecuted.
The lawsuits ought to go as long way towards convincing Duke University and the City of Durham to do some house cleaning.
And Crystal Gail Magnum must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Only if hoaxers learn that there will be consequences to their actions, will the hoax industry go out of business.
Meanwhile, Crystal Gail Mangum gave birth to a daughter on January 3. I'm not a religious man, but I'll be praying for that child.
The Duke Three's next court date is February 5, when defense counsel will again press a motion to dismiss all charges, which presiding Judge Osmond Smith may grant. Alternatively, Judge Smith may remove Nifong from the case due to the conflict of interest caused by the D.A.'s pending ethics trial, in which case a second prosecutor would likely drop all charges. If any good is to come of this travesty, the men's lacrosse team players of March 13—indicted and unindicted alike—must make the dismissal of the charges just the beginning of their own scorched earth campaign for justice.
Postscript: On January 12, news reports showed that during her December 21 interview with DA Nifong's chief investigator, Linwood Wilson, accuser Crystal Gail Mangum again changed her story, saying that she was indeed raped by two white lacrosse players, but claiming that Reade Seligmann was not one of the rapists. Mangum also changed the time of the alleged attack, saying that it occurred before midnight, and before she had begun dancing. So she now expects jurors to believe that after the rape, she still went on with the show.
Note, however, that we are talking about the same December 21 interview in which she allegedly had changed her official story, and said she had not been raped. As one of the defense attorneys, Joe Cheshire, told the Durham Herald-Sun back in June, "She's made so many different statements that anything she says is exculpatory, simply because it's inconsistent with everything else she said."
Nicholas Stix [email him] lives in New York City, which he views from the perspective of its public transport system, experienced in his career as an educator. His weekly column appears at Men's News Daily and many other Web sites. He has also written for Middle American News, the New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Chronicles, Ideas on Liberty and the Weekly Standard. He maintains two blogs: A Different Drummer and Nicholas Stix, Uncensored.
