Those boys were ripped from end to end over this, their names dragged through the mud, castigated by the “Group of 88”, judged guilty in the court of public opinion, and sacrificed on the altar of DA Mike Nifong’s ambition. The team, once a top notch unit, was destroyed, the coach disgraced.
All on the word of a liar.
That’s the real disgrace.
So, should we push to have Nifong disbarred? Should we push to have the judgmental faculty members fired? Should we bring the woman up on charges? Will it make any difference if we do?
I’ll tell you one thing. If it were me, when all was said and done I would OWN that school. As it is, some of these people are going to be lucky to get away with the shirt on their backs. Which is as it should be, considering the lengths that some of them went to to skewer the real victims here. It’s only just that they should lie in the poisoned bed that they tried to make for these guys.
All of the people who prejudged these guys can go to hell.
I’m glad you started this thread, because it means we won’t have to see that damned “Lying whore” thread again.
Seriously, the lacrosse players got screwed, and I imagine the responsible parties (esp. Nifong) are going to pay. A lot.
As far as the faculty members, hard to say. They do have academic freedom. It depends on what exactly they said. I’m not familiar with their statement… I’ll have to take a look.
Yeah, there’s no need to dredge up a 35-page trainwreck. Besides, this thread will be considerably shorter. I don’t expect to see too many stand-up posters come in here to recant their previous stance. As usual, since nobody really wants to wade through a thread like that, there’s strength in anonymity.
You know though, it is interesting to see me vindicated. I have stated several times here that a DA can ruin your entire fucking life, even if he never even gets close to a conviction. Case in point.
Of course, now his life will be ruined but their lives will never be the same.
I definitely agree that Nifong should be prosecuted for abusing his office.
I would like to see Baker’s feet held to the fire to issue a very public apology, (and if he shucks and jives on this issue, I have no problem with people hurling charges of racism and prejudice at him at every turn until he does apologize–and repeating the process if he apologizes and then recants).
I am less sure that the kids accused are going to suffer much more than they have already. (That is too much, of course, and if they think they can get some “pain and suffering” cash out of Nifong or someone, they ought to consider going for it.)
However, my cousin went through a similar situation of a false claim of rape, years ago on the campus of one of the big Indiana schools. He even had the president make a public statement about “bad elements” that sometimes contaminate the school. When it became very clear that the charges were wholly invented (and my uncle–a mild individual with a rather fierce side–threatened to own the president if there was not a full and immediate apology with no weasel words), the matter was laid to rest. My cousin finished his education without further incident. And he has never encountered any repercussions in his life from the incident.
Memories are short. Our world is filled with daily atrocities. I support the students getting whatever recompense they can (not much, I would guess), but they are not going to suffer under this cloud the rest of their lives. I doubt that any of them will even hear about it again if they do not run for public office.
I understand this has been an ordeal for them, and they should definitely recover attorney’s fees, tuition, and maybe some “make it go away” cash. But now that the charges have been dropped and they’ve been proven innocent, I think they’ll do just fine – they’re among the lucky few who have a case public enough that everyone will know the charges were dropped. If they go in for a job interview, and someone says “I noticed you didn’t complete your studies at Duke*,” can you imagine the great answer they could give? Unless the interviewer is a conspiracy theorist who chooses to believe one side of a story based on race or sex, they’ll give them a pass. I agree that their lives won’t ever be “the same,” but I think it will end up making them better people. Yes, it sucks; but it builds character.
assumes Duke doesn’t offer them each a free ride to complete their degrees to make up for suspending them.
Being falsely accused of rape and having yourself splattered all over every major news outlet for an entire year ‘builds character’? Five million dollars in legal fees to defend yourself from charges of an incident that is entirely the fabrication of Crystal Mangum and Mike Nifong 'builds character?
You said yourself that there will always be people who believe that the victims in this case are actually rapists. The last I knew, there was still a group of Duke faculty who believed that the falsely accused young men were actually rapists. Is that just some conspiracy theory?
Crystal Mangum and Mike Nifong should both be punished severely for what they’ve done, which is a tremendous wrong to not only the three young men who were eventually falsely accused of rape, but the other members of the lacrosse team (44 of them) and the coach, and the families of all of them.
Losing a lacrosse match builds character. Being falsely accused of rape and the victim of prosecutorial misconduct can’t be dismissed as ‘building character.’
Their attorneys fees are well over 5 million dollars. Their lives have been put on hold for a year, their education delayed, in one case a promised job offer withdrawn. Recovering that will involve multiple civil suits. They are by no means out of the public eye, unlike tomndebb’s cousin, who I assume was never the subject of an award winning 60 Minutes piece, for example.
This by no means over, and until it is, no possibility of a normal life exists for these young men.
I probably wouldn’t be excused from a jury for all I know about this case. That being said, I think you are overstating things a bit. 44 guys? I couldn’t tell you the name of one of them. While I do think this may have changed their life in the short run, I doubt the possibility of a “normal life” is outside the realm.
Heck, Hedda Nussbaum is leading a relatively normal life. I’m betting so is Miss Lewinsky and various other specific folk who have been in our media ad naseum.
Heck, an old friend of mine made the news as far away as Sri Lanka and precious few people even remember the incident even though it happened in this town.
I’m talking about the the three who were falsely accused. Who had banners calling for their castration plastered over their campus, with the thanks and support of 88 faculty members. Who have not been allowed to study at their university, or participate in their sport, or transfer to another university to do so. About whom the president of Duke University said “whatever they did, it was bad enough,” when they had done nothing at all. Who will be in the public eye while Nifong’s case is heard, and while the civil suits work their way through the system.
This thing is far from over, and until it is, their healing cannot begin.
What crime was Monica Lewinsky accused of? Rape? Assault? Kidnapping?
When this is finally laid to rest, the three players are going to be viewed as victims of Justice Run Amok. There isn’t going to be much reason at all for anyone to think poorly of them, they had a bit of a raunchy party at college, and wound up in a legal mess not of their doing.
They will have spent a lot of money defending themselves (which they may get back in a lawsuit), and lost time to study in college, but that’s just time and money, it doesn’t destroy their lives for good.
As to the stripper, I see her as a minor player in all of this. Some angry chick who wanted to teach these college kids a lesson for messing with her, and she got dragged in by an overzealous prosecutor. Once Nifong ran with the charges, she couldn’t easily back out without admitting to filing a false report.
She deserves a measure of blame here, but it was Nifong who turned a false report into a complete fiasco.
There’s nothing wrong with that thread. I’ve been thinking for awhile the OP there was unfairly bashed for his harsh but justified language. Crystal Mangum is lying (still), and she is (almost certainly) a whore, as in “someone who has sex for money” – the multiple spooge samples, plus the driver’s testimony that he had taken her to a hotel for a brief visit in the days/hours preceding the rape, makes it pretty clear she was not just an “exotic dancer.”
It affected the entire rest of the team. After Duke canceled the lacrosse season because of the allegations, the coach had to leave NC and found it difficult to get employed elsewhere. The 44 players on the team not accused of the rape were still the target of protests by student and faculty groups (the Group of 88, for example). Scholarships were put into play, since a kid in college on a lacrosse scholarship likely wouldn’t keep that scholarship without a lacrosse team to play on. At least one of those lacrosse players found it extremely difficult to even transfer to another school - and he was not one of those falsely accused of rape. So yes, it did affect a lot more than just the three young men who were branded rapists on ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, NBC, et al, and that’s just television. Nancy Grace went so far as to say that if Crystal Mangum was her daughter, she would burn that house down (the house shared by several lacrosse team members) on her show on CNN Headline News.
She’s quite a major player in this. She started the events into motion and has continued to keep them in motion by refusing to recant her obvious lies. She started the entire thing because she was drunk and didn’t want to be put on a psych hold when she was taken to the hospital. To absolve her of guilt is to send a message that false accusations of rape are not a serious problem, and that the wrongdoer will not be punished. It does nothing to discourage false accusations in the future if we let her off the hook because she was just ‘some angry chick who wanted to teach these college kids a lesson for messing with her’. She is not the victim here. Crystal Mangum is a criminal. What she did is a crime, and she should be punished for it.
Oh boo-hoo for the poor, victimized, lying sack of shit Crystal Mangum. She’d have to admit to exactly what she did by telling the truth, oh noes!
Why should someone who did what she did get an easy out? She levied what is arguably the second worst (behind child molestation) charge you can against three people who did absolutely nothing of the sort.
Crystal Mangum is not a victim. Crystal Mangum is a lying sack of shit criminal.
You give her an easy out so that the charges can be dropped, and the players don’t get hurt. These charges would have gone exactly nowhere if Nifong had done the job he was elected to do. False and weak cases have to come across a DA’s desk every single week, it’s a HUGE part of the job to separate the wheat from the chaff and only pursue valid cases. As Nifong ran the case, Mangum would practically have had to hold a press conference to admit she lied, it’s not like Nifong ever talked to her.
She deserves blame for a false allegation. Filing a false report is a class 2 misdemeanor, max penalty 6 months in jail. The circus this turned into, the charges filed by the DA, the action by the school, the witholding of evidence, the national attention, that is all squarely on Nifong’s shoulders.
False allegations happen all the time, but they get investigated and nothing comes of it. That’s why it’s only a misdemeanor, on the order of simple assault or writing a bad check. Making a false allegation should not result in this sort of mess, Nifong turned a miniscule event into a monster trainwreck, not Mangum.