Bravo! 
Thank you. My first (?) post in the OP, lo these many months ago, was to the Kanin study. Human nature is such that people are rarely better than they need to be. A woman who levels a charge of rape (false or true) can often get attention (yes, bad and good attention) and sympathy that she would not have otherwise gotten. Someone handed an A-Bomb is going to have to be of especially strong character not to use it when they get provoked. It would be foolish, as Kanin’s statistics found, to assume that significant numbers of women would not succumb to the temptation to cast themselves as the ravished damsel when otherwise they would just come across as a drunk whore involved in a payment dispute with dissatisfied guys who wanted a sober, attractive stripper and not an f’d-up whore (I again speak literally).
But she apparently said nothing about rape until she was speaking to police and, being drunk and possibly drug-addled, was facing the possibility of being taken into custody.
I certainly never jumped to conclusions on this case, but I definitely was biased to believe her story. I just had trouble believing that someone would make a false accusation like that and not know what would happen. You’d think that she would know about things like rape kits and DNA evidence. And even if she didn’t, then when she did see where the case was going she should have backed out. Her behavior is so illogical.
I guess if you have nothing to lose and are a vindictive cunt, then it makes sense.
I want to acknowledge you and AHunter3 for being (so far) the only ones to acknowledge that you were victimized by (i.e., believed) LWCM.
Others here really really wanted her story to be true, because they sickly wanted hordes of whiteboy jocks to be coveting and wanting to rape ugly-ass (you’ve checked out the pix? Geez.) run-down Afro sex-trade chicks. (As if you’d have to “rape” Crystal – just book a room at the Holiday Inn Express, and to judge by the record, her driver would deliver her there for an hour with no problem).
Not so much.
Women do, apparently, sometimes, and systematically, lie about rape, in spectacular, and easily-falsifiable (well, maybe not so easily) fashion, we learn.
This is one of those weird facts of human behavior, like Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy, or foot fetishism, or whatever, that you have to see to believe. Certain (usually stupid and short-sighted) chicks, when they put themselves in a self-induced bind, will shout “Rape” for sympathy and succor.
Prosecutors need to take this (and the incidence of crazed female behavior, a la Crystal’s, and male behavior) into account in evaluating inconsistent, implausible claims. This is where Dumbfuck Nifong so spectacularly failed in exercising his prosecutorial discretion.
The difference between this and “you can’t rape a whore” is?
CMC fnord!
The difference is if she would come to your hotel room and do the nasty for $X, you, as a rational customer, would hardly take the risk of a rape charge to avoid paying X, when X is prob. <$200.
I.e., the applicable principle is more like “You wouldn’t rape a whore, because the incremental savings is hardly worth it.” Crystal was putting out left right and center (four spooge samples). Her asking price could hardly have been in the high two-digit range.
That’s all irrelevant, of course, since no one one the Duke lax team (to their great aesthetic credit) had any nasty-ass sex with her nasty-ass self. Good for them, as they’d have been dipping their wick in a toxic spooge stew.
We know this how exactly?
Was that taxi driver in the room?
Anybody come forward and actually say “I paid her for sex”.
'Cause until somebody provides that kind of evidence, all you got is that she’s promiscuous and has bad hygiene, not proof that she’s a “whore”.
Right?
Wouldn’t want to accuse someone of a crime without evidence, would we?
CMC fnord!
Somebody remind me, what do we call a guy who gets it “left right and center”, two or three times in the same day with no shower in between?
Ah, the double standards defence. :rolleyes: TWAT!
Actually, it was the possibility of a mental health evaluation, which, I believe, is a mandatory 48 hour confinement.
Ponder Stibbons as well.
There’s a group of people who have thus far only been mentioned in passing, but I think they deserve a shout out. Hey Grand Jury, nice job! You’ve proven once again that Sol Wachtler was right, present the grand jury with a tasty ham sandwich, and they’ll return an indictment.
Why even bother with this farce of a process when all you do is rubber stamp what the prosecutor wants?
To be fair (?), the GJ is uniquely dependent on what the prosecution tells it – unless the defendant chooses to testify (and most don’t because the threshold for probable cause is in practice so low), they hear only what has been filtered through the prosecutor. don’t see witnesses, etc. As Dumbfuck Nifong was (a) lying; (b) totally ignorant of the facts (because he had not investigated them); and (c) a Dumbfuck, they made a Dumbfuck decision. It may be the GJ process itself that is flawed, though the media interviews with these GJs, at a fairly late stage in the game, IIRC, showed undue credulity even once they were exposed to more facts. But then the GJ is also drawn from the Durham venire.
Have you ever met someone who had sex with two strangers, at two different business hotels, in a 24 hour period, but was just “promiscuous?” Kobe Bryant at his best/worst would be challenged to top this, and I suspect a fairly handsome rich NBA star offers more in the way of enticement to to the opposite sex to a long term relationship than what we’ve seen in LWCM’s mugshot and bio.
I’m not a prosecutor and no one is talking about putting her in jail for whoredom (or for anything, as it turns out!). I’m talking about whether she is a “whore,” as the OP said, and was condemned for saying. I will put you to the same challenge I put the other faux-head-scratcher: If an omniscient being held a gun to your head and asked you what happened when a skankity-skank went to a Holiday Inn Express and another business hotel for respective one hour periods in a one day time frame, and you had to make one guess, would you REALLY have the suicidal smirkiness to say “Gee, I can’t say, so I’ll assume she was on a date with a new beau, or crocheting, or they watched SportsCenter?” Even self-righteous prigs presumably have self-preservation instincts, so I will GUARANTEE you would say “Boning or blowing or some freaky-ass sex fetish.” When said omnisicient being went on to say “And you think Crystal did this for free, because that’s what drug-addled skanks do, charity gigs for strangers?” Again, would you REALLY say “Well, probably, she didn’t invite the driver into the room so there’s no proof the probable sex with a stranger in a hotel was paid,” which would be followed momentarily by the cleanup crews scraping blood and bone fragments off the walls of wherever you are? I am again assuming you are not that stupid and would say: “Duh. She got paid to bone.” Why waste our time, then, with “Do you have a cite to the fact that non-prostitutes aren’t typically driven around by paid (in trade?) drivers to hotels to meet strange men” silliness?
I call him gross. If he’s doing it for money and dancing at Chippendale’s, I call him a “gross prostitute.” I had a roommate like this once. He was the admiration of really no one, and we called him Sleazy Mike, though being paid for it would have obviously been far sleazier.
In my book, they only get a pass if Nifong fabricated evidence. AFAIK, the only “evidence” in this case was Mangum’s complaint. There was no corroborating evidence, no additional witnesses*, nothing whatsoever to support her claim. I would hope that people on a GJ would take the job seriously and only offer an indictment when there is actual evidence linking the defendant to the crime.
If the standard for an indictment is “Someone said that guy commited a crime”, you don’t need a grand jury, just let the prosecutor indict whoever he wants.
*Did the other stripper there actually support her claim, or did her statements kind of make her claim unlikely? I don’t remember the details.
At one point, directly because Nifong got her bail reduced in another matter, the other stripper (Kim Roberts) did go along with Crystal Mangum’s story. Some time after the Nifong-bail deal came out, she recanted and said that no rape had happened.
He certainly failed present evidence (lack of LAX DNA, plus multiple other DNA hits) that would have exonerated them. Not exactly fabricating evidence, but definitely playing fast and loose.
The latter. She called it “a crock.”
But the prosecutor can also present evidence selectively, which can have some of the same prejudicial effect as fabrication, especially when there is no opportunity for rebuttal.
As far as Kim Roberts, there were aspects of her story (stories) that could have been viewed as corroborative, and then aspects in which she basically said “I don’t think anything happened.” Which ones would you think Dumbfuck would emphasize to the GJ? Her baseline story was always that she never saw anything directly, but that at some later point LWCM became very “upset” or very drunk, and/or both. That can go . . . either way.
This is where prosecutorial discretion comes in. I can imagine a world in which a highly credible victim comes in and says, “Look, this may seem nutty, but a guy kidnapped me off a deserted street, took me to an isolated house, and raped me (but fairly gently) while using a condom, and having shaved all his body hair so as to leave no forensic evidence [not my invention, stolen from some John Sandford detective novel], and then dropped me off,” and the prosecutor found her story highly credible (but for its inherent unusualness) and self-consistent, and there had been other crimes of that description – he would need to have the option to try to persuade the GJ that an indictment was warranted on the “more likely than not” standard, and I can’t say I would per se deny it (though the common law standard for rape, requiring proof of resistance, etc., had some common sense to it, recognizing that people frequently have consensual sex, and that women apparently sometimes lie about rape, whereas few people are consensually murdered or beaten or fabricate stories about their own murders, so that additional corroboration might be required).
But Crystal’s situation was nothing like that hypothetical. Her story was internally inconsistent, improbable, etc. Thing is – if Nifong went in as he did and presented it as a really strong case, and he’s the DA, and the GJs are dumbasses who may be looking to stick it to a white boy or two – maybe an indictment (based on only one-side of the story) made sense to them.
Huerta, I don’t know what motivated people in that other thread to defend Crystal. But do you really think it was because they were wanting to feel that white jocks desired a black girl? When is the last time you have been on a college campus? In a night club? Plenty of evidence for anyone that wants some that there are white men that desire black women.
Now, before you bring the smack down, let me stress again, I don’t know why in the world some were defending her so strongly…I just doubt it was because they were overjoyed at the prospect that a white man would want a black girl. I don’t think there are many on this board stupid enough to want to believe a rape for that reason.
None of which should be taken to mean the GJs covered themselves in glory. They didn’t, but I’m also suggesting the process is set up in a way that makes this not surprising even when they aren’t racially-motivated dumbasses, as they may have been here after Nifong poisoned the well with his media campaign.
Nor am I interested in a smack down or in re-opening any racial topics. Let us say that there are some (Jesse Jackson’s comment, which I linked in the other post) who seemed to take an unhealthy interest in (and to be influenced in evaluating the credibility of this stupid accusation by) the “slaveowner with cowering dusky maiden” scenario, just as I recall a professor somewhat but only somewhat faceitiously describing the passage of the Mann Act (White Slavery Act) as motivated by the slavering fantasies of dirty old Congressmen who couldn’t get enough stories about innocent young (white) girls forced into filthy, filthy degradation (congressional factfinding mandatory). More generically, the victim lobby is in love with grievance and thus in a fucked-up way, in love with rape – if a rape didn’t happen, well, that’s one less thing to be aggrieved about – see the moronic comments of that Duke biology professor posted above. She cannot BEAR to lose this gripe, so she’ll never let go of it, facts be damned.