For the legacy media, the recent admission by Crystal Mangum, the accuser in the infamous 2006 Duke lacrosse case, that she had fabricated accusations of rape against three players on the university’s team, was at best a one-day story. While Mangum, a deeply troubled woman serving a long stretch at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women for killing a boyfriend five years after the Duke case, was clearly sincere in her contrition, opining on the podcast Let’s Talk with Kat that “saying that they raped me when they didn’t . . . was wrong” and “I made up a story that was wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God,” it hardly qualified as stop-the-presses news. That the allegation was false had long ago been established beyond question. The boys were fully exonerated and had reached a financial settlement with Duke for the school’s appalling response to the allegation. The hyper-ambitious rogue district attorney who in his zeal to nail them withheld key evidence of their innocence had been disgraced and disbarred.
So in that regard, it makes sense that in most accounts of the belated confession, it would come across as an out-of-the-blue footnote to a half-forgotten story, with a paragraph’s review of the case providing background for the uninitiated. The New York Times’s brief story, by Jenna West of The Athletic, does not even appear in the pages of the paper, just online.
In brief, the coverage conveyed not even a fleeting sense of what the Duke case meant at the time, how fully the story gripped the nation, dividing Americans by race and class; how, indeed, it anticipated much of what was to follow in the Trayvon Martin case; in Ferguson, Missouri; in the furious aftermath of the death of George Floyd; and, hardly least, in exposing the rot at the heart of two of America’s key institutions that has since become ever more apparent—academia and journalism.
All these years later, the media’s perfunctory coverage of Mangum’s admission is telling precisely because of what, given the calamitous mis-coverage of the original story, it so conspicuously lacks: self-awareness and accountability.
For most in the army of reporters who besieged Durham in 2006, the narrative of a poor black stripper violently gang-raped by privileged white male jocks was irresistible, confirming as it did the view of racial and power dynamics so pervasive in their circles. Never mind that there was no corroborating physical evidence of rape or sodomy and firm proof that at least one of the accused was elsewhere at the time of the alleged attack. This was not merely another instance of a story too good to be checked: there was no way it could not to be true, so it needed no substantiation. So fixed was the attitude that it endured for months, despite increasingly compelling evidence to the contrary.
A few stood up against the prevailing rush to misjudgment. While a coalition of 88 leftist faculty members, including some of Duke’s biggest names, went full Jacobin in their race-based denunciations of the accused, and spineless Duke president Richard Brodhead, caving to their demands, fired the lacrosse coach and canceled the rest of the team’s season; Duke law professor James Coleman, liberal and black, headed a committee whose findings decisively contradicted the prevailing characterization of the players as loutish bullies given to casual racism and sexism. Likewise, the student journalists of Duke’s paper, The Chronicle, from the first pushed back against the mounting hysteria, characterizing the 88 as promoting a “radical, inflammatory discourse that obscures what should be our true aim: reasonable discussion.” Then-Chronicle columnist and now-Trump advisor Stephen Miller wrote scathingly of the “untrue and indefensible charge that Duke is filled with racists,” adding that the activist faculty “hope to make a case not only for the excoriation of the lacrosse team, but also for sweeping social reform to address what they see as profound racial inequity.”
Among professional journalists, meantime, a handful similarly distinguished themselves, including liberal stalwarts Chris Cuomo and Dan Abrams, as well as AP sportswriter Aaron Beard. Notably too, the reporter that the New York Times initially put on the case, sportswriter Joe Drape, stood out for his balanced coverage of its initial stages. As Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson write in Until Proven Innocent, their definitive work on the Duke lacrosse scandal, Drape was “a sharp, aggressive reporter . . . who was pushing hard for the truth. And the more he pushed, the more Drape came to believe that Mangum was not credible and her rape charge was probably false.”
But Drape was soon “having trouble with his editors,” who “wanted a more pro-prosecution line. They also wanted to stress the race-sex-class angle without dwelling on evidence of innocence.” Drape’s replacements—Duff Wilson, Rick Lyman, and Jonathan Glatzer—gave their bosses what they wanted. Their coverage was augmented by savage commentary on the sports page by Harvey Araton and Selena Roberts. In one especially notorious column, Roberts decried the “‘Lord of the Flies ethos in Durham,’” claiming the lacrosse team were a brotherhood united in the protection of rapists and demanding that the crisis result in “a fresh discussion on race, gender and respect.” In their deeply reported book, Taylor and Johnson, who’d blogged on the proceedings to a growing legion of online fans, cite a host of media outlets for malfeasance, as well as a range of commentators. Paula Zahn and Nancy Grace, both then at CNN, come in for especially well-earned scorn.
Unsurprisingly, in the wake of the case, with the players exonerated yet forever burdened with being just a click away from association with a heinous crime, few in the media were inclined to reflect on what they’d gotten so grievously wrong. To its shame and to the ongoing devastation of its reputation, the media continue to refuse to acknowledge gross error, let alone to apologize for it. Such high-handedness might have been surprising in 2006, but not anymore—not in an era that has seen, among much else, the silence that followed the collapse of the Russia collusion narrative, the egregious mis-reporting on Covid, the burying of the Hunter Biden laptop story, and the professed ignorance of Joe Biden’s encroaching senility.
In 2011, HBO acquired the rights to Until Proven Innocent, which looked like a smart move. Hollywood has a rich history of movies about Southern racial injustice, from The Defiant Ones and To Kill a Mockingbird to In the Heat of the Night and Ghosts of Mississippi, and the Duke story had all the elements for another: a vicious false accusation, pushed by an unscrupulous prosecutor and the local establishment, and sympathetic defendants and their defense team fighting back against all odds. Among these were Brad Bannon, an insecure young lawyer, “thick skulled when it comes to math and science” by his own bemused self-description, who, in a couple of all-nighters, taught himself about DNA from a book. He was then called upon to cross-examine the prosecution’s DNA expert. “Listen,” Bannon’s superior told him, “there’s a difference between lawyers and great lawyers, and that difference is in moments like this. You are a great lawyer, Brad. I’ve always told you that, but you’ve never believed it. You can do this. You will do this. And you’ll do great.”
Bannon went out and dismantled the expert, growing ever more confident as he proceeded, in the process destroying the prosecution’s case.
But HBO never made the film.
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