You're Wrong About - The Duke Lacrosse Rape Case

Episode Date: November 14, 2018

Mike tells Sarah how a false rape allegation became a right-wing rallying cry and a left-wing conspiracy theory. Digressions include JonBenet Ramsay, “24” and “The Vagina Monologues." Mike regrets not commenting on the metaphorical significance of being trapped in the closet throughout the episode. Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

We're sitting here amidst a cleaning supply. We've really gone bizarro. Like, I have an actual adult space in the world to be recording in, and you're sitting surrounded by trash. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we were as wrong as you are, because we were just following the news, assuming that what was being told to us

was in the neighborhood of the truth. And it turns out you can't do that at all. Yes. I'm guessing that that's relevant to this story. This is not going to follow any of the themes. The media was great. Prosecutors were great. Everything went fine at the end.

It's going to be a six-minute-long episode. Oh, shit. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall, and I'm a writer in residence at the Black Mountain Institute. I'm going to start saying that now because it's fewer things than what I've been saying.

Yeah. I only have one thing, so that's fine. So we're talking about the Duke Lacrosse case, which I remember being in the news either right before or right after I started college. And it was, I feel like, a very paranoid time about college. Yes. And especially fancy, terrible white person college.

So what do you actually remember about the facts of the Duke Lacrosse rape case? I have not looked into this at all, since he told me you were going to start researching this. Hopefully, my brain will be a pristine mid-auts time capsule. What I remember is that there was a group of fraternity guys at Duke, or lacrosse players, I guess, and that they had hired a stripper to come to a party,

and she had performed. And then she had accused one or some of them of rape. And then it had been revealed, pantingly, in the media that there was some evidence that she had fabricated those claims. She was that thing the American media most longs for the false rape claimer. And I remember the story just dropping out of headlines

after that point, essentially. And I have no idea what happened after that. So the first thing to know about this case is just how big of a deal it was. I found this American Journalism Review article about how the media handled this case. And they mentioned that there were three suspects, the month that they were indicted, the networks dedicated 42 minutes

to the Duke Lacrosse rape case. And they dedicated 35 minutes to the Iraq War. This was massive. There were three or four Newsweek cover stories. The New York Times did 100 stories, eventually, a number of which were on A1. This was the scandal of the year. Well, and I remember there being a feeling at the time,

because I went to college prep school, and that this was like our whole world was sort of the stocks of various colleges. And I remember sensing a feeling on the wind that Duke had just plummeted, and that there was this feeling. The same feeling as when like Bear Stearns took a nosedive. I've been researching this for two weeks, and I got totally obsessed.

I know. I have all your text messages about it. It's one of those things like the Zodiac Killer, where like everyone that looks into it becomes weirdly obsessed with it. I was reading case reports and like medical reports from like 2006, like going through the footnotes. Like, I went deep on this.

And one of the quotes that I love from a 2011 Law Review article, and I think this really sums this up, often a full examination of the fact of a notorious case reveals that events were ambiguous, and the reality is not as bad as early reports suggested. This case does not fit that pattern. It gets worse on inspection. Oh, my.

And that's totally my experience with this case, that when I first started out looking at this, I was like, false rape claims are extremely rare. La Crosse 19-year-olds are extremely terrible. And like I kind of wanted to find some ambiguity or some wrinkle of like, maybe it's not what it seems. But dude, this is a false rape allegation. It just is.

And I think there's this reluctance on the side of, I think, left-leaning people to really lean into the fact that it truly is a false rape allegation. And then there's this glee of right-wing people, of like, yes, it's a false rape claim. Like, we found one. They know that they found the thing that liberals don't like to admit exists,

and that they can use as this poking you right in the Achilles heel kind of thing. And you're right, because the left does need to admit that false rape claims do exist. They're extremely rare, and we shouldn't look at them as if they diminish the credibility of any other woman accusing anyone of rape, because the idea that a man, especially a powerful one, would be raping

or sexually assaulting or harassing a subordinate person is not at all earth-shattering. And in like a weird Pac-Man way, where you go off one end of the screen and then you come back to the beginning, this has actually made me understand true rape allegations much better. All right, let's get into that,

because we need all those tools as many as possible of them right now. So I'm not gonna do like a who done it. We're not gonna do the forensic files version. We're not gonna do the forensic files version. I'm gonna start with what we know about the event. So this comes from an attorney general's report that has published a year after the event

that is based on interviews with every single person who attended the party. It's based on a year of interviews and investigations and forensics and everything. So these are what we know to be the facts. You know, if we wanted to be dicks, we could stretch this out into a 16 episode long series, but we're just gonna do it all right now.

We're gonna walk and talk. So it's March 13th, 2006. There's three Duke University students who live off campus. It's not a fraternity. That's like one of the things that the right-wing pedants always yell at you for. Well, because a fraternity is the collective noun

for a group of dickish young white men. A fraternity of dudes, like that's the collective noun. It's just what it has become. So spring break, these three lacrosse players live in a house off campus. They wanna have a party. It's kind of a tradition. One of the guys that owns the house

calls a stripper slash escort service. He asks for two white dancers. For no particular reason, he tells them that it's a bachelor party. I don't know why he tells them that, but that's not actually true. They're paying $800 for two hours of entertainment, which this already starts to tell you

like the kind of people this is. Oh, come on. That would have been two months rent for me in college. Like there's no way I would have been spending that one night. So they order these dancers a little bit after 11 PM, one of them shows up. So there's Kim and Crystal. Kim, who is not the accuser.

Kim is the second dancer. Kim gets there at 11. Crystal, who ends up being the accuser, doesn't show up until around 11 40. So Kim and Crystal do not know each other. This is important. They've never met before. They work for the same company,

but they've never met before. Crystal is late. When she shows up, she's drunk. She's like visibly impaired. She kind of stumbles out of the car. And this is something that is confirmed by people that are there at the party. There's a neighbor who lives next door

who hates the Duke lacrosse players and is looking for any excuse to call the cops on them. So he's looking out the window and seeing these strippers arrive. And so later on, she says that she had taken flexorill, which is a muscle relaxant that I had never heard of. The guys are already a little pissed off that they've asked for white strippers

and they get black strippers. So a little bit after midnight, Kim and Crystal start doing the dance and the performance, everyone, including Kim and Crystal, say the performance is pretty lackluster. It's supposed to last two hours. It only lasts five minutes because Crystal is so drunk

that she falls down during it. And there's video of this. The guys are kind of cringing as they're doing it. So in a let me see your manager kind of way, the guys are pissed off. They're like, we paid 800 bucks for this. There's so much class shit happening from the very beginning of this that I never remember.

Yes. Everyone in the story is unlikeable. The prosecutors, the left-wing people, the right-wing people, everybody sucks in this entire story. All right. So Kim and Crystal sort of start making out during the performance, but all the dudes are just kind of grossed out.

One of them makes a comment about a broomstick. Like maybe if we pay you more, we'll put a broomstick inside you. Some kind of just terrible comment. Kim gets annoyed. She's like, you know what? This isn't worth it. You guys are terrible.

She stops the performance. She is the one that I have the most sympathy with in this entire story because it's just like, we've all been that person where you show up to do a job and your colleague kind of sucks and you have to like clean up after your colleague. I love how your main complaint with people like across the board of this whole time

we've been doing this show is like when people are unprofessional. Yes. Or like they don't plan something very well. Like that's really the only thing that your judge meant a lot. I have been the Kim in many situations. This is kind of the dynamic that forms.

Crystal was pretty out of it. Kim, who's never even met this person before quits the performance because these guys are being jerks. They then go to the bathroom together. They just kind of hang out in the bathroom for like 20 minutes. She's kind of trying to revive Crystal, kind of trying to figure out what to do, right?

Do we leave? Do we stay? Whatever. The dudes are starting to complain. One of the girls leaves their cosmetics bag outside the door. The boys go into the cosmetics bag and start stealing money out of it

because they're like, oh, they owe us money back. Oh my God. But then one of the guys who lives at the house is like, dudes, don't do that. This is stupid. They start kind of negotiating. Then eventually the guys are like, well, let's just get them out of the house.

Like this isn't fun for anybody. They slip another hundred bucks under the door because these are college students that have a hundred dollar bills with them, obviously. They've had like a million noise complaints. They're sort of under the radar of the cops at this point. So one of the guys that lives in the house is like, this isn't worth it.

This is dumb. It's already late. Let's just get everybody out. So they basically start canceling the party at that point. They kind of get everybody outside. They get Kim and Crystal into the car. This is around 1226 AM. There's all these phone records.

If Crystal calls the escort service, she's like, what do we do now? Everyone is kind of outside of the house and milling around. Eventually Crystal, for reasons we don't really know, she gets out of the car, comes back to the house, goes to the back porch and is like banging on the back door. It's not clear like maybe she left something inside or maybe she wants more money.

Yeah, like did they take money from them? It's not clear. There's some accounts where like Kim gives some of the money back, but then it's not clear who she gives that to or whatever. But so the door at this point is locked. Crystal comes back to the back door. She's banging on the door trying to get in.

She's kind of slurring her words and saying kind of incoherent things. Then eventually she passes out. There's a photo of her at 1237 AM, passed out on the back porch. Everyone is just kind of like, what do we do now? What do you do in that situation? I mean, what they do is then they kind of rouse her.

They kind of shake her awake. They walk her to the car. They put her in the car with Kim. Crystal has no ride. So Kim is like, whatever, I'll like drive her away, but I don't know this person. Kim did have a really bad night. Kim had a super bad night, dude.

My son, but these are 100% with Kim in this whole situation. So what's important about this is that there's essentially no time when a rape would have occurred. Like no time when Crystal's alone with the lacrosse guys or anything like that. And also there's not much time.

So they go back to the car at 1226 AM and they're leaving the house at 1242 AM. So there's very little time in that like the window when she is not with Kim is very small. There's 15 minutes of Crystal being alone. And we have a photo of her passed out in front of the door at 1237. So right in the middle of that, there's no way.

It's also something that requires a large group of people to keep their story consistent if they are all lying about something. Another thing that's really important about this is that this is a party of a bunch of 18 to 22 year olds. So what are they doing? They're taking photos of each other. They're taking selfies.

They're texting. They're calling. So there's deep phone, photo. They're friend stirring because it's 2005. Updating their MySpace profiles. So there's all kinds of documentation, right? This is why we have the video of them doing the stripper performance.

This is why we have the photo of her on the back porch. We have all kinds of texts indicating like, hey, the stripper has just arrived. Like it's very easy to triangulate this entire timeline from the hundreds of texts. And this would be an early big news case of this kind, right? Where something became such a national focal point and you could actually track the locations

of a group of youths. Yes. So essentially, there's no opportunity for anything to have taken place unless there's just a giant criminal conspiracy and Kim is lying and the players are all lying in extremely consistent ways. Then this gets super ugly. So Kim and Crystal start driving away.

The players are like, they make some asshole comment of like, maybe if we gave you more money, you'd fuck us or something. And then Kim, who again is like the closest thing we have to a hero in the story, she says something along the lines of like, your little white dick is too small for me ever to fuck you. Like something little and white and dick. We don't know exactly what the comment is.

But something that hurt their feelings. And so they start shouting racial slurs. Oh, come on, you guys. Is it amazing that in this like play hard, work hard, culture, people can try so hard at some things and also just not at all at being a human being? And so at one point, one of them yells, thank your grandfather for my nice cotton shirt.

Oh, unbelievable. This is one of those things that you hear and you're just like, yep, lock them up, throw away the key, electrocute these kids. This is according to the neighbor and the lacrosse players admit that this was said. So this is not in dispute that somebody shouts this. Oh my God.

That's like 1932 burning crosses, sheriff of a corrupt town thing to say. It's awful. And of course this becomes one of the main details that goes around after this hits the media. Like as it should, it's an unbelievable thing to say to another person. Well, and I don't remember that at all.

But so Kim obviously is extremely upset. Kim is like, fuck you guys, I'm calling the cops on you. So she calls the cops and says, I'm just a random person who happened to be driving by and these guys yelled a racial slur at me. Again, because we have the call record, we know that this is 1253. It speaks to this very small window.

They are driving away at 1253, right? So we know when they arrive, we know when they left. There's a very small window for that. So Kim is in the car with Crystal. Like I am in a car with a random passed out person who I've never met before. So she doesn't really know what to do. So she drives to a local grocery store,

she goes inside, she asks the security guard, hey, can you call the cops? The cops come and she tells the cops like, I picked up this random woman who I've never met before who's now passed out in my car, can you deal with her? She just doesn't like really know what to do. She doesn't know where Crystal lives. She doesn't know anything.

And all of this timeline becomes incredibly important later, but the cop comes, gives her smelling salts, wakes her up, gets her out of the car. He notes that she's clearly impaired. He takes her to the hospital because he thinks that she needs detox or like to have her stomach pumped or something, takes her to the ER. The ER nurse and other people are interviewing her.

She's kind of out of it and she's saying weird things and she's sort of half asleep. At one point they're talking about involuntarily committing her, they find out that she has two kids. Somebody mentioned CPS and this, you know, the descriptions of this differ, right? That the defense lawyers for the boys say they were threatening her with having CPS come

and get her kids and that's when she brought up the rape. But then there's also another account that is simply they ask her out of the blue, were you raped tonight? And she says yes. But what we know is that she doesn't volunteer that she was raped. She is asked.

I can imagine feeling at that moment is there only needs to be another feather on the scale before it tips in favor of you going to jail for some reason. As a black woman who was found intoxicated and is in a marginally legal sex work industry. You know, it's like you're playing a video game and you just need to like use all of your lives at once to deflect something away.

Making a rape claim does feel like it could be one of those like emergency moves. If you're gonna be randomly criminalized, it does feel like maybe the only way to deflect that, if only briefly, is to be like, no, no, no, no, no, I'm a victim. You know, if the only categories people see are villain and victim, like you can be like, ah, victim.

And also, I mean, in a rare case of the system actually working, she mentions the rape, then like she gets a woman who medically examines her, the rape kit, a very detailed rape kit. I think it's a 27 page report is taken with they do anal swabs, they do oral swabs, they do vaginal swabs, they examine like every part of her body, they do a long two and a half hour long interview.

How long before the DNA evidence is processed? This is like two weeks later. Two weeks? Yeah. It's processed in two weeks? Is that fast or slow? That's so fast. Like there are warehouses of untested rape kits

in this country. I think that's probably because this is such a high profile case. That's crazy. So basically all the cops have at this point is they have a rape allegation, they have this medical report. So immediately the investigation begins

and this is the next day they go to the house, they get a search warrant. The lacrosse kids are remarkably compliant. I think this is another thing of the richness and whiteness of the accused is that these are kids that like a lot of them, their dads work in the financial sector, these are not rich kids. These are like amazingly rich kids.

And like one of the accused eventual accused kids, his dad was working for Bear Stearns, like was high up in Bear Stearns in 2008. Of course he was. These are people for whom the system is designed to work. So the police come over and they're just like, hello, you keep our TVs in our homes. Literally.

And so they're just like, yeah, of course, come on in. Sure, like take my laptop, like look through the garbage. No big deal, we're happy to comply. The three guys that live in this house all voluntarily go in with the cop. They're like, if you want us to take a polygraph, we're happy to take a polygraph. Right.

They don't even lawyer up, which is actually interesting for rich kids. That is interesting. And also, I mean, it's another thing that is kind of a sign of innocence, right? There's no cover up. They're just like, yep, we ordered strippers. Yep, we made racist comments.

They just put everything on the table. And here's what's interesting, like of the ways that you can not be thinking two steps ahead of the police or trying to in America. One of the only scenarios where that makes sense is when you're a rich white person and someone less privileged than you, i.e. anyone else has accused you of something

you actually didn't do. Like that is one of the only times when he feels like it's reasonable to be like, you know what, the police can just take a good look around. Yeah. This is a good scenario for them to explore the possibilities. I don't think they're gonna make any other mistakes.

So what happens here is the lacrosse players start telling a very consistent story. They tell the story of, you know, strippers got there and they did the dance and it was kind of boring and everybody left. They're all telling exactly the same story, right? And the DNA results haven't come in. So what happens at this point is enter Mike Nyfong.

Mike Nyfong. This is the Durham district attorney, the guy that will prosecute this case and will eventually be disbarred for his handling of this case. Wow, he got disbarred in North Carolina. I imagine that's hard to do. So he gets the case in late March.

He has a meeting with the investigating detectives who basically tell him like, this is a weak case. The only evidence that we have is the word of the accuser and she's already changed her story three times. It was a gang, right? Like 20 people and then it was five and then it was two and then it was three. And they're saying like, every time we interview her,

she says something different and the boys are completely cooperating and we haven't really found anything. The only actual physical evidence of this is they find a fake fingernail, one of Crystal's fake fingernails in the trash. Which is only evidence of her being in the house. Basically, yeah.

And the guys aren't really denying that they were in the house and that's it. Right. So yes, listeners, if the acoustics has changed is because I'm now in my closet because people are doing weed whacking outside. It's because it doesn't get better is why. It gets better and then it gets worse again.

So Nyfong gets this case. He finds out from the detectives that it's pretty weak. He hasn't gotten the DNA test back. He immediately starts doing media appearances. He does 60 media interviews over the next two weeks. He makes a series of insane statements. So first of all, the fact that all of the lacrosse players

are telling a very consistent story, he doesn't refer to that as like exonerative. He refers to that as a stone wall of silence. Wow. And one of the most infamous quotes is he says, one would wonder why one needs an attorney if one was not charged and had not done anything wrong. That's what they said about John Benning Ramsey's parents too.

So it's like the entire foundation of the legal system, like that everybody has representation, it's like somehow seen as evidence of guilt. He goes on MSNBC and he does like a live demonstration of how the rape happened. He's like, oh, they strangled her like this and he's like reaching around, pulling his arm around. At this point, she doesn't even say that she was strangled.

So it's weird. He also says, the thing most of us found so abhorrent and the reason I decided to take it over myself was the combination gang-like rape activity accompanied by the racial slurs and general racial hostility. Interesting. He makes this a case about racial animus very quickly.

He's playing up the kind of town versus gown structure of this that there's a lot of preexisting resentments of Duke by people that live in Durham. The most bizarre thing that he says is, he's again on NBC, he says, I wouldn't be surprised if condoms were used. Probably an exotic dancer would not be your first choice for unprotected sex. What?

So it's like, dude, this is your star witness. Your entire case rests on believing her as a credible witness and then you're like, oh yeah, she's like just some skank and like you'd never have sex with her at a condom. Like what? It's a weird thing to say about anyone. You know, what all clicks into place later but very few people comment at the time

is he is up for reelection. He's going through a political primary at this time. Uh-huh. What we find out later, the day before he takes the case, a poll comes out showing him trailing his primary challengers. So there's a woman he's running against who's been involved in some other high-profile case like social justice case and he's losing to her

because she's seen as this crusading hero and he's just like this buddy, duddy, old white dude who hasn't really done any of this stuff. So his campaign manager will eventually testify that this case is worth a million dollars in free publicity. Oh my God. So basically the most simple explanation for his entire crusade here is follow the money.

And it also comes out that if he's employed for three more years, his pension goes up 15%. So it's like the most boring motivation for him going on this crusade is just like he wanted to bump his pension and he wanted to win this election and it should be noted that it worked. He wins the primary, he wins the general. I have like a bad taste in my mouth right now.

So basically he's doing this political gambit out in front of cameras. Behind the scenes, the case is completely falling apart. First of all, Crystal is telling wildly inconsistent stories. She's changing the number of attackers. She's changing the role of Kim. When she first tells the story, she says her and Kim were assaulted.

And then it changes where Kim is trying to save her, that she's pulled into the bathroom and Kim is like, no, no, no, trying to like pull her back. Once it comes out that Kim is saying publicly and saying to investigators, no, none of this happened. Like there was no opportunity for this to happen. She then changes her story and says, oh, Kim didn't know. Kim was outside, I was inside.

So she also changes this thing where when she first tells the story, she says it's this group of five guys and they're all being orchestrated by this one dude who's like, I'm getting married tomorrow. I have to get this out of my system before I get married. But that's when Crystal thinks that it's a bachelor party. False accusations tend to involve

expository dialogue also it seems, like more so than actual crimes. And then once she finds out that this wasn't in fact a bachelor party, that detail goes away. And it's like three equal attackers. And so the pattern that emerges is she says something and then she kind of gets fact checked

and then she changes it. And then she gets fact checked and then she changes it. And these are not small things, right? These are not stupid things. Like you say you're afraid of flying and yet you flew here. These are like large, did they vaginally rape you? Did they aint only rape you?

Like she says at one point that they ejaculated in her mouth, but then she takes that back. At some point she says all three of the guys raped her. But then she also at some point says two of them did but one of them was watching. I mean, central facts of her case keep changing. And one thing that the cops mention is that she's changing things kind of for no reason

that like every time she tells the story, they're like, we're not even skeptical. Like we're not even doing a like, what were you wearing at the time kind of interview? Like they want to nail these lacrosse players. Right, it's like the one rape case in America that's being taken seriously at that moment. As a little like detour, I looked up,

there was this really interesting article about false rape allegations. There's this woman who did a study of people that were exonerated for false rape claims. People who are exonerated after being falsely named as rapists. And what she says is that of course they are very rare. And one of the things to know about false rape claims

is that it's rare that people make them but it's much rarer that people go forward with them. I mean, most false rape claims very early in the process, medical examiners or prosecutors are just like, sorry, this doesn't hold up. This idea that like men are going to jail in like vast numbers due to false rape claims, very few false rape claims make it to that stage.

Well, you know what men are going to jail in vast numbers for? What? Is being falsely convicted of rape with the collusion of police officers where, you know, a victim of an actual rape will falsely identify in a lineup or in a photo or raise someone

that the police kind of think did it and who they kind of pushed toward the victim. Which is exactly what you see here, right? Because any common sense skeptical, like a normal level of skepticism, like trust but verify. Someone who wasn't running for reelection. Yes, would have just after a couple of days

had been like, we're not going to move forward with this, I'm sorry. Right. One of the things this study mentions about false rape allegations that they're almost always super severe. So something like the Rolling Stone UVA rape case where it's a gang rape, it's being done on broken glass and people are saying things like, you know,

grab its leg and this awful stuff. People don't make up what rapes really look like. The way that rape presents like what 90% of the time and that the establishment doesn't care about because it's not like hardcore and villainous and not something that any kind of a normal non-evil man would do. Yeah, like people don't in general make up things like,

I went on a date, I liked him, we made out in the cab, we went back to his place, he got a little rough. I kept saying no and he wouldn't stop. That's what real rapes look like. That's not what fake rape allegations look like. And like real rapes can be horrific, but it's just that that's how you know that you're going to get what you claim recognized.

Like no one's going to push all their chips to the middle of the table and say that date rape happened to them. And one of the reasons why fake rape allegations almost never make a trial is because they're so severe, those leave huge medical evidence. If we're talking about severe aggravated rape, typically you have lacerations and you have tears

and you have bruises and especially in a case like this one where somebody is at the hospital six hours after the rape is alleged to have taken place. And after claiming a gang rape too. Yeah, that you would have a lot more than what she's actually presenting with. And so in this article about false rape claims, which is written in this year,

they actually mention the Duke rape accuser as an example of this. So she says Crystal Mangum, the accuser in the Duke Lacrosse case was the archetypal false accuser. She had previously reported another brutal rape in which no one was ever charged. She had a previous felony conviction

and she ultimately went to prison for an unrelated crime. She had trouble keeping her stripping job because the combination of drugs she was on, including antidepressants and methadone, made her keep falling asleep at work. Tragically, she seems to have genuinely suffered sexual abuse as a child, another feature that often appears in adult false accusers.

That makes sense. What the prosecutor should have done in this case is just quietly move on, get her to the help that she needs. Get her a job that she can fall asleep during, like phone sales. Another reason why Nifong's case is falling apart is that there is no medical evidence

that an attack took place. There's no lacerations, there's no swelling. They do all this examination of the anus and they find nothing. There's some swelling of the vagina, but they also find out that she has a yeast infection, perfectly matches the kind of swelling that she has. There's no bruises.

So one of the things that makes them really skeptical is when this medical examiner is poking her and saying, you know, tell me where it hurts. Every single place that they poke her, she says it hurts there. So it's like, does your ankle hurt? Yes, do your hips hurt? Yes, does your stomach hurt?

Yes. This is one of the reasons why the medical examiner is actually skeptical of her. The medical examiner doesn't believe her because she's like, in cases like this, like your neck hurts, but your arms don't, right? Or your knees hurt, but your back doesn't. It doesn't make sense that your entire body hurts like this.

Another reason it's falling apart is she can't identify the people that attacked her. The night that she comes in, she says their names are Adam, Matt, and Brett. So she picks like the whitest names imaginable. Their names are Chad, Brent, and Chadwick. Exactly, and like, in a group of 46 white people, like half of them are named Adam, Matt, and Brett.

They were all wearing chambray shirts. We show her the photos of every Matt, Adam, and Brett on the team. She's like, no, I don't think so. She weirdly describes all three of them as heavy set. So she says some of them weigh like 260, 270 pounds, which on like an elite lacrosse team, there just aren't that many bigger dudes.

No, lacrosse guys are ropey. Yeah, lacrosse guys are extremely ropey. And so one of the main things, in the case against Nifong, eventually, is the way that he does the photo identification. So the way that it's opposed to work, and I'm sure you know this, is they show you something called, it's called a six pack.

I just learned that this week. Yeah. Six photos. Two of the people in the six photos are suspects. And then four people are like filler. They're people that live in a different city. They died 50 years ago. Like, they could not have done this.

It's like as much cider as you're supposed to put in like any respectable gift six pack selection, you know, two ciders, two actual suspects. Yeah. And so this is kind of like a check on the accuser too, right, of like, she's not just like picking people at random. So the thing that Mike Nifong does in this case, they don't do that.

They show her 35 people, all of whom were on the Duke Lacrosse team. Right, because those prosecutors often do. He says, this is a really important case. And so Wirik is going to proceed at random. She doesn't identify anybody of this first array, which you can see maybe she's a little bit skeptical of going forward, right?

She's like, oh, none of them, none of them look like it. You know, maybe she wants to save her ass without actually throwing an actual other people under the bus. Yeah. Then, because they've been interviewing all these Lacrosse team players, they know who was at the party and who wasn't.

So they print out photos of every single person who was at the party. They make a PowerPoint presentation where she just goes through and she's like, no, no, no, no, yes, no, no, no, yes. Which is an insane procedure because there's no wrong answer. Right.

There's nothing in there to say like, oh, maybe she's mistaken. Right. So she picks out three people, one of whom it turns out wasn't at the party. So again, red flag. She's picked out three people with 100% uncertainty. One of them wasn't even there.

It's frustrating that someone is so inexperently lying and there's just nothing to catch her at any level for a really long time. She also misidentifies the person who made the broomstick comment that she's like, oh, that's the guy that made the broomstick comment. But again, like that's on video.

And so she misidentifies that person. So huge reasons for skepticism. So she picks out this guy, Colin Finnerty, and Reed Seligman. So those are the two kind of like prime suspects at this point. And then the DNA evidence comes back. Thank God.

Well, this becomes a huge thing that North Carolina has an open discovery law where the prosecutor has to show the defense attorneys every piece scrap of evidence, even if it's exculpatory, like it's supposed to be just like a totally transparent process. God, what do other states have?

We should do an episode about that. Seriously. Go on. So even though the DNA evidence shows no lacrosse DNA, it shows between four and 11 other guys in her various oral, anal, vaginal, whatever. There's all these other guys that show up there. All the different swabs. I looked this up.

DNA of a man stays in a woman between three and seven days. Wow. Yes. That's longer than I would have thought. Me too, actually. But so instead of turning this over as he is required to by law, Mike Nyfong conspires with the head of the DNA lab

to keep these results out of the summary report. So he releases a summary report that says no DNA from the lacrosse players. So to his credit, that was in there. It says her boyfriend's DNA was there, but it excludes this detail about between four and 11 other guys. The right wing latches onto this as basically like,

she's a slut, like as if that means anything. But it's not the most relevant thing, but it's also not irrelevant because it means the test is so sensitive that it can find DNA from. A week ago? Yeah. But it can't find DNA from six hours ago. Yeah.

So this means is that the test is not faulty. It could lead to a compelling defense theory down the line of maybe she's experienced a gang rape at some point, even in the last seven days. And is describing that and is kind of not in an ideal mental state for processing what happened when. And also, you know, we live in a country where jurors like people are just a little slut shaming.

And it is a big weakness in Mike Nifong's case that she has this many other dudes DNA inside of her. So like, it's a huge weakness in his case that he deliberately keeps from the defense lawyers. And it doesn't even matter what it is. The fact that he's withholding anything is just, you know, wildly unethical. Yeah.

So then another period of time goes by. So this fake fingernail that they find in the garbage can has Duke LaCrosse player DNA on it. It has the DNA of this kid, David Evans. Oh, that's interesting. Who lives in the house where the rape took place. So everyone else is just like a party goer, whatever. David Evans is one of the people that lives in the house.

This eventually gets twisted into this version where his skin was found under her fingernails. That is not the case. There is a partial DNA match on the outside of her fingernail. And could that come from like sweat or something like that? Well, that's the thing is that it's not like this fingernail is sitting pristine at the top of the garbage can, right? It's a couple of days later.

It's like been jostled around. It's been dumped out so the cops can look for it. So what everybody says after this is that it could have been like a sandwich that he ate or like his saliva from something else could have got like. It could have touched a solo cup. It's also a partial match. So 2% of the population would show up as a match

because it's not complete DNA. Oh. Yeah. So the most insane thing to me is that after all this DNA evidence comes out, Nifong then decides to charge the lacrosse players. Wow. The timeline of this is unbelievable. After the exonerating evidence comes out,

he then decides to charge them. Why do you expect Nifon to be making good decisions at this point in his career? He's already come this far. Another thing that comes out at this point is that Call Infinity and Reed Seligman, two of the accused people, have like watertight alibis. So Call Infinity left the party right after the strippers

were done and we have credit card receipts from him at a Mexican restaurant. We also, he went there with like six other bros. So all the bros are like, yeah man, he was with us. And also Reed Seligman has like the world's watertightest alibi. Reed Seligman calls a cab at 12.15. So like five, 10 minutes after the strippers are finished,

we have the phone record of him calling the cab. We have the cab driver who signs a sworn affidavit. Yes, I picked him up. We have camera footage of him getting money out of an ATM at like 12.25. We then have a little dorm bloop where he gets into his dorm like he swipes his card to get back into his dorm at like 1 AM.

So all of his whereabouts are documented. And every few minutes he pops up somewhere. Yes, it is very clear that he did not do it. Also David Evans who lives at the house and is a bit more involved like he knew about organizing the strippers. He's like a bit more of a mastermind of this entire evening.

He's on the phone with his girlfriend from like 12.25 to 12.40. Oh wow, during the entire window when he's, but he's also got his girlfriend who's able to testify like he didn't sound like he was participating in a horrific gang rape. So again, to believe that this rape even took place, you have to believe some pretty sketchy stuff.

But then to believe that these guys do it, you're into like Baroque conspiracy theory insanity territory. Well, I guess this is physically impossible. Like how would it even have happened? There's just no way. But again, Nifong, rather than being like, oh holy shit, he tries to get the alibi witness thrown in jail,

this cab driver, this poor cab driver. What? Oh my God, that flailing bastard. Nifong threatens him unless he doesn't change his statements. And then eventually arrest him on some like bullshit trumped up, someone stole something out of his cab and he like didn't show up to testify. And then Nifong like throws him in jail for that,

like this insane shit. Is a cab driver a gentleman of Caucasian descent? Oh, I mean, his last name is El Mostafa. Okay, proceed. Yes, also Kim, the dancer who says like this never could have happened because she has warrants out for her arrest too. He enters into a deal with her to reduce her bail to zero.

And then magically she changes her statement and says, well, it could have happened. I didn't see anything. On Nifong's part, this is like deliberate and premeditated. Every decision he has to make is about denying or hiding the truth in some way until it becomes literally impossible or I somehow win, which I'm sure he believed would happen.

Totally. Meanwhile, the right wing people that talk about this case, they see this as like the main tragedy of the case. The lacrosse season, the entire lacrosse season has been canceled. Oh no, not the lacrosse season. The lacrosse coach loses his job. Oh, that's a bummer.

You know, he's basically accused of like complicity in this rape. You know, it is a real, like it's a legit bullshit that he gets fired. It's a blow to the lacrosse community. Oh, what's interesting is, you know, this is where the sort of political correctness argument comes in.

Again, everyone in the story sucks. The campus goes nuts. So people start putting wanted posters around the campus with photos of random lacrosse players because this Nifong Code of Silence narrative really catches fire. Is there a sense that the guys are probably guilty? Oh yeah, I mean, there is no question

that the guys are guilty. Really? Oh yeah, 88 academics at the school sign a letter saying the entire team should be expelled. We don't want them in our classes. Wow, the whole team. A lot of it is not actually about this case. A lot of it is about like there's a rape culture on campus.

There is a sense of entitlement among college athletes. And like those guys suck, but just for different reasons. Yeah, you know, it becomes like all of these things. It just becomes an excuse to talk about pre-existing beliefs, right? Yeah. It is true that like there's an environment of like shitty masculinity on Duke campus

and an environment of the campus sucking up to student athletes at the expense of academic rigor. All of those things are true, but those things are not dependent on this case. And so everything gets tied to this case. Right. In this way, the right wing commentators on this are correct. Like there really was a rush to judgment on this.

Nobody wanted to express any skepticism of the accuser and nobody wanted to entertain the idea that like the only information about this case that we have is from the prosecutor, which is weird because left wing people are like so skeptical of criminal justice stuff. No one was like, uh, we really have a prosecutor that's like up for reelection.

Well, because one of the controversial left wing platforms is that we should try to prosecute rape sometimes. And so it's just easy to get so excited when there's like a rape case actually getting prosecuted. And the racial stuff was just too perfect, right? That like we've got these elite institution, guys whose parents work in the financial sector. And then we've got the black exotic dancer

who's like a student at the, not a community college, but like the public college. She's raising two kids. She's a single mom. It just, it feels really gross to be like, ah, she has a prior conviction. Like everyone finds it really not cool to be questioning her, which like is understandable.

Like it feels gross. But then also nobody asks basic questions. Yeah. And this is the same vortex that we're trapped in today in a way that makes complete sense. We feel like we're living in a culture that doesn't take rape seriously generally. It feels like allegation by allegation.

And if you look at facts that don't really line up and are like, well, you know, are you sure? Like that doesn't really make sense. Then like questioning that allegation is going to mean questioning, you know, women's right to elect rape at all. You know, they just, everything still feels so tenuous. There's also, I mean, right wing,

like media figures are like super gloaty and like super gleeful about this case now that it's fallen apart. But like the right wing media acted abysmally. So we've got Tucker Carlson in April is saying, the accuser's testimony about matters of sex is to be taken by ordinary common sense people a little differently than the testimony

of someone who isn't a crypto hooker. What's a crypto hooker? Someone who's secretly a hooker, like a crypto Nazi? A hooker that uses Bitcoin. That's a really weird insult. And also, so Rush Limbaugh, of course, he shows up in this. It's like the lacrosse team supposedly rapes some hoes. God, Rush Limbaugh.

These people are all dancing on the grave of this case now. But then what really makes this story catch fire is a front page New York Times article. 6,000 words long. How long after the alleged crime is this in the news? This is four months. This is August. And is this what makes it like national news,

this big New York Times piece? It hit already. The case actually didn't make it to the national news before the DNA samples from all of the lacrosse players got taken. The crime happens on March 13th, but it doesn't become news until March 27th or something, because that's what really sparks the nationwide attention.

So there's this four month period where there's just not very much information. And Mike Knifong, for this whole four month period, is saying this extremely inflammatory stuff. He then indicts the three players in April. And then in August, this article comes out saying, we're just going to do a objective analysis of all of the evidence.

And they just get worked by Mike Knifong. Oh, man. They just take whole cloth all of their explanations for the strength of their evidence. Which is amazing, because Mike Knifong seems like a terrible liar. He seems like he should be pushing junk bonds or something like that.

What's really interesting about this article is that they got a copy of the discovery file. So they have 1,800 pages of notes and contemporaneous, like arrest records, every single scrap of information. This 1,800 page file contains a 33 page memo by the investigating officer. So the investigating officer says, I didn't take any notes for the entire four months

that I was investigating this case, but I wrote down four months later from memory every single thing that happened in the early stages of the case. No, that's like how you write a novel in the Victorian times about being a sea captain, being pursued by an ice ghost. Like that's not how you conduct a criminal investigation. We know now, either he is lying about not taking notes

and he just kept those out of the file, or he just is like a bad detective and didn't write anything down. So I mean, one thing they note in this article is that the first person to talk to Crystal that night, she describes the attackers, they're all heavy set, right? And then we've got the notes of the detective four months later, who says, the night of the attack,

she described one of the attackers as tall and lanky, i.e. he looks exactly like this call infinity guy who has been indicted for the crime. Oh, come on, you guys. You can't treat rich white guys like you treat regular subjects of an investigation. Someone will check up on you someday. Well, this is what's so nuts.

It's like the journalists, in one sentence, they say the police could not identify the reason for the discrepancy. Yeah, it's called retconning. They did it on Buffy. The person who took her testimony the night of the case has no reason to lie. It wasn't a media scandal at that point.

It was just a routine intake. You should tend to believe when there's conflicting accounts, the person who has the least incentive to lie, perhaps even none. And then we've got this person now whose entire career of his boss depends on convicting these guys. And it's like, who can say who's more credible?

They also bring in this ridiculous thing, which I actually remember reading this at the time, that she was roofied. They'd note that when Crystal arrived at the party, she was sober. But then within minutes, she started showing signs of being impaired. But no one says that she was sober.

The taxi driver who drove her to the party says he saw her drinking beer. The neighbor says he saw her stumble out of the car. So I have no idea where they got this detail that she arrived sober. There's also a toxicology report that shows negative four-date rape drugs. So it's like she was tested for date rape drugs.

At the time, they also, this is pretty fucked up, they also interview the sexual abuse nurse who like interviews Crystal after the attack takes place, who lies and says she had anal swelling and bruising when she came in. The nurse does? Yeah, this becomes like a day right wing thing that the nurse is a proto-feminist.

Like she, one of the details that ends up in later books about this is that this nurse has been in performances of the vagina monologues. Oh no. This is seen as like profoundly discrediting to her. So they're saying that she's like a bleeding heart feminist and so she helps construct this false claim.

That appears to like actually kind of be true. Like she just seems like someone who is inclined to believe women. Oh no, heaven forbid. I know. But she exaggerates evidence that like the idea that there would be anal swelling and bruises and no one writes that on the report

when the entire purpose of the examination is to find evidence of sexual assault, that makes no sense. What is the thrust of this article then? Like we just, we read all these prosecution documents and we find them credible the end. Yeah, it's basically do they have a case? And so they do this kind of like both sides thing. But I remember reading that article

and being like these dudes are fucking guilty, right? You've got the date rape thing. She's got bruises, she's got anal swelling. They've got like this weird semen evidence. They're like, oh, the semen of David Evans was found on a towel near the bathroom, which like he's a 19 year old boy. Like of course his semen is on all the towels.

Yeah, there's semen covering that whole house. That doesn't mean anything. Yeah, of course. So this article is just right in the pocket of good old Nifong. Oh yeah, Nifong loves it. And Nifong is clearly, he's giving them quotes. They are just taking hook, line and sinker every single thing that Nifong says about this case.

Good job, guys. I mean, basically this case then ends up winding through the courts. This is like such an example of rich people justice that the trial never, they never actually get to trial, but there's nine months of pre-trial motions. Are the kids out on bail? I don't want to call them the kids.

Are the, God, the kids. It's like they get younger each time we mention them. They're like 19, 20, 21. Okay, but they're out on bail? They're out on bail. At one point, one of them mentions like, when I was in London, I heard the news, da, da, da, like they're, they're fine.

They're doing okay. And I'm shocked that I haven't read a novel by a white guy about a thinly veiled version of this, like the summer of my ankle monitor. But anyway. This then becomes nine months of pre-trial hearings. Rich people justice, it's, there's all this technical stuff, right?

They want the case to be thrown out. They want the jurisdiction changed. There's all this stuff about the DNA. They fight, the lawyers fight to get the complete DNA results because all they have is the summary report. And so they're fighting to get the actual underlying data. And one of the things that's actually fucking cool about this is one of the defense attorneys

teaches himself to read a DNA report, like the raw data and he finds out this thing, but four to 11 other men are found in the DNA report because that was deliberately taken out of the summary. Who is this heroic, wonky defense attorney? Because I want them and Kim to be on like the two saints candles that we make. Seriously, there's also this amazing footage.

So there's like some sort of routine hearing, whatever. Nifong shows up with the head of the DNA lab. He says, oh, by the way, this guy's gonna testify today. So you guys have had no prep for cross-examining this guy. I'm picturing this guy literally as Lionel Hutz from the Simpsons now. This guy who has trained himself

to do the background reading. Oh my God. He stands up and starts like tearing this dude apart. And it's like, well, what about the Zygote ZX13 that you felt like technical shit? How does it feel, Nifong? And eventually gets him to admit that they've had a conspiracy,

that Nifong has asked him deliberately to keep these results out of the summary report. So he actually does the lawyer thing that never happens in real life, that happened in this case where you got someone to confess something incendiary on cross. Yeah, it's like a legit Perry Mason moment. That's beautiful.

So that's basically the end of the case, is after all of this, after this guy admits in open court, yes, we were engaged in a conspiracy. Wow. The North Carolina bar files an ethics complaint against Nifong. This is insane. Nifong drops the charges of rape against the boys,

but keeps the charges of kidnapping and sexual assault. So he refuses to give up. Nifong is like that weasel that got picked up by an eagle and then the eagle and the weasel died with their jaws clamped on each other's throat. It's like that's Nifong in the legal system. But eventually, because of the ethics complaint, he has to recuse himself.

The case then goes to the North Carolina AG, who at the time is Roy Cooper, who is now the Democratic governor of North Carolina. He then does a full on starts over again, Brie does the investigation. And this is where we get the timeline of events that I started with. Good old Roy.

He puts out this paper in April, so a year almost to the day since the crime occurred. And he concludes, A, this crime did not happen, and B, these guys did not do it. And so it's actually a very rare thing for one of these reports to say these people are innocent. Usually they're just like, we conclude the evidence does not add up, blah, blah, blah.

So I think this is actually one of those examples of rich people justice, that it's not clear if there's pressure if he just sort of feels like it's a moral crusade or whatever, but the report actually says, we conclude that a crime did not occur and that these three defendants are innocent. And is it like the system finding fault with itself

or is there a language about like shifting all the blame onto Nifong where a lot of it does belong? Well, I mean, one of the big themes of this case is this idea that like this is an isolated incident. But like aside from this case that we're all looking at, the system is functioning extremely well. One of the things that the AG report mentions is prosecutors have no forms of accountability,

but surely this is not typical of prosecutors in general or the state of North Carolina in particular. Like it goes out of its way to be like, this is the only time this has ever happened and we have a bad apple. Right, and he's not even an apple. It's just a riding goats head that got into the apple barrel somehow

and now we've taken it out and hosed off the other apples. One thing I kept thinking reading this report, this is how the justice system should work every time where basically it's like the state AG is like, stop what you're doing. Someone might have been falsely accused, all hands on deck.

The difference between the way that this false accusation gets handled and like false accusations of, for example, shaken baby syndrome against a Hispanic nanny is night and day. In those cases, it's so reluctant. Like, I guess we can have another hearing. This one is like, no, we need to get there tomorrow.

Like, there is this rush to exonerate these kids. Because they're like, oh my God, like if they're falsely accused of something they didn't do, it might screw up their lives. These guys are gonna get Wall Street jobs. We can't possibly derail that. Wait, so what are the repercussions for Nifong in this? So Nifong gets disbarred, he eventually resigns.

I was so ready to hear he was like, still working for the state right now. There's like a weird thing where he has to turn in his law license, but he says that his dog ate it so he can't turn it in. Wait, he literally said that? Yes. Which sounds like I'm making that up,

but he does actually say I can't give back my law license because my dog ate it. That's amazing. He even now gives interviews to various folks. He still says they're guilty. Wow. So like the whole thing basically breaks down. Yeah.

So a lot of these like how did this happen types of reports? And so there's a couple theories that show up in the literature. My theory is that everyone did their job like they normally did. Yes, exactly. So first of all, the media is terrible at covering procedural things.

What? We are? All this stuff about the photo arrays and the DNA. The media knew all this, but just like didn't see it as a big deal. They're just like, this is the information that we have. It's very difficult for the media to look at these things and being like, this actually invalidates everything.

They're so trained in just taking the word of criminal justice professionals as gospel. And specifically prosecutors and cops. Yeah. And so much reporting on cases that are developing or where details are emerging is literally just a press release for the police. One of the people that I really blame for this

is Nancy fucking Grace. Oh yeah. I blame Nancy Grace for the heat death of the universe. So as I mentioned, there's nine months of pretrial hearings. Nancy Grace is doing this like every day. I mean, one of her quotes is, I'm so glad they didn't miss a lacrosse game

over a little thing like gang rape. So like she goes on the war path. It's really her only path. The day that the news comes out that the attorney general is declaring these kids innocent, Nancy Grace calls in sick, which is like, I don't want to do conspiracy theory stuff, but it's like, it doesn't look great.

She doesn't seem like the kind of person who calls in sick very often. Not very much. I mean, the much bigger issue here is that she never talks about it ever again. What? Like she never does another show. She never mentions it in passing.

She just moves on. There's this kind of like radical feminist lady who had gone on her show a bunch. You know, Nancy Grace does the like, argue for and argue against with these dumb ass heads in little boxes. Right. Cause conservatives get feminists on their shows

when they're like someone who is against rape. Yes, exactly. So one of these people that had come on over and over again to say these boys are terrible, they should all be convicted, blah, blah, blah. Afterwards, of course, takes no responsibility. She says, you have to appreciate my role as a pundit is to draw inferences and make arguments

on behalf of the side to which I'm assigned. So of course it's going to sound like I'm arguing in favor of guilty. That's the opposite of what the defense pundit is doing, which is arguing that they're innocent. Oh my God, Nancy. So we're gonna do a little bit of after, like the afterlife of this case.

Yeah. So in 2008, a book comes out called Until Proven Innocent, Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape. Truly the greatest problem with our legal system at this time. Well, this is what's so interesting. So I read excerpts from the book

and a lot of the guy that wrote it has this really interesting blog called Durham in Wonderland where he covers lots of the details of the case. And just like the weird universes that this case exists in where in the right wing echo chamber, it's political correctness gone mad. And so their book is this whole thing with like long chapters about political correctness

and like fake rapes and how rape statistics are bad and how take back the night is like ruining America. And this whole like panic over what's going on on college campuses in America. They are, of course, using this case as the little coat hanger for these bigger arguments that they wanna make about political correctness. And of course, this whole thing of false accusations,

the authors of this book, never get interested in false accusations when it's not false accusations of rape. Prosecutorial misconduct does not interest these people unless it's prosecutorial misconduct against rich white dudes on behalf of women. So this is like an incubator for like white guys who have weird persecution complexes

because they saw someone who looked like them get broadly accused one time. A lot of people made their name on this case. God damn it, Nifong. But then the left wing does exactly the same thing. So in 2014, we have this guy called William Cohan who puts out a book called The Price of Silence, the Duke Lacrosse scandal, the power of the elite

and the corruption of our great universities. So basically like the right and the left pundits both went off and wrote like the most predictable books? Yes, because I read this book. This was like how I got into the research on this, was reading William Cohan's book. It's shit. It's like, you just wanted to write a book

about how universities suck up to college athletes. The inequalities between the university and the city. Well, I'm sure he just wanted to write that book anyway and his agent was like, it's not timely enough. You have to connect it to something in the news. And then he did and that's how you got a crappy book. And so you're reading this thing and like a lot of the stuff he says is true.

The NCAA is bullshit and college athletes are sucked up to in a gross way. He links all this back to teen drinking that like binge drinking on campus is out of control. It's like, just write your book, man. Like please proceed, governor. You don't need to hang it all on this case. And so one of the things that he does,

which now having read his book and having like looked at the actual primary documents, I find completely obnoxious that he goes back to this theory of events where he basically says something happened. He refuses to acknowledge that this is a false rape allegation. And how could something have happened

based on the timeline? Well, exactly. He never actually says. He does this very coy thing. He shows up on NPR and he's on fresh air and he's everywhere and he keeps getting asked, you know, what happened? He's like, I don't know what to believe.

He says something happened in that bathroom that none of us would be proud of. What? But he also, I mean, he put stuff in his book that is just insane. So now Crystal Mangum, the accuser, is now in jail for murdering her boyfriend. Oh, shit.

This was in 2013, I think. She stabbed him between the ribs with a butter knife. Shit. Oh, God. And of course she says it's self-defense, but the guy that she killed actually lived for a couple of days after she stabbed him and says like, it was not self-defense.

He's been in and out of jail for other things. This lady has had just like a shitty life. So anyway, William Cohan, the author of this Something Happened book, interviews her in jail. She says, oh, the reason why there was no DNA is because they actually, they raped me with a broomstick. And it was so severe,

the medical examiners were pulling wooden shards out of me. Which is not true and is provably not true. I remember reading years ago, this interview with one of the writers on the TV show 24, where he admitted that every single episode of 24, they just write it for like, what's gonna work in this moment? They're just like, oh, wouldn't it be suspenseful

if like the president double crossed this other person? But like, if you go back through the show after the end, nothing makes sense, right? You're like, oh, if the president was the bad guy all the time, in episode three, why did he do this other thing? Like nothing holds together. Wow.

This is exactly what Crystal is doing. Okay, it's a broomstick and it's so bad that they were pulling wooden shards out of you okay, but then why wasn't the avowed vagina monologues feminist who examined you, why would she not mention that? If there was any evidence that this was true, we would have locked them up and turned away the key, which like we should have done if there was evidence.

Or maybe we wouldn't have, but there would still be some documentation of it. Yeah, it's the kind of lie that you make when you're just not thinking through consequences because it would be like, that's something that would have been substantiated and it's very easy for someone to come back to be like, no, that didn't happen.

And then if your response is to just make up another version, you're just not operating according to the logic that will allow you to feel like you've been caught in an untruth. Yeah, and there's a lot of other evidence of she has other stuff going on. So like when she's confronted by the AG's office about why is there a photo of you passed out

on the porch when you say the rape took place, she says, oh, that photo was doctored. She also, she does two interviews with the AG. At one of the interviews, she shows up super drunk and on a bunch of prescription medication and she's like slurring her speech. She's just really troubled, man. So someone needed to be like,

let's pay for this lady to go to like intensive rehab. That's the thing is like someone needed to just really get her the help that she needed. And so one of the amazing things about Kohan's book and what drives me fucking crazy is like, he just quotes her giving this broomstick account. But like doesn't question it. He's just like, oh, now she has this new thing.

And then it's like chapter 11. Like he doesn't- This relates to how books aren't fact checked. Yes. Sometimes at all, often at all, right? Yes. And like, you know, he quotes her as saying I, you know, the broomstick thing happened.

And then he says, no account of wooden shards shows up in the medical examiner's report. And then he just moves on. Right. And it's like, well, what does that discrepancy tell you, man? Like what could you as an adult conclude these two facts? But he just goes on.

He also interviews Mike Knifong at length. Oh boy. He keeps doing this explanation of like, well, Mike Knifong made mistakes with a reaction. He was the subject of a witch hunt basically that like the AG came down on him too hard. He also, this was also like, drew me insane. He also cast aspersions on whether these kids are innocent.

So the kid, Reed Seligman, who's on camera at an ATM, he says, I asked Mike Knifong about that. What do you think about the Reed Seligman alibi? He told me it could have been a manufactured alibi. He points to the fact that when Reed Seligman asked for the cab to come pick him up, instead of picking him up at that house, he had the cab go to the house around the corner.

Why would you do that? Obviously he wanted to get away from that house. Like, is why he called the cab. So like, we're being skeptical of the guy whose story has never changed and who's on camera in another location. The scandal of all of this should have been that this investigation and this whole case

was allowed to proceed without any obstruction for as long as it did. Like, how long was this hurtling along until finally this heroic defense lawyer derailed the whole thing? One of the reasons why this case has been so clarifying to me of why I believe Anita Hill and like why I believe Blasey Ford

is like, reality has discrepancies. As we have discussed, if you explain to someone any event that took place in real life, there's going to be discrepancies, right? Like, why did you bike home even though it was raining? Like, there's always gonna be weird things that don't make sense, right? What we have in the cases,

the true cases that we've been dealing with is there are discrepancies in those accounts, but when those discrepancies are pointed out, people are not changing their stories, right? When people push on the so-called discrepancies in Anita Hill's case, if you say he harassed you, why did you pick him up at the airport?

She gives very convincing accounts of those discrepancies. She's like, I am an adult, and being an adult means remaining cordial with your boss, even though you don't like him. Whereas in this one, we've got discrepancy, she changes her story. Discrepancy, she changes her story. And that back and forth?

Left-wing people should be comfortable just saying like, falsary allegations are really rare, but like, they exist. Like, women are human beings, and human beings sometimes do bad things. And all of the evidence is that she's lying. And to believe that she's not lying, you have to believe an insane timeline of events

where they left and they gave their dorm key card to someone else and they falsified their phone record. You have to believe in this vast conspiracy, or she was lying. Or somebody lied, and then they got caught, and then they just kept digging. And then someone saw her keep digging, and it was like, great, let's all get shovels,

and also keep digging forever. And that's so much more plausible. I mean, I also feel like it's hard to like, accuse someone of making a false rape accusation. But we tend to see that as like, something that you do out of malice, out of like, choosing true in someone's life, wanting to create a witch hunt.

Like, the idea that like, false rape accusations are about wanting to, to screw with someone. When really like, you look at this case, and it makes total sense that she just got, you know, that her brain was not at optimal levels, and just got backed into a corner, and got scared and panicked and lied to save her ass,

and just, and then just kept going with it. Like, there doesn't have to be any malice there. It was just a bad choice. And like, really to me, like this whole story, this is the Nifong story. And like, any story where that unveils systemic flaws, it feels like the story being in the news is the equivalent of like, a fishing boat having nets

that are basically mostly whole, or more whole than net, and like, are not netting any fish. And instead of telling that as a story about like, fishing boats need to upgrade their net technology, the story is like, what is up with these fish? Like, what is going on with the fish in the ocean? So to me, the real lesson of this, and what we should end with is, I don't know,

we should all be maybe more skeptical of perfect accounts by overzealous prosecutors. I don't know, I mean, I don't know, I don't know if the generalizable- We should just all be skeptical of prosecutors as a general rule. I feel like we should look at prosecutors the way, you know, when like, a random person approaches you,

and is like, can I use your phone for a second, you know? You don't want to be a bad community member. You're like, okay, but like, I'm gonna kinda, you know, not feel maybe super comfortable until this is over. Like, I feel like that should be the attitude we bring to prosecutorial accounts. All right, like continue. I am going to be pretty vigilant.

I also think there's something about hanging your larger arguments on extremely rare cases. A gang rape by affluent white college students against a not affluent African-American dancer. Like that perfect storm of race and class and education and everything else doesn't come along all that often. False rape claims also don't come along all that often.

So it seems disingenuous. Like, if you think rape culture on campus is bad, write your blog post. You don't need this case to fit into that. And if you think political correctness on campus is out of control, write your blog post. Leave these things complex in between them and don't twist them around in a way

that supports views you already hold and are going to continue to hold regardless of how this case resolves itself. Yeah, but where have criminal justice sweeps weak? Ha ha ha.