The Duke Lacrosse Scandal in Retrospect

Most of the features of today's online inquisitions were present in the Before Times

Today’s guest post by Geoffrey Shullenberger revisits a crucial episode in the long arc of ideological succession. “The future is already here, just unequally distributed,” is a broadly useful maxim whose relevance to this case concerns what would in the years to come become the open avowal and formal institutionalization of the denial of due process as an expedient endorsed by a progressive left pledged to combatting the depredations of white supremacy and patriarchy in America. The Duke Lacrosse Case was a moment in which such ideas, long incubating within obscure humanities departments, crossed the blood-brain barrier to dominate mainstream media coverage of an event that seemed scripted to fit the narrative.

That the narrative wound up totally collapsing, resulting in the vindication of the accused and the ruination of the prosecutor who engaged in serious misconduct in the service of that narrative would become a recurrent feature of the media spectacles that would become pervasive in a social media and media culture that would accept that narrative as axiomatic in the Trump years. Shullenberger looks back across the gulf separating our own world from that of the Before Times, and sees in the strange synergy emerging between the Duke University English department, an opportunistic white male local prosecutor, and the sports desk at New York Times, a potent anticipation of the world in which we all live today.

by Geoff Shullenberger

During the Spring of 2006, much of the nation’s public was riveted by the story of a heinous crime initially reported in local outlets out of Durham, North Carolina. On March 27, Mike Nifong, the city’s District Attorney, alleged that earlier that month, three white members of Duke University’s highly ranked lacrosse team had raped a black stripper hired to perform at a house party hosted by the team’s captain. For months, leading newspapers and TV programs presented the alleged assault as a damning illustration of the injustices of American society now widely known as “white privilege” and “toxic masculinity.”

There was just one problem: the supposed rape had never actually occurred. Although it took months for mainstream coverage to catch up, within a few months it was clear to many observers that the accuser was highly unreliable, and that the prosecutor had doggedly pursued a case with a flimsy evidentiary basis, played fast and loose with facts, and disregarded due process. What’s more, Nifong had an obvious ulterior motive for railroading the accused players: he hoped to serve up an incendiary racialized narrative to pander to black voters in an election year. By the end of 2006, the case was in tatters, and the North Carolina bar filed ethics charges against Nifong, leading him to withdraw from prosecuting the case. He would subsequently be disbarred for his misconduct.

On April 11, 2007, state Attorney General Roy Cooper—now North Carolina’s Democratic governor—formally dropped all charges of sexual assault against the three lacrosse players: Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans. Cooper’s action marked the end of a legal battle that had directed the sort of negative attention at Duke that college administrators most fear. But by endorsing a fabricated, politically motivated case against its own students, the university’s leadership and faculty only made matters worse.

The accusations initially seemed to disgrace one of Duke’s top sports teams, but in the end, the proof of the players’ innocence shifted the opprobrium to the star professors and high-level administrators who had aided and abetted Nifong— at every stage. Yet while lacrosse coach Mike Pressler had been forced out through guilt by association with the accused players, none of the professors or administrators who supported the prosecutor, even after his case fell apart, ever faced any consequences for their actions. Duke’s president, Richard Brodhead, who bore significant responsibility for the university’s collusion with Nifong, remained at the helm for nearly a decade after the players’ exoneration.

Then there were the members of the so-called “Group of 88,” the faculty who signed onto a statement published in the student newspaper a few weeks after the accusations surfaced.

While stopping short of asserting the players’ guilt, the Group of 88 thanked “the protestors making collective noise” who were busily putting up “Wanted” posters with the players’ faces and demanding the university expel those accused prior to any legal determination of guilt.

The letter also asserted: “Regardless of the results of the police investigation, what is apparent everyday now is the anger and fear of many students who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism, who see illuminated in this moment’s extraordinary spotlight what they live with everyday.” In other words, even if the players proved innocent of the charge of racially motivated sexual assault, they were guilty of being beneficiaries of structural racism and sexism.

This caveat, reiterated in a “clarifying letter” the Group of 88 published after Nifong’s case had collapsed, offered sufficient plausible deniability to salvage the signatories’ reputations once the players were exonerated. They claimed, in effect, they had only been using the concern generated by the accusations to call attention to a systemic crisis, and as far as academia was concerned, this was sufficient reason to publish a statement egging on the rush to judgment. As Professor Wahneema Lubiano, a leading member of the Group, wrote in a blog, “regardless of the 'truth,'” the accused were “almost perfect offenders . . . the exemplars of the upper end of the class hierarchy, the politically dominant race and ethnicity, the dominant gender, the dominant sexuality, and the dominant social group on campus.”

This version of the Duke lacrosse case, where the players stood in for “white male privilege” and their accuser came to embody its intersectional victims, was quickly taken up by the national media after being pushed by faculty and student activists. The resulting morality tale anticipated, in broad contours, the one conjured up in 2019 out of l’affaire Covington, in which a video alleging to show a group of teenage boys harassing a Native American activist outside the Lincoln Memorial dominated a few news cycles. Soon enough, it became clear that the version of the narrative circulated by the mainstream media excluded crucial context that absolved the accused.