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SHERIFF: 'DUKE LACROSSE CASE ALL OVER AGAIN'

Virginian Pilot Reinforces Hate

The Virginian Pilot reacted with hate and bigotry to the evidence that the fable about coed “Jackie” gang raped by the fraternity brothers at UVA was a lie from beginning to end.

They ran a cartoon showing a “right wing” couch potato ranting about rape to his TV set while his daughter enters the room, apparently the victim of rape.

It’s the kind of thing you expect from the “cool kids gang” in junior high taunting their classmates after they are exposed as fakes. It’s what the little bastard do to reclaim their superior status.

There is a great takedown of this kind of crap from the people who hold the megaphone but lack either moral stature or a sense of shame.

The problem with the editors of the Virginian Pilot is not so much that they failed to see through the bullshit of the Rolling Stone story. Lots of people thought that accusing men at UVA of gang rape without a shred of hard evidence would not actually reach print in a national publication. But you would be wrong, and the editors of the Virginian Pilot went into paroxysm of rage over the fable. They assumed without evidence that other members of the MSM had a shred of decency left.

Wrong again.

But here’s the real crime. After admitting that the rape didn't happen, after grudgingly admitting that none of it’s true, the MSM and the editors of the Virginia Pilot believe the rest of the fable printed in Rolling Stone IS true.

For example, the part about UVA sweeping rape accusations under the rug. Here’s the first person to actually question the rolling Stone story (no, it’s not a writer for the Washington Post but a blogger) Shots in the Dark. The MSM just piggy backed on his questions, just as Dan Rather’s lies about George Bush’s National Guard record were first uncovered by a blogger.

The one true thing about Jackie’s story…is that it disproves Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s story. Erdely used Jackie to argue that UVa is indifferent to allegations of sexual assault. But as we know now, the university took Jackie’s story very seriously. Jackie spoke with a dean who subsequently checked up on her multiple times; was offered counseling; was offered the opportunity of pursuing the matter through university channels or through the police; and was recommended to a rape survivor group. Then, she was taken seriously when she claimed that she’d been hit in the head with a bottle, although there was ample reason to suggest that this incident was fabricated. Does this sound like official indifference to you?

But here’s the reason why the cartoon in the Virginian Pilot defaming conservatives is such a heaping pile of crap. It’s because they took the rest of the Rolling Stone story, the one that went beyond the lies about a gang rape and reinforced every bit of it. They believed it and ridicule anyone who thinks it too is a lie.

Remember how I said that I thought Columbia made one big, fundamental mistake?

Here it is.

The only part of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s article closely examined by Columbia was the lede, which detailed Jackie’s incredible story of gang rape.

Columbia should, in fact, have closely examined the entirety of Erdely’s article.

Because ultimately, this article was not really about Jackie. Take a pencil, lop the Jackie story off the top, and the article could have run pretty much as it was.

The article was about the existence of rape culture and university indifference to said culture.

Jackie’s story was supposed to be proof of that, and Jackie’s story was a lie. But no one at Rolling Stone—not Erdely, not Dana, not Woods, not Wenner—seems to have considered just the possibility that maybe, just maybe, they were wrong about this.

Jackie’s lies do not in and of themselves disprove Rubin Erdely’s rape-culture thesis.

But if you examined the rest of the article with the same critical eye that you examine Jackie’s story, you’ll find that it, too, is deeply deceptive. “A Rape on Campus” is fashioned on selective presentation of material, the use of bogus or discredited statistics, quotes that are either fabricated or taken out of context, unconfirmed allegations, anonymous sources, the deliberate exclusion of evidence contrary to the author’s thesis, and material that is either fabricated or presented in a way that is so profoundly misleading it can only be evidence of incompetence or dishonesty. (The multiple verses of a UVa fight song, for example, that nobody at UVa has actually heard.)

Sabrina Rubin Erdely was not first and foremost trying to obtain justice for Jackie; that was incidental. Her intention was to prove the existence of rape culture and to shame and ostracize those whom she fervently believed participated in it.

When you know how Rubin Erdely went about her work, you are forced to conclude that she failed, that the rest of her story is as unbelievable as Jackie’s story—it’s just concocted in a slicker way. In the ongoing debate about sexual assault on campus, we must remember this.

The Virginian Pilot is – reluctantly I’m sure; they wanted the gang rape to be true – to back away from the details, but for them gang rape on UVA campus it “the Truth” even if there is zero evidence of this. It’s a belief system that comes from the air they breathe.

The really, really bad thing about this is that a female student at UVA was raped, and killed. It should have gotten more attention especially because the accused, Jesse Matthews is also accused of raping and killing students at Virginia Tech, Liberty University and Christopher Newport University. It should have been a warning about lone female students getting drunk and running around Charlottesville in the early hours of the morning and going somewhere with a stranger in the street.   But the rapist and killer was not a frat rat,  He was a young black man.  He was not (in Tom Wolfe’s term “the great white defendant”) that advances the narrative that fit the Virginia Pilot’s list of top ten people to hate.   

In fact, Sabrina Erdely admitted she spent months looking for the "perfect" victim and the "perfect" criminal and found it at UVA.  The press loved it.  it reinforced their stereotype.   Having been cheated out of their victims when the Duke lacrosse hoax blew up, the UVA frat rape was perfect.

Having been humiliated by having their perfect narrative exposed as a lie the sophomores at the Virginian Pilot take out their bile on the people that had nothing to do with spreading their lies.

It's been a bad week for the press.  With the kind of support that the family who owned Memories Pizza received, it sucks to be one of the editors of the Virginia Pilot.

Some thoughts on the sexual assault issue on campus

There has been quite a reaction on the Libertarian Right about universities crusading against “sexual assault,” often defined as women complaining about having sex while drunk, regretting having sex, or simply lying about it. The most egregious example in the last decade is the Duke Lacrosse case in which the members of the lacrosse team were accused of gang-raping a stripper they had hired for a party. It turns out the accusation was lie, but in the meantime the Duke faculty signed petitions, held marches and banged on pans to protest the rape that never happened. The case drew national headlines. Virtually all of the MSM assumed the white men were guilty of raping the black woman, and that this was a perfect example of White Male Privilege™.

The accused men were in danger of being jailed for many years until their legal team was able to prove that the accusation by the stripper was a lie.  

Forget for a moment that a number of innocent young men almost spent decades in jail because a woman lied and Liberals tried to lynch them because they were young, white, rich jocks.  Do you think hiring strippers is a good idea?  What do you think about a young woman who decides to be a stripper who sidelines as a prostitute and makes that her career choice?  Is she sexually liberated?   A young woman whose claim to fame is acting in porn films has just become a student at Duke, explaining that performing in porn is "liberating."

Even as the tide of sexual self-expression is cresting, we have a counter-revolution.  The interesting thing is that this is a counter-revolution led by the revolutionaries.  The current hysteria about college as a hotbed of rape is fanned by Liberals and feminists.  But it's not certain whether it's created by actual feminist hysteria or by Democrats trying to rouse their base.  This may be a false choice; it's probably both.

Glenn Reynolds, the Master of the Universe of blogging, frequently links to articles on this subject. I love his blog Instapundit and am very much in tune with most of his views. His view may be the most representative of the Libertarian position on this issue.  But we do differ. He’s a Libertarian and I’m a Conservative. Our experiences are different. For one thing, Glenn’s a lot younger. He often hints that in his student years he was quite the stud. He frequently links to The Frisky website which specializes in the multiple sexual adventures of young unmarried women …. sort of a Penthouse for college-age women without the pictures.

If I am to take Glenn Reynolds, Hollywood, TV shows, the print media – sort of the regnant pop culture – as representative of American culture as it’s lived and experienced, I am woefully out of date. But then I look around me at teens, young adults, the middle aged and elderly where I live in Middle America and I don’t see people living the lives as they are depicted in popular culture.  True, I'm not peering in bedroom windows.  But looking away from the screen and the tabloid I know that I am in the majority and they are in the minority.  They just have hold of the media megaphone.  Most marriages that I am aware of are monogamous. I know a few gay people but no married gays. It may be true that college is a place where sexual license reigns and young adults with raging hormones take the opportunity to do things that their parents would not allow them to do at home. But I would be troubled if I thought my children were busy putting notches on their bedposts in the evening rather than studying.

We are all victims of the culture.  A great, if extreme, example of the image that college students are supposed to emulate was Elliott Rodger. Of course Rodger was weird in so many ways, expecting women to approach him if he walked past. But his image of male/female relationships was very much in line with the way it’s depicted in film, the Internet and magazines. He wanted that lifestyle.  What young man at that age doesn’t dream of having the cheerleader throw herself at you. And women reading Cosmo, The Frisky, or similar outlets may feel there’s something wrong with her if she has not slept with at least a couple of her classmates.

But sex is not a value-neutral act. It’s not the same as scratching and itch or a game of tennis. But that’s how it’s often depicted, a sporting event that you have to practice so that you can get good. But "casual sex" is like playing with knives.  You will either receive or give others psychological scars. Those are the emotional consequences.  There are also physical ones like pregnancy and an array of “social” diseases some of which have no cures.

With that as the background, let’s think about what we should desire in terms of a better atmosphere for the teen and young adult going to college. At the risk of sounding like a prude – I remember my own raging hormones as a college student - I don’t know of any Conservative who thinks that the college “hook up” culture is a good thing. Tom Wolfe wrote a book (Hooking Up) and a novel (I am Charlotte Simmons) about this.   They are both good reads and leave you questioning the culture in academia.

Perhaps Conservatives should not reflexively oppose what the Left is doing to men in academia. We should, of course, seek to protect young men from being railroaded by a kangaroo court. But keep in mind that the reason these young men are being accused of sex crimes is because, in almost all cases, they have had sex with their accuser. So in standing up for them we are also standing up for casual sex, the one-night stand, the drunken quickie, in college. We are joining the ranks of the Libertines for whom the hook-up culture is a wonderful thing. I’m not sure that that’s a group I would like to join. Between the guy who will screw any girl if given half a chance and the girl who lets him, regrets it later and tries to ruin his life, it would be nice if they could both lose.

The Left has created the current debased standards of sexual conduct in academia. I am willing to see if the Left can be more reactive than the Bible thumping troglodyte of popular culture.  Let's see if they can fix the problem that they have created; because it is a problem.

Rather than stand up for the principle that casual sex on campus is a good thing, something that should be protected, let’s use some social jujitsu. Let’s see if we can go the Left one better. How about the end of co-ed dorms? Perhaps we can even encourage reports of drunken, unsatisfactory sex between unmarried students. Do we really want to be the ones who assault the ramparts of academia in favor of sexual promiscuity?

At Duke only nerds can get laid.

Now I'm one of those troglodytes who thinks that sex should wait on marriage. But the rules for unmarried sexual relations at Duke go beyond parody. They are, however, the sort of rules that fully meet our expectations coming from the school most famous for trying to railroad its lacrosse team to prison for a rape that did not take place.

Joanne Jacobs

The Duke Blue Devils had better remain chaste. As national champions, they are unable to have consensual sex with other students under Duke’s new “sexual misconduct” policy, warns the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). A person seen as “powerful” — such as a varsity athlete — may “create an unintentional atmosphere of coercion,” the policy states. For the “powerful,” it’s not just that “no” means no and silence means no. “Yes” means no too.

In addition, sex with someone who’s been drinking — not like that ever happens — is considered a form of rape because the policy considers any level of intoxication makes a student unable to consent to sex.

From Instpundit frau Dr. Helen:

I received an email today from Robert L. Shibley, the Vice President of FIRE about a press release warning of a new Duke University policy that can make you a rapist without you even knowing it: ...

It seems to me that the most powerful group on Duke's campus is the group of feminists that got this policy passed. If you have sex with one of them, you have obviously been raped and need to file charges.

If you would like to let Richard H. Brodhead, President of Duke University, know how you feel about this new policy, you can send him an email here. I just sent an email and I hope you will too.

Duke's Racist, Homosexual, Pedophile Administration

Please forgive the accurate but inflammatory headline. I just wanted to get your attention.

Did I do that?

Good.

Because we have another Duke Rape case. And this time it’s probably not a hoax.

About the author, Professor Mike Adams:
Mike Adams is a verbal “bomb thrower” ... and a tenured professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. I have been following his essays at Townhall for several years. He has travelled the road from Left Wing Atheist to Right Wing Christian and is an entertaining polemicist in the style of Ann Coulter.

In his writing he examines the seamy underside of Liberal campus culture. Well, here's a seamy underside that is not going to get much sunlight in the MSM. Nowhere nearly as much attention as the trumped up Duke Lacrosse Rape case.

According to Adams, it seems that

... Duke University has another rape case on its hands. This one may hurt the university nearly as much as the one that rocked its campus back in 2006. Unlike the previous case, this one appears to involve a credible confession of sexual abuse. Like the previous case, crucial facts are already being filtered through the prism of identity politics.

Frank Lombard is the associate director of Duke’s Center for Health Policy. The university administrator was recently arrested by the FBI and charged with offering up his adopted 5-year-old son for sex. I tried to contact Frank Lombard over the weekend to probe his expertise regarding the health benefits of raping small children. So far, he’s declined to comment.

University administrator Lombard is accused of logging on to a chat room online and describing himself as a “perv dad for fun.” The detective who wisely looked into the suspicious screen name says that Lombard admitted to molesting his own adopted son. All this was before allegedly inviting a stranger to travel to North Carolina from another state to statutorily rape his already-molested adopted son.

Duke is known for its radical faculty that is a virtual parody of political correctness.

… when several white Duke Lacrosse players were accused of raping a black stripper. A whopping 88 professors signed a statement accusing the players of both racism and rape. Such was their regard for the presumption of innocence.

Perhaps even more stunning was the response of some professors after it became apparent that the white lacrosse players were innocent. After that became so obvious the school had to readmit the students, Professor Kate Holloway resigned her committee assignments in protest.

It should be noted that the DA who tried to railroad the Duke students was later disbarred and went to jail for his crimes. The Duke faculty never apologized and continues to defend its initial position. The case engendered a book and a blog, "Durham in Wonderland" devoted to exposing the sickening hypocrisy of the Duke faculty community.

But back to the current Duke Sex scandal. This time the perps are not students. He is white, however, which should make him ripe for condemnation. But ….

And here is a big but … he is homosexual. And he adopted two black children. And he is pimping these black children to strangers. And it has been alleged that he has been filmed performing a variety of sex acts on these children.

What is the proper response of the Duke faculty to this outrage? They will be torn.
White = bad!
Male = bad!
Homosexual = good!
Homosexual adopting children = very good!
Performing sex acts on children = keep you laws out of my bedroom?

What is a proper Liberal professor at Duke to do? Stay tuned.

Endnote: The Virginian Pilot had an AP story on this which told you very little. This will probably be the take from the MSM. They have more important things to inform their readers about: the death of another child abuser, Michael Jackson, and the infidelity of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. By all means, editors, stay away from this one, it does not fit the template.

UPDATE: More information on Frank Lombard. It seems that he was a Vestryman of the Episcopal Church of the Advocate in Durham, NC. The church describes itself as practicing "radical hospitality." It is also busy scrubbing its website of any mention of Frank Lombard.

I have only one comment to make about this. It is not only a cowardly thing to do, it's not a Christian thing to do.

They were perfectly happy to have a gay man with two adopted "African American" children as a leading member of the church. But he's now exposed as a pedophile practicing perverted sex with children and offering them to strangers to feed his sexual fantasies.

Now that he is exposed as a sinner before the entire world, and now that his persona is being torn down, his shame is at its peak, he is most in need of Christ's forgiveness. Christ's apostles here on earth are the members of his church. And rather than practicing "radical hospitality" they are scurrying for cover; not willing to face the sins that they have enabled.

"Radical hospitality," not so much. A bunch of whitened sepulchers is more like it.

UPDATE 2: Can the MSM continue to cover up the details while saying they "covered" the story? From The American Thinker:

A new and even more scandalous rape allegation has surfaced at Duke University. Yet the usual media and campus PC crowd are keeping mighty quiet. Identity politics apparently trumps all sense of outrage....

I am afraid that as far as the media and academic communities are involved, it is not the crime itself that matters, but rather whether the alleged perp is a member of an "oppressor" group. Although white, Lombard is gay, so in the interest of avoiding unpleasant stories involving homosexual adoption, the media is anxious to shut down public interest in the affair.


However, the outspokenness and willingness to judge in advance a case involving white jocks - easy targets - of Duke and media, inevitably place a spotlight on their handling of another Duke rape allegation....

All this coming in the wake of another highly publicized incident at the same prominent university? I don't think they can suppress this one. The conservative media have the power to put this case on the national agenda. It is too dramatic.

Spitzer, Nifong & Earle

What do three prominent crooked prosecuting attorneys have in common? They have the press as their allies! In fact, the press is indispensible in their campaigns.

Spitzer threatened his enemies with his willing accomplices inthe media.

Ronnie Earle held press conferences to vilify Tom Delay and succeeded in getting him out of office. So where is the prosecution? Where is the trail?

Mike Nifong used the press to whip up hatred of the white lacrosse players and get elected in Durham. He was willing the sacrifice the lives of these young men to get a pension and the press was a critical component in that effort.

GayPatriot:

The fact that Spitzer(D,NY) would often find "enemies" and take off on a slash and burn campaign to destroy them with little to nothing to go on reminded me of D.A. Ronnie Earle(D,TX) and D.A. Mike Nifong(D,NC).

Austin Texas D.A. Ronnie Earle (D), you may recall, is the one who empanelled no less than seven grand juries to secure an indictment of Rep. Tom Delay (R,TX). So far, Mr. DeLay has not been prosecuted. One would think that Mr. Earle would have brought a case by now, almost three years on.

...

Then there's Durham County (N.C.) D.A. Mike Nifong of Duke Lacrosse Team Scandal infamy. Nifong, with a victim whose story constantly changed, suppressed evidence, frequently talked about the case on talk shows, whipped up the Durham black community into a frenzy and ran for reelection on the case. Nifong was convicted of criminal contempt for false statements and has been disbarred. He spent at least a year destroying the lives of the players involved based on little or no evidence.

...

What's worse is that they have a fawning media to back their plays.

Read more

Comments on the Academy. Fallout from the Duke Rape Case.

Were we expecting a change in Duke or Durham as a result of the Duke Rape case? If so, we were doomed to disappointment. The reason is found in this comment found in Durham-in-Wonderland.

The ratio of nastiness to illumination in this thread of comments is too high for my taste. I suppose it is inevitable that the comments section of this blog should from time to time dramatize the dialogue of the deaf that passes for “political discourse” at many levels in our land. But it is reduced to its sad essence in the brilliant exchange that begins, in effect, “Your are an idiot,” to which the devastatingly witty response is “No, I am not an idiot. You are an idiot.”

I’d like to return to the subject of the post: namely, the effect of what has happened so far to various people at Duke/

The expectation of Apocalypse Now on the Duke campus is and will remain unrealistic. “Why don’t they fire Brodhead?” “Why don’t they ‘clean house’ in this or that department?” “How can they make an 88-er a dean?” To this list of supremely naïve questions I’ll add another one that shows up in various forms: “Why don’t they hire KC Johnson?” Such questions betray a serious lack of understanding of the operations of large and complex educational institutions. They move rather ponderously and within the confines of strict protocols. Our universities have a “business” aspect to them, but it is only one aspect, and the models of business reform or restructuring frequently brought forward are largely irrelevant to them. Duke and many other wealthy institutions are also large charitable entities that view their mission in terms of the redistribution of wealth—first in the relatively paltry manner of handing out scholarships and fellowships, but much more importantly in the creation of lasting “social capital” in their graduates. Most parents are incompetent to judge the actual intellectual quality at a given institution, but they know, rightly, that an average college graduate will have a lifetime income far greater than that of an average non-graduate, and that the average Duke graduate will do considerably better than the average graduate of Western Kentucky State Teachers’ College.

Universities are staffed by faculty members who for the most part enjoy the protection of appointment with continuing tenure. The institution of academic tenure has defensible aims but often-lamentable results. It is nearly impossible to fire a tenured professor, however deep that person sinks into sloth or incompetence. To be fired for “moral turpitude” in today’s climate presupposes a level of sexual athleticism requiring long, arduous Olympic training beyond the capacities of most of us. Hence a university faculty, though highly and self-consciously professionalized, has many of the characteristics of a voluntary organization, like a civic or church committee, or a campaign organization, or a baby-sitting pool. There is seldom a very good match between the need as seen from a center and the competence, willingness, or availability of someone to fill the need. The administration has to cajole people into taking on necessary but perhaps irksome jobs. “Madge, would you be willing to be recording secretary this year? Oh, you’re tied up with the Garden Club?...Well, Tom, how about you? I can teach you to write…” I have not perused a Duke catalogue, but from what has come up incidentally in this blog I get the impression that many Duke faculty (a) teach very little, and (b) teach pretty much what they want to teach, which is (c) two or three variations on an esoteric theme.

A university president may and does have very great power, but is almost guaranteed to fail if he cannot at least achieve a state of uneasy non-belligerence with his faculty. Hence the strange gyrations and even stranger silences of Richard Brodhead. He is a prudent and experienced fellow. If you want to consider what happens when a self-identified political conservative is brought in with powerful board support to “clean up” an institution with a faculty run amok, and is imprudent enough to try to do so, review the sad history of Boston University under the presidency of John Silber. So don’t look for swift actions and dramatic gestures that feature so prominently among the desiderata in these comments. But don’t go to the opposite extreme and suppose that “nothing has changed”. A good deal has changed because of this Rape Hoax.

1. Richard Brodhead’s is a failed presidency. Everybody in higher education knows that, which is why practically nobody in higher education will say it. He will not disappear immediately, but he will disappear. And I mean disappear—not reappear as the president of some other institution. This may not be fair to Brodhead, who is an able person, and his successor is unlikely to be better. But nobody who has presided over such a genuine “social disaster” can recover. And people will in the future reflect on why and how he failed.

2. Another development on the local Duke scene is the “raised consciousness” of sensible alumni and institutional friends. There is a large effort from various sources trying to blunt the effect of this blog and what it has represented. To paint Duke’s critics as neocon, reactionary, racist “blog hooligans” will now work for only a very diminished audience. There now is a very detailed, circumstantial, well researched and well written book that needs to be answered. The one attempt to answer it to date—Piot’s—is so pathetic as actually to amplify the work’s power by giving such a vivid example of the intellectual quality of its opposition. Any intelligent Duke alumnus of whatever age should now realize that he or she probably has more sensible and constructive ideas that many prominent Duke faculty.

3. Do not underestimate the power of the derision and opprobrium heaped on various faculty members through various posting and especially the “Group Profiles”. These were particularly effective, because they were not name-calling but intelligently collected anthologies of the individuals’ own written opinions. It is one thing to shout out that “the Emperor has no clothes”. It is another to present the Emperor in the buff before our own horrified eyes. Professor Piot undoubtedly still has his clannish friends at their unread and unreadable academic journal. But for literally thousands of other people, not to mention hundreds of silent colleagues on his own faculty, the man is now a public fool. This is the result not of name-calling but of self-advertisement. There probably will not be immediate professional effects. But I think it very unlikely that even with a deck of fifty-two race cards Professor Baker, for example, will today seems such a hot property to anybody else as he did to Vanderbilt before the publication of his racist diatribe.

KC Johnson Comments on New Leadership at Duke; Same Old - Same Old

When you read Johnson's comments on the appointment of Donna Lisker as associate dean of undergraduate education, you come to the horrifying conclusion that - at Duke - this is the best that can be done. It's depressing.

Click on the link for the entire article, including sound bites of Lisker commenting on the probable guilt of the lacrosse players.

And how's this for stereotyping: cultural conservatives are more likely to commit rapes! Yes, according to the new Dean most rapists have "traditional beliefs."
K C Johnson:

But there’s something off-putting about a university administrator suggesting that her ideological opponents are more likely to commit rapes—even if, as she hastened to add, most cultural conservatives were not prospective criminals. Imagine the outrage if Duke had appointed as associate dean a conservative who had publicly asserted that feminists were more likely to file false rape reports.

Lisker tries to steer the focus away from the false rape charges to the fact that some members of the team had a party at which there was drinking and that a stripper was hired. I don't know about the stripper - I went to school in a more uptight age, and, frankly, strippers were not in my budget. But to appear to be outraged about drinking in college is so ludicrous as to be a self-parody.

There is much more in this post that needs to be read. But the end result remains horribly depressing. I recently attended a meeting at which one of the men mentioned that his son attended Duke. I told him how sorry I was.

Former Duke Lacrosse Coach Sues School

It seems they reached a settlement but...

Mike Pressler's lawsuit apparently stems from a financial settlement the school reached earlier this year with Pressler, although school officials did not give details.

"Mr. Pressler, aided by his attorney, reached a fair and final financial agreement with Duke University in the spring of 2007," Pamela Bernard, Duke's vice president and general counsel, said in a statement. "We are disappointed that he is now trying to undo that agreement with an unfounded claim against Duke.

"We will address the matter through the legal process and insist on honoring our existing agreement."

The Herald-Sun of Durham reported Friday night on its Web site that Pressler's lawsuit alleges the university broke the terms of the confidential settlement when university senior vice president John Burness made disparaging comments about the former coach.

The newspaper reported that the lawsuit asks the state court to void the settlement and hold a trial on Pressler's claim of wrongful termination.

It seems that Duke's faculaty and staff just can't shut up.

Virginian Pilot on "Duke Non-Rape" Case: It's All "Their" Fault!

My wife handed me that part of the Sunday Virginian Pilot that I usually scan: the comics and the editorial page. I read the editorial page because it’s a useful guide. There are two kinds of guides that are useful: one who consistently point you in the right direction and one who consistently points you in the wrong direction. Both are equally useful once you figure out which is which. The Pilot is an infallible guide. If you read its advice and do the exact opposite, you are sure to get it right.

Where was I? Oh yes. The Pilot felt compelled to editorialize A hard lesson on snap judgment on the apology extended to the falsely accused lacrosse players by Duke President Richard Brodhead. Why? Who knows? The Pilot’s sparse coverage of events outside of Tidewater consists of reprints of wire service stories and NY Times articles.

Since I have followed this story closely, and since there is a wealth of information on a web site devoted to this case created by professor K.C. Johnson Durham-in-Wonderland, at least three things about this editorial proved to me again that the Pilot is an infallible guide to wrongness.

First, the Pilot’s editors ascribe what they call the “rush to judgment” one of their favorite villains: “shock radio and endlessly blathering blogs.” This attempt to lie about the past may have fooled people twenty years ago when inconvenient facts could be swept down the “memory hole” but today there are alternative sources of information. Thanks to the magic of computers and the Internet, we can find out who said what and when about this case. And it wasn’t shock radio and blogs that were piling on the lacrosse players. It was a lynch mob led by

-Duke’s professors (the Duke 88)
-the NAACP
-and the high and mighty New York Times – the source of much of the Pilot’s news and opinion.

Lest we forget, it was the New York Times that sent a pair of investigative reporters to Durham to review the evidence AFTER the DNA came back negative for the accused and pronounced:

By disclosing pieces of evidence favorable to the defendants, the defense has created an image of a case heading for the rocks. But an examination of the entire 1,850 pages of evidence gathered by the prosecution in the four months after the accusation yields a more ambiguous picture. It shows that while there are big weaknesses in Mr. Nifong’s case, there is also a body of evidence to support his decision to take the matter to a jury.

Stuart Taylor takes them apart in Slate where he states:

The Times took its stand in a 5,600-word, Page One reassessment of the case on Aug. 25, written by Duff Wilson, a sportswriter responsible for much of the paper's previous one-sided coverage, and Jonathan Glater. The headline was "Files From Duke Rape Case Give Details But No Answers."

Like the headline, the piece cultivates a meretricious appearance of balance. But its flaws are so glaring that it was shredded by bloggers within hours after it hit my doorstep. They were led by a Durham group called Liestoppers and by KC Johnson, an obscure but brilliant New York City history professor of centrist political views. Johnson alone has produced more insightful (if sometimes one-sided) analysis and commentary on the Duke case—about 60,000 words—than all the nation's newspapers combined.

The Wilson-Glater piece highlights every superficially incriminating piece of evidence in the case, selectively omits important exculpatory evidence, and reports hotly disputed statements by not-very-credible police officers and the mentally unstable accuser as if they were established facts. With comical credulity, it features as its centerpiece a leaked, transparently contrived, 33-page police sergeant's memo that seeks to paper over some of the most obvious holes in the prosecution's evidence.

I have written about this here.

While virtually all the MSM went with the lie, I cite the New York Times because it is the big cahuna of dead tree publishing, and there are too many other villains in this story to mention. So, contrary to the Pilot’s desire to shift the blame to radio commentators (read Rush Limbaugh) or the blogosphere, it was the so-called “mainstream media” that carried the story and rushed to judgment.

And why not? It had the appropriate victim: a black female (a twofer) and the appropriate villains: rich white males. Given the ideological make-up of media types, the story was too good not to be true.

And when the story blew up in their faces, they decided to point fingers and cry “foul.” “We were misled,” they cried. The fact is they wanted the story to be true so when the DNA evidence wasn’t there, when photographic evidence showed that one of the accused was not at the party at the time of the supposed rape, they kept on keeping on. They were not misled; they were willing accomplices in a high tech lynching, and not for the first time.

And lest we forget about the NAACP, here's the reaction to the exculpatory DNA evidence:

Bruce DePyssler, an assistant professor of English at Central and faculty advisor to the "The Campus Echo," said reaction on the Central campus to the DNA news was a little disorienting. "Our initial reaction was 'uh-Oh, this is another Tawana Brawley.' However there were more students who thought there was more of a conspiracy and that the DNA tests don't prove anything," DePyssler said.

Barber [North Carolina NAACP President]says he has been focused on tamping down talk among some black residents of "taking matters into our own hands." No vigilante justice has been Barber's bottom-line message. But, he said, the NAACP is demanding a thorough investigation.

And here is one of the bloggers that the Pilot's editors may have been talking about.
And here is NOW's view. Are these the blogs the Pilot's editors are reading? Sad to say, that may be exactly where they get their news.

Not content with re-writing history, the Pilot then attempts to turn a wrong into a right.

When the Duke players were charged, Brodhead acted by canceling the men's lacrosse season, ushering the team's coach out the door and instituting a series of reviews involving "campus culture," the interaction of the university and the Durham community, and reports of "persistent problems" with the lacrosse team.

Given the explosive nature of the events, and the glimpses of laxness in team oversight, those actions stand the test of time.

Oh yeah? I call bullshit. If the accusation of rape by a college football or basketball player resulted in the cancellation of the season and the firing of the coach there would not be an athletic program in any college in the nation. The fact is that the poisonous racial atmosphere engendered by radical professors at Duke, the Durham NAACP and egged on by Liberal newspapers led to the destruction of the lacrosse program at Duke and the establishment of kangaroo courts headed by the very professors who were stoking the fires of racial hatred.

And finally, Brodhead’s apology is totally inadequate because it does not address the problems created by tenured radicals in the university which led the lynch mob that – but for a good team of defense attorneys – would have led to the destruction of the lives of three completely innocent men as the racists bigots in Durham, the media and the academy cheered.

UPDATE: Welcome Freepers. Please look around, feel free to comment and tell your friends.

Duke Non-Rape Case Just Won't End

Political Science professor Ole Holsti ...demanding that the lacrosse players apologize for the party (when, of course, the captains already have, and repeatedly so), criticizing the parents of all the lacrosse players, and playing down the administration's need to apologize.

A commenter:

What are they all crying now? It is the fault of the Lacrosse team. If they had never hired strippers, no one would have ever been falsely accused of rape, no one would have been unconstitutionally prosecuted, the 88ers and the lynch mobbers and the pot bangers would never have tried to lynch anyone. Isn't that sort of like Adolph Hitler saying if it weren't for the Jews there wouldn't have been a holocaust?

A perfect storm of disgrace

The book is out on the "Duke Rape" case. Villains are everywhere.

After Duke Prosecution Began to Collapse, Demonizing Continued

Note that none of the members of the news media that did so much to inflame this case are mentioned by name. I suppose one has to observe certain silences if one wants to be printed in the NY Times.

Another Excuse for Lying in the Newpaper

The opinion Journal has a good summary of where the media went wrong in the "Duke Rape" case and why they are usually wrong even if the story does not includes sex and race.

Michael B. Nifong--the district attorney who pursued Seligmann, Finnerty and teammate David Evans even as evidence of their innocence mounted and his case imploded--was held accountable for his actions. Hours after Seligmann testified, Nifong announced his intention to resign; the next day, he was disbarred.

The media incurred no such penalties. No loss of license, no disciplinary panels, no prolonged public humiliation for the reporters, columnists, cable TV pundits, editorial writers and editors who trumpeted the "Duke lacrosse rape case" and even the "gang-rape case" in front-page headlines, on the nightly news and on strident cable shoutfests.

Of course, Nifong had information and power the media did not. His failing in the case cannot be overstated, nor can it be equated to that of a throng of journalists and pundits, however odious some of their reporting and commentary. But the media deserve a public reckoning, too, a remonstrance for coverage that--albeit with admirable exceptions--all too eagerly embraced the inflammatory statements of a prosecutor in the midst of a tough election campaign. Fueled by Nifong, the media quickly latched onto a narrative too seductive to check: rich, wild, white jocks had brutalized a working class, black mother of two.

"It was too delicious a story," says Daniel Okrent, a former New York Times public editor, who is critical of the Times' coverage and that of many other news organizations. "It conformed too well to too many preconceived notions of too many in the press: white over black, rich over poor, athletes over non-athletes, men over women, educated over non-educated. Wow. That's a package of sins that really fit the preconceptions of a lot of us."

Read the original article here.

NAPPY-HEADED HOAX: Ann Coulter on the "Duke Rape" case

Ann is doing a victory lap, and who can forgive her. The sins of the media are quickly put down the media memory hole. But thanks to the Internet, that no longer works so well.

Excepts:

The New York Times alone has mentioned the Scottsboro Boys case from the 1930s nearly 20 times since 2002 (expanding the "news" part of "newspaper" just a bit), so I think I'm entitled to spend at least one more week luxuriating in the Duke lacrosse players' total vindication and the exposure of a Southern liberal prosecutor as a corrupt hack.

Twenty years ago, disbarred Duke prosecutor Mike Nifong would have been Time magazine's Man of the Year. Vanity Fair would have photographed him sitting in a Porsche under the headline: "Speaking Truth to Power."

One hundred years ago, he would have been lynching innocent black men. Southern liberals have stayed the same; only their victims have changed.

To watch the complete destruction of this foolish and evil man, Michael Nifong — despite the mainstream media's best efforts to portray him as a modern-day Atticus Finch — is as great a moment as the annihilation of Dan Rather. Katie Couric's self-immolation is just a bonus — when it rains, it pours!
[...]
The accuser's history of making false accusations of gang rape, the players' alibis and the prosecutor's lies were all known to The New York Times when it reported on Aug. 25, 2006, that "while there are big weaknesses in Mr. Nifong's case, there is also a body of evidence to support his decision to take the matter to a jury." By "body of evidence," the Times was apparently referring to a smattering of racial and sexual stereotypes earnestly believed in Hollywood and in newsrooms across America in defiance of the facts.

The Times article also noted, "In several important areas, the full files, reviewed by The New York Times, contain evidence stronger than that highlighted by the defense." The "stronger" evidence consisted of obvious lies told by the prosecution and lustily repeated by the Times.

Shockingly, even when the jig was up, and the attorney general of North Carolina announced that the accused were innocent, much of the mainstream media continued to withhold the accuser's name.
[...]
From my research, it appears that CBS News named Crystal Gail Mangum and showed her picture. (Of course, this being CBS, the picture may have been forged.) But the only time her name came out on CNN was by non-CNN employees during live press conferences and one time when a guest slipped it in — you should pardon the expression — during a discussion of Nifong's disbarment hearing, unaware of CNN's policy of protecting the names of women who make false accusations of rape.

The New York Times has yet to name the woman who falsely accused three men of committing a brutal gang rape.

The Times "public editor" described the paper's delusional coverage of the Duke case after the first several weeks as "basically fair." The Times Sports editor, Tom Jolly, said he was "very comfortable" with the coverage, saying the case had two main elements: "One was the allegation of rape; the other was the general behavior of a high-level sports team at a prestigious university." That's when you know your newspaper might have a wee hint of a liberal bias: when even the sportswriters are left-wing crackpots.

Apparently, the Times editor did not see this possibility as an "element" of the case: A liberal prosecutor incites a racial conflagration weeks before an election in a heavily black voting district by using the incredible claims of a stripper to falsely accuse three innocent white men of gang rape.

"Duke Rape:" Stupid and envious is a bad combo platter.

There is nothing so dangerous as a Southern liberal hoping to be invited to a Graydon Carter party.

As is now well-known, Durham prosecutor Mike Nifong falsely accused three white Duke lacrosse players of gang-raping a stripper, even as evidence piled up proving it never happened. In the weeks after an unstable stripper — or, since this is not a Hollywood movie, "a stripper" — accused the players of rape, Nifong stated on national TV: "I am convinced that there was a rape." He called the players "hooligans," contemptuously sneering that their "daddies could buy them expensive lawyers."

Envy is an emotion well-known for producing model behavior.

Revealing his own motives, Nifong said defense attorneys for the non-indicted players "were almost disappointed that their clients didn't get indicted so they could be a part of this spectacle here in Durham." Hello, Vanity Fair? Did you see where I talked about their "daddies"?

The Arianna Huffington of the legal profession might still have made his star turn at a Vanity Fair party, but for the fortuity of the defense lawyers discovering that he had tried to hide DNA evidence from the defendants, revealing that the stripper, Crystal Gail Mangum, had the DNA of four different men in or on her person, including the driver who took her to stripping gigs and enough other men to bring a class-action suit against her.

None of the DNA matched any Duke lacrosse players, who are starting to look like the only adult males in the Durham area who haven't had sex with Mangum.

From Ann Coulter. Read the rest.

What About The Duke 88?

The Duke 88 aren't an anomaly that will receive scorn and rebuke from their colleagues. They represent the norm, and Duke as well.

What about the gang of 88?

Scott Johnson of Powerline notes:

It is a remarkable fact of the Duke case that the legal profession has acquitted itself with greater honor than the professoriate.

Perhaps all the lawyer jokes should be re-written into professor jokes.
"What's a bus full of professors going over a cliff? A good start."

How the Duke Lacross Players Were Vindicated

The justice system righted itself somehow so that at the end of the day there was indeed a declaration of innocence of these three young men. But it was done with backup systems in a way that was never designed to work as the justice system should work.

It appears that Mike Nifon and the North Carolina justice systme was accustomed to getting things thier way. What was unusual in this case was that the accused were able to afford a good defense; a defense that beat the rogue prosecutor, the Duke facultay and the MSM.

Nifong Convicted; Media Tries to Wash Its Hands.

From ABC News. First the truth:

Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong has been found guilty by the North Carolina State Bar for a battery of ethics violations in the Duke Lacrosse case.

Followed by the lie:

From the early days of the case, Nifong was widely criticized for his handling of the matter.

Huh?

Want to see what the NY Times wrote? What the Duke 88 wrote (and then removed from their web site)? What Houston Baker - Professor of English at Duke wrote? Al Sharpton? The local Herald-Sun? How about ABC News itself?

The truth is that the only reliable source of news and criticism was the blog written by KC Johnson, a professor of history at Brookly College writing as Durham-in-Wonderland. Here is his overall case narrative. This is the authoritiative source for the "Duke Rape" case.

The MSM whose narrative was "rich white powereful jocks rape poor black powerless women."

Lady MacBeth said it well: "Out, out damn spot." But like the blood one her hands, this was one high profile instance of the MSM doing the dirty deed and now trying to remove the evidence. Twenty years ago, this might have worked and the past would have disappeared down the "memory hole." Don't they know that their lies live on in the thousands of websites that recorded their words? Are they that stupid?

BELMONT CLUB (One of the most intelligent bloggers anywhere) comments:

The university, the media and even their teachers left them for dead. But they had their parents. Maybe one day, when the family is abolished altogether as a regressive social evil, future people in a frame won't even have that.