Duke accuser admits she lied (12-13-2024--Hour1)

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[00:00:28] So, it merely took 18 years, but we finally have an admission from the accuser in the Duke Lacrosse case that she made it all up. That she lied. Crystal Mangum. I was a reporter here at WBT at the time this case broke, this story broke.

[00:00:58] I remember having discussions and debates with people in the newsroom, the late Jim Barrow being one of them, talking about, you know, the evidence and the process and how it, like, this just seemed so bizarre.

[00:01:15] There were so many problems with the story, so many loopholes and, not loopholes, but gaps in the story and evidence that just did not line up. Yet, it seemed like the entire campus had gone mad.

[00:01:35] And media outlets that had been trusted as these legacy gatekeepers for truth and such, they'd lost their minds.

[00:01:46] It was the first time that I really became aware that there was such rot in higher education.

[00:02:02] I'd gotten out of college in 97. So, this was like nine years after I graduated Winthrop University.

[00:02:11] And to hear the way that Duke University was behaving and the professors, the faculty, the district attorney, reporters and commentators, talking heads, pundits and such, student activists.

[00:02:34] It was such a foreign language to me. I could not understand what they were looking at, what they were seeing and how they were explaining things.

[00:02:43] It just didn't make a lot of sense at the time.

[00:02:45] And I came across a blog, a website, which at the time, you know, before social media, this was the way that people would kind of follow along digitally with live events.

[00:03:05] The name of the blog was called Durham in Wonderland.

[00:03:10] Durham in Wonderland.

[00:03:12] And it was written by a fellow named Casey Johnson.

[00:03:19] And I'm going to play a piece from FIRE, F-I-R-E dot org.

[00:03:28] And they did a big, like a 12 minute long piece on the Duke lacrosse case.

[00:03:35] I forget what the, I forget what FIRE stands for.

[00:03:40] It's like, it's like Freedom or Found, eh, Information.

[00:03:43] I forget what.

[00:03:45] But it's like a, it's like a free speech kind of, on campus kind of organization.

[00:03:52] And here's what Casey Johnson had written back in 2014 when he shut down Durham in Wonderland.

[00:04:02] So this would have been eight years after the case first broke.

[00:04:09] The story broke.

[00:04:11] He said, when I first started writing about the lacrosse case at a joint historian's blog called Cleopatra, sorry, Cleopatria.

[00:04:22] I did so in reaction to the group of 88 statement.

[00:04:28] I'll explain with, well, I'll tell you now.

[00:04:30] The group of 88 or the hateful 88.

[00:04:33] These were 88 faculty members at Duke University who published an ad in the school newspaper using school resources to do so.

[00:04:46] Where they maligned their own students, these accused lacrosse players, and egged on the activists who were calling for the castration of the students.

[00:05:02] 88 faculty members.

[00:05:07] And the last count I saw, and it's been a long time because this case has been out of the news for a decade.

[00:05:17] None of those faculty members apologized but three.

[00:05:22] And two of those apparently recanted their apologies.

[00:05:26] In fact, these 88 went on to cushy gigs.

[00:05:31] They got promotions.

[00:05:33] They got better jobs in other universities and such.

[00:05:36] They suffered no professional ramifications for what they did.

[00:05:44] Media outlets that ran this story and amplified the attacks against these students who were innocent.

[00:05:56] They did not do what they were accused of doing.

[00:05:59] And it didn't matter.

[00:06:01] Nobody suffered ramifications for that stuff.

[00:06:04] So, like, this case really was sort of the canary in the coal mine for what we now all recognize is wrong with the university.

[00:06:16] Right?

[00:06:17] Not just Duke, but all across academia.

[00:06:22] So, Johnson says he had, he started writing, he first started writing about this case after the group of 88 put out their statement.

[00:06:38] He said,

[00:07:09] He said,

[00:07:31] Seven years later, you know, he's still blogging.

[00:07:38] So, Crystal Mangum was the woman who falsely accused three Duke men's lacrosse players of raping her in 2006.

[00:07:50] And now, in a podcast interview that runs 11 minutes long, and the first half of it, I watched it.

[00:07:59] It's like 11 and a half minutes.

[00:08:01] And the first half of it, the host is asking her questions.

[00:08:05] If you could fly, where would you fly to?

[00:08:10] I think she asked, like, favorite foods or something.

[00:08:12] What's your favorite food?

[00:08:14] Like, these are the kinds of, it's called Let's Talk with Cat.

[00:08:18] It's hosted by Katerina DiPasqua.

[00:08:21] And she is Slavic, I want to say.

[00:08:27] I forget.

[00:08:28] But she's European.

[00:08:29] And she did the interview at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women.

[00:08:36] Because that's where Crystal Mangum is.

[00:08:39] Because in 2013, she was convicted of second-degree murder of her then-boyfriend in 2013.

[00:08:51] And so, she gets this interview with Crystal Mangum.

[00:08:56] According to the Duke Chronicle, which is the student newspaper,

[00:09:01] DiPasquale said that when she initially, oh, wait, let me start here.

[00:09:09] Yeah, in her talking to the Duke paper, DiPasquale, the host,

[00:09:15] said that when she initially contacted Mangum,

[00:09:18] she was not aware that Mangum wanted to apologize.

[00:09:22] However, Mangum expressed her desire to apologize to the players

[00:09:26] in her response to DiPasquale's request for an interview, saying, quote,

[00:09:31] It's been on my heart to do a public apology concerning the Duke Lacrosse case.

[00:09:36] I actually lied about the incident to the public, my family, my friends, and to God about it.

[00:09:43] And I'm not proud about it.

[00:09:45] When we met and were about to begin the interview,

[00:09:48] she made it clear that all she wanted to do is to apologize, DiPasquale wrote to the Chronicle.

[00:09:54] It felt like this apology was something she needed to get off her chest.

[00:10:00] And she did.

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[00:11:03] All right.

[00:11:04] So here is Crystal Mangum in her appearance on this podcast called Let's Talk with Cat,

[00:11:13] hosted by Caterina de Pasquale.

[00:11:18] I'd never heard of the thing before, and it only runs about 11 minutes.

[00:11:20] So if you want to watch the whole thing, you can.

[00:11:23] But here is the relevant part to North Carolina.

[00:11:27] My other question to you is, do you have any regrets?

[00:11:33] That could be.

[00:11:34] I don't have any regrets.

[00:11:36] Everything happens to get everybody to the point where they are.

[00:11:40] Okay.

[00:11:41] And it's all to show God's love and his forgiveness, his grace, and his mercy.

[00:11:48] Thank you.

[00:11:52] It's all to show his glory.

[00:11:58] I'm a living witness of God's forgiveness.

[00:12:04] That night, my Reed Seligman, Colin Bennerty, and Dave Evans, they took me into their home.

[00:12:24] And they trusted.

[00:12:26] The Bible says that you shouldn't do harm to your neighbor that lives trustingly beside you.

[00:12:31] And they were my brothers, and they trusted me that I wouldn't betray their trust.

[00:12:39] And I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn't.

[00:12:48] And that was wrong.

[00:12:52] And I betrayed the trust of a lot of other people who believed in me and made up a story that wasn't true because I wanted validation from people and not from God.

[00:13:10] And that was wrong when God already loved me for who I was.

[00:13:19] Regardless, I didn't need to seek validation from him because I already had validation from him.

[00:13:24] I just didn't know it.

[00:13:25] And I hurt my brothers.

[00:13:35] And I hope that they can forgive me.

[00:13:39] And I want them to know that I love them.

[00:13:43] And they didn't deserve that.

[00:13:46] And I hope they can forgive me.

[00:13:50] And that I hope that they can heal and trust God and know that God loves them and that God is loving them through me, letting them know that they're valuable and that they didn't deserve that.

[00:14:19] So that was it.

[00:14:21] I would note she never actually says, I'm sorry.

[00:14:26] And I'm not criticizing her.

[00:14:29] I mean, I take what she wrote here or what she said here as as an apology, as a request for forgiveness.

[00:14:36] And she does admit that they did not assault her.

[00:14:43] That she lied.

[00:14:45] She bore false witness.

[00:14:47] She made up a story about them and grievously harmed them.

[00:14:54] And she hopes that they can forgive her.

[00:14:57] I've not seen any reporting yet to see any response from these three men whose lives were forever changed because of that party that was held at the at the off campus house during spring break.

[00:15:17] With the lacrosse team.

[00:15:19] And.

[00:15:21] I would also point out that she wrote a book.

[00:15:24] Last Dance for Grace, the Crystal Mangum story.

[00:15:27] And in that book.

[00:15:30] She provided graphic details of the alleged incident.

[00:15:36] So she wrote it all in a book.

[00:15:38] And now it turns out she made it all up.

[00:15:41] And I do also find it noteworthy that the question was about whether she has any regrets.

[00:15:47] And she says no.

[00:15:49] And she is giving this interview while incarcerated.

[00:15:54] For the second degree murder of her boyfriend in 2013.

[00:15:59] So no regrets.

[00:16:02] And I understand maybe where she's trying to get to like, you know, God bless the broken path that led me to you in a kind of way.

[00:16:09] But no, I would say that would be a regret.

[00:16:12] Like murdering somebody and also lying about being raped by three college kids.

[00:16:18] I'd say like, yeah, you could say that that's a regret.

[00:16:21] All right.

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[00:16:52] I mentioned this blog Durham in Wonderland.

[00:16:55] And the guy who wrote it at the time from like 2006 through 2014.

[00:17:01] It was his name is Casey Johnson.

[00:17:04] And there was a documentary done about this.

[00:17:08] A short documentary runs about 12 minutes from fire dot org.

[00:17:14] Going over the details of this case.

[00:17:16] And it is essentially Johnson.

[00:17:20] Detailing what the case was about and how corrupted it was and the people involved in it were.

[00:17:30] So it starts off by saying in 2006, three members of the Duke lacrosse team were charged with first degree rape of a stripper who performed at a party.

[00:17:41] That these that the lacrosse team members had attended.

[00:17:51] What was remarkable is that lots of figures within the media, within the Duke faculty and to a certain extent within the Duke administration, not only presumed the players to be guilty, but then drew these very broad moral judgments.

[00:18:07] In 2007, the North Carolina attorney general, Roy Cooper, declared that the players were innocent, saying that they were victims of a tragic rush to accuse.

[00:18:23] It was a completely closed minded early approach to the case.

[00:18:37] My name is Casey Johnson.

[00:18:39] I'm a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

[00:18:43] I wrote a blog on the Duke lacrosse case called Durham and Wonderland and co-wrote a book on the case with Stuart Taylor called Until Proven Innocent.

[00:18:54] During spring break, when most of the students at Duke were off campus, the captains of the lacrosse team came up with the not so bright idea of inviting two strippers to perform for the players.

[00:19:08] One of them was this woman, Crystal Mangum, who we subsequently learned had very severe mental problems.

[00:19:17] She arrived.

[00:19:18] She had no particular interest in performing.

[00:19:21] It appears as if she was on some sort of combination of alcohol and prescription drugs.

[00:19:26] And the party relatively quickly turned ugly.

[00:19:31] There was a shouting match between the other dancer and members of the team.

[00:19:36] By this point, most of the guys had already left.

[00:19:40] And then the second dancer, a woman named Kim Roberts, drove off.

[00:19:44] And in a normal circumstance, no one ever would have heard of this again.

[00:19:49] But as Roberts drove off, she found out that her fellow dancer had passed out.

[00:19:55] She called the police to come and get Mangum to take her either home or to a psychological institution.

[00:20:04] Mangum, when she was awakened by the police, she was going to be admitted to a psychological institution and was prompted improperly by a nurse who asked her whether she had been raped.

[00:20:15] And Mangum, who knew the system well, said yes, she was sent to Duke Hospital and she made an allegation.

[00:20:28] We saw a kind of mob mentality that took hold of the activist wing of the Duke faculty, which culminated in an April 2006 statement signed by 88 Duke faculty members, called the Group of 88,

[00:20:43] in which before any charges even had been filed, these 88 faculty members took out an ad, a full page ad in the Duke campus newspaper.

[00:20:53] They unequivocally asserted that something had happened to Crystal Mangum.

[00:20:59] She was claiming rape.

[00:21:00] The lacrosse players said nothing happened.

[00:21:02] They said that they would continue their activism regardless of what the court decided or what the police said.

[00:21:09] And they thanked public protesters for not waiting and making themselves heard.

[00:21:15] And the highest profile public protest that had occurred at that point had been a march in front of the captain's house,

[00:21:22] in which protesters had carried large signs urging the castration of the lacrosse captains.

[00:21:29] So this was, it was a complete abandonment of any pretense of objectivity, of any interest in the truth.

[00:21:43] Her story then begins to unravel.

[00:21:47] There were three elements that proved Mangum lied.

[00:21:50] The first and by far the most important was the DNA.

[00:21:54] Mangum's story was that she was sexually assaulted for 30 minutes by a group of people who did not use condoms.

[00:22:02] In such an assault, DNA would be left behind.

[00:22:06] And she was immediately taken to the hospital.

[00:22:09] DNA samples were taken from all 46 white lacrosse players.

[00:22:12] And there were no matches to any 46.

[00:22:15] The second were the descriptions.

[00:22:18] Mangum did describe the people who attacked her.

[00:22:21] Those descriptions didn't resemble in any way any of the lacrosse players.

[00:22:27] And the third were the inconsistencies within Mangum's story.

[00:22:31] Mangum looked at a number of different photo arrays.

[00:22:34] There was only one lacrosse player that she positively identified as being at the party in every single photo array that she looked at.

[00:22:43] The problem is that that was one lacrosse player who could prove that he was never in Durham.

[00:22:48] He actually wasn't in Durham County the night of the party.

[00:22:52] And that information was shared with prosecutors.

[00:22:54] So the prosecutors knew before they went forward that they had a wholly unreliable witness whose descriptions didn't match her alleged attackers and where there was no medical basis to advance to substantiate her charges.

[00:23:08] The state of North Carolina conducted a separate investigation.

[00:23:14] Findings announced 13 months after the party.

[00:23:18] We believe that these cases were the result of a tragic rush to accuse and a failure to verify serious allegations.

[00:23:29] Based on the significant inconsistencies between the evidence and the various accounts given by the accusing witness, we believe these three individuals are innocent.

[00:23:49] The purpose of due process is to yield, is the best way of yielding a truthful result.

[00:23:56] No one benefits to begin with from a false allegation of rape yielding a conviction because when these issues get published, as was the case with the lacrosse case, it undermines a general presumption in the value of accusers.

[00:24:12] And the other thing about valuing due process is that it is, it's facially neutral.

[00:24:19] It's not as if a system of due process benefits either the accused or the accuser.

[00:24:25] The purpose is to create a fair system.

[00:24:28] A lot of times what we're increasingly seeing on college campuses is that the process is designed with the presumption that the accuser must be telling the truth.

[00:24:38] And that testing that presumption is somehow another sexual assault on the accuser.

[00:24:44] And this is entirely anathema to basic principles of due process, really both within the criminal justice system and within higher education as a whole.

[00:24:54] I am not going to allow Durham's view and the mind of the world to be a bunch of lacrosse players from Duke raping a black girl in Durham.

[00:25:06] That was Mike Knifong, the district attorney in Durham, who, perhaps coincidentally at the time of the case, was running in the Democrat primary.

[00:25:18] Trying to win the primary and the general election.

[00:25:23] FIRE stands for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education.

[00:25:29] Thefire.org is the website, so I apologize.

[00:25:32] I think I just said FIRE.

[00:25:32] But if you type just FIRE, it'll take you to thefire.org.

[00:25:36] This is their interview with Casey Johnson, who did the Durham in Wonderland blog about the Duke lacrosse case.

[00:25:47] Mike Knifong was the prosecutor in this case.

[00:25:51] Knifong as prosecutor seemed to be functioning as if his goal in the case was to violate as many different ethical procedures as he possibly could in one case.

[00:26:05] So, you know, he ordered the police to run this rigged photo lineup that contained only photos of lacrosse players so anyone Mangum picked could be charged.

[00:26:15] He conspired with the former head of the police to ensure that the lab head would not fully report his DNA results.

[00:26:28] Results which were exonerating of the players.

[00:26:30] He lied in open court to a judge for which he eventually was held in criminal contempt and was sent to county jail for one day.

[00:26:42] He issued a barrage of inflammatory public statements which violated ethical rules for prosecutors.

[00:26:50] So Knifong's behavior was extraordinarily bad.

[00:26:57] To say the least, yes.

[00:26:59] It was, I think, unprecedented the sort of behavior that we saw from the Duke faculty.

[00:27:04] I can't think of another instance in modern higher education in which faculty members essentially chose to exploit their students' distress to advance a campus pedagogical agenda,

[00:27:19] to sort of push their own ideological vision, and to abandon any pretense of supporting fairness, due process, the dispassionate evaluation of evidence.

[00:27:30] So there were multiple villains in this case.

[00:27:34] The worst of them was Knifong in terms of the degree of the misconduct.

[00:27:39] But if we want to look at unprecedented conduct, I think the focus would be on the Duke faculty.

[00:27:47] Oh yeah, and the media.

[00:27:50] The Times coverage, which was both relentless and one-sided,

[00:27:54] there were more than 100 articles or opinion columns in the Times about the lacrosse case,

[00:28:00] set the stage for the national media that, look, these guys must be guilty because it's the New York Times which is saying it.

[00:28:06] And if the Times is saying it, it must be true.

[00:28:10] I don't think they want a lie detector test because they're afraid they won't pass a lie detector test.

[00:28:14] Nancy Grace!

[00:28:15] I may be the last person willing to take the heat because the victim is certainly taking a beating, as is Mike Knifong,

[00:28:20] and it's really unconscionably unfair.

[00:28:22] This was a case that served differing agendas of differing groups.

[00:28:27] For Knifong, he wanted guilt because it would help his cause in the primary.

[00:28:32] For the Duke faculty members, portraying their own students as racist,

[00:28:37] advanced an on-campus agenda of making more hires,

[00:28:41] dealing with topics of race, class, and gender,

[00:28:43] and requiring more courses in race, class, and gender.

[00:28:47] And for the New York Times, this was a case that fit very much the basic assumptions of a typical Times journalist,

[00:28:54] that white male athletes were out of control, both sexual and racial connotations,

[00:29:01] and that advancing this would sort of advance a broader ideological agenda of the Times.

[00:29:07] And so this was almost a perfect storm of a case in which a variety of different groups could exploit the case for their own purposes.

[00:29:21] In 2011, the documentary here says,

[00:29:24] in 2011, the U.S. Department of Education ordered universities that received federal funds

[00:29:28] to lower due process protections for students accused of sexual assault.

[00:29:35] To lower them.

[00:29:39] It's bad.

[00:29:40] A double jeopardy system had to be introduced so that if a verdict was not guilty,

[00:29:47] the accuser needed to have the right to appeal.

[00:29:49] And it strongly discouraged colleges from allowing the accused student to cross-examine his accuser

[00:29:56] within the disciplinary tribunal itself.

[00:29:59] Those procedures remain in place, and there's no indication that the federal government

[00:30:03] will be backing away from them anytime soon.

[00:30:05] And one of the things that we saw in the Duke Lacrosse case is that campuses today,

[00:30:10] for a variety of reasons, are already virtually uniquely hostile to students who are accused of sexual assault.

[00:30:18] And then we have the federal government coming in saying that even the minimal due process protections

[00:30:24] that often were afforded to students on campus had to be eliminated, had to be lowered.

[00:30:30] And the purpose seemed to be to make conviction of sexual assault in these campus tribunals far more likely.

[00:30:41] For everyone who chose to speak out against us before any of the facts were known,

[00:30:46] I truly hope that you are never put in a position where you have to experience the same pain and heartache

[00:30:52] that you've caused our families.

[00:30:54] While your hurtful words and outrageous lies will forever be linked to this tragedy,

[00:30:59] everyone will always remember that we told the truth.

[00:31:02] And in the words of Abraham Lincoln, truth is the best vindication against the land.

[00:31:09] All right, so that was the 12-minute sort of documentary rundown.

[00:31:14] That was Casey Johnson that you heard his voice narrating what had happened.

[00:31:18] And it's a really good summation of the Duke Lacrosse case that took years to unfold.

[00:31:26] In his final post at his blog, Durham and Wonderland, back in 2014,

[00:31:32] he talked about three general reflections.

[00:31:36] The Academy, Nifong, and the media.

[00:31:45] And with the Academy, he talked about how higher education is probably like the only product

[00:31:51] where Americans will drop tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars

[00:31:56] without having any kind of a clear sense of what they're actually purchasing.

[00:32:00] Very few parents or alumni or legislators or prospective students spend much, if any, time

[00:32:06] exploring the scholarship or the syllabi offered by professors at the school of their choice.

[00:32:13] And there seems to be a general incorrect impression that while colleges do have the occasional tenured radical,

[00:32:23] right, on staff who lacks real influence on campus,

[00:32:26] that most professors probably fall well within the ideological mainstream.

[00:32:30] And that is not true.

[00:32:31] That's what was blown up with the Duke Lacrosse case.

[00:32:35] When the 88 faculty members published that ad before any charges were filed.

[00:32:44] And even as we knew there were so many problems with this woman's story and it didn't matter to them.

[00:32:52] They savaged three of their own students because they had an ideological axe to grind.

[00:33:00] And it laid bare the lie that so many faculty members are, in fact, objective arbiters of truth.

[00:33:06] All right, that'll do it for this episode.

[00:33:08] Thank you so much for listening.

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