During a recent podcast, the woman who accused three Duke University lacrosse players of beating and raping her in 2006 admitted that she had lied about the whole thing:
“I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t, and that was wrong. And I betrayed the trust of a lot of other people who believed in me,” Mangum said on Katerena DePasquale’s show, “Let’s Talk with Kat.” “I made up a story that wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God.”
“I hope that [the players] 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,” she said.
For those who are intimately familiar with this case, her comments are perhaps surprising, given that, for more than 18 years, Mangum has steadfastly claimed she was telling the truth when she made her original accusations in March 2006. I’ll write more about this case in a future article for the Mises page, but suffice it to say that, while Mangum saw her accusations as a way—as she put it to her fellow workers at a Durham strip club—to “get money from the white boys,” others used them to push their own agendas, as KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor noted in their book on this infamous case.
The police officer who originally pushed the case hated Duke students and saw it as an opportunity to inflict further damage on them; the prosecutor, Mike Nifong, used it to win a primary and general election by galvanizing both black and radical white voters. A group of 88 Duke University faculty members signed a guilt-implying statement in the student newspaper and used the case to push for a remake of “campus culture,” while journalists from the networks to the New York Times refused to logically look at the evidence, since that would have required them to consider the possibility of innocence, which was not possible for bien pensant journalist given all the supposed symbolism of the case.
As usual, truth was still putting on its shoes while lies were already out the door. When then-North Carolina Attorney General declared the accused players “innocent” on April 7, 2007, the story took second fiddle to the firestorm created when radio personality Don Imus referred to the black players of Rutgers University’s women’s basketball players as “nappy-headed hos.”
Even afterward, Mangum still claimed she was raped. Unfortunately for her, she was convicted in 2013 of stabbing her boyfriend to death and was sent to prison. Some True Believers remained. Legal analyst Wendy Murphy, who made a number of false-and-inflammatory statements about the case, claimed that the accused players’ families had paid off Mangum even though Mangum had (at that time) not recanted.
But almost 19 years later, Mangum suddenly has recanted. As noted earlier, she gave her stated reasons for coming clean, but one is tempted to look at some details before taking her remarks at face value. Why now?
Remember that in 2013, Mangum was sentenced to a minimum of 170 months for second-degree murder, but that also would include time served, as she was incarcerated after her 2011 arrest in the case. Given that, she almost certainly is approaching her first parole date soon, and one can be sure that the parole board of North Carolina would immediately reject her application if she were to continue insisting that the lacrosse players had raped her. Thus, she has a clear incentive to (finally) admit the truth.
After Cooper exonerated the accused players in 2007, the families of the three accused players urged state investigators not to pursue criminal charges or any other legal action against Mangum. So far, I’ve not read any public statements from any of the accused nor from anyone else associated with the case. While one can be happy Mangum finally has told the truth, how much better it would have been had she not lied in 2006.
