Apparently, a rape did occur in the Duke case

Posted by Marc Hodak on April 11, 2007 under Invisible trade-offs | Comments are off for this article

The assailant was District Attorney Mike Nifong. The victim was the lady with the blindfold and scales.

The accused Duke lacrosse players have finally been exonerated. For those of us who have been following this case, the dropping of these charges is long overdue. The players and their families have gone through hell, paid their lawyers over $2.5 million for the privilege, and lost a year of their young lives in the netherworld of an out of control prosecutor.  Their coach lost his amazing job.  Their teammates lost a great shot at the NCAA championships–the pinnacle of what most lacrosse players work their lives to achieve.  The best coverage of this whole, sorry affair has been provided by KC Johnson.  He will undoubtebly put it all together in a much-deserved bestseller.

My own interest in this affair stemmed from my son’s decision to apply for and accept Duke’s invitation to their Class of ’11.  When I asked him about the lacrosse affair, he responded in his typical, mercenary fashion that he should probably send Nifong a thank you note for making it that much easier for him to get in to a great school.  I suppose this was a year of reduced quantity of applications for Duke, and since the students would eventually be found innocent, it was a fair bet that the school’s reputation should more or less recover.

I would qualify these statements by mentioning the behavior of some of Duke’s administration, including President Jim “Throw ’em under the bus” Brodhead, and the politicized faction of their faculty that used their student’s plight to press their own agenda.  In either of those regards, however, I don’t think my son would have fared better at any other elite university, except that Duke’s loony left may have been sufficiently spanked by the deservedly bad publicity to lay low for, perhaps, the next four or so years. I doubt it, though.

Of course, the long-term negative effects of this prosecution will be borne by future rape victims who will have a harder time having their voices heard.  Among the outrageous enablers of this false prosecution were supposedly feminist advocates who played the victim’s siren song long after everyone else got tired of the screeching.