Crystal Mangum walked out of a North Carolina prison last month, 15 years after she fatally stabbed her boyfriend, Reginald Daye. Five years before her murder conviction, however, Mangum made national headlines when she accused members of Duke University’s lacrosse team of raping her. The accusation was false, but the furor surrounding that 2006 case provoked a firestorm that had a radicalizing effect on many students at Duke, including President Donald Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller. Twenty years later, we live in a world shaped to a remarkable degree by a lie told by a stripper.
David Evans, a 23-year-old economics major from Bethesda, Maryland, was one of four captains of the Duke lacrosse team. Because of the team’s competition schedule, the players had been forced to skip spring break and stay on campus. So the team captains came up with the idea of having a party and inviting strippers to entertain the players. As events would prove, this was a very bad idea, and college boys everywhere ought to be taught this lesson. Hindsight is always 20/20, of course, but when the team captains called up an escort service to send over a couple of strippers to their off-campus house, they had no idea what they were getting themselves into.
March 13, 2006, was a Monday night, and one might suppose that the Allure Escort Service in Durham, North Carolina, would have had many adult entertainers available for the occasion. For some reason that was never adequately explained, however, while the lacrosse team captains had reportedly requested white strippers, the two performers sent to 610 North Buchanan Boulevard were a 31-year-old mixed-race woman, Kim Roberts (half-black, half-Korean), and Ms. Mangum, a black woman who was then 27. This contributed a racial aspect to the subsequent controversy that had a magnetic effect in attracting national media attention.
Here it must be pointed out that, although Duke University sits amid the thriving urban Research Triangle region of North Carolina, it is nevertheless still in the South, and there is nothing that the national media loves so much as to cover a “racial incident” in the South. As I wrote in 2020: