Duke University rape “victim” Crystal Mangum has finally confessed that she manufactured her tale when she accused three lacrosse players of raping her when she performed at a wild party.
Serving time for second-degree murder, the former stripper admitted that she concocted the yarn, which the far-left mainstream media repeated, during an interview on the Let’s Talk With Kat podcast.
The false accusations became a 24-7 nightmare for the three players. The media smeared them for months, and the case led to the disbarment of the prosecutor who swallowed the allegations hook, line, and sinker.
The Lie
Mangum, who is black, became a national cause for the sisterhood when she accused the three white players of raping her at a party in 2006. That followed the Tawana Brawley hoax of 1987, and prefigured the 2014 rape hoax at the University of Virginia. The story turned into a moral panic about white “racism.”
The far-left media, led by The New York Times, convicted the players, as did a group of professors. Duke canceled the lacrosse season.
“Before and during the [players’] trial — the same period in which he was running for reelection — Mike Nifong, then-Durham County district attorney and lead prosecutor in the case, spoke openly to the press, saying in [a] March 2006 interview with CBS News that ‘there’s no doubt a sexual assault took place,’” The Duke Chronicle recalled:
Initially, Nifong said that the DNA would prove which players were innocent. However, once all of the tests came back negative, Nifong reversed his statement, noting that courts of law used to have to “deal with sexual assault cases the good old-fashioned way, [where] witnesses got on the stand and told what happened to them,” absent of DNA evidence.
Nifong was disbarred June 16, 2007, by the North Carolina State Bar for lying in court and withholding DNA evidence which ultimately absolved the defendants of responsibility for Mangum’s allegations.
The state attorney general took over the case and dismissed the charges.
The players sued the university and its president, Richard Brodhead.
Despite all that, Mangum repeated the lie in her book, Last Dance for Grace: The Crystal Mangum Story, published in 2008, The Chronicle noted: “‘I will never say that nothing at all happened that night,’ after which she provided graphic details of the alleged incident. However, she has told inconsistent accounts of the night throughout the past 18 years.”
She has spent the majority of those years in prison for stabbing her boyfriend to death. Mangum is a repeat domestic abuser.
In February 2010, her 9-year-old called police because Mangum and a previous boyfriend were fighting. “[P]olice accused Mangum of slashing the vehicle tires of her boyfriend Milton Walker, smashing his windshield with a vacuum cleaner and setting fire to a pile of his clothes in a bathtub while the police and her three children were in her apartment” the Raleigh News & Observer reported. “Mangum was convicted of child abuse, vandalism and resisting an officer. The felony arson charge against Mangum was dismissed.”
The Confession
Now, 11 years into a 14- to 18-year sentence on the second-degree murder conviction, Mangum has come clean.
“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 told podcaster Kat DePasquale. “[I] made up a story that wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God.”
Mangum told the podcaster that she wanted to apologize, The Chronicle reported:
“It’s been on my heart to do a public apology concerning the Duke lacrosse case,” Mangum wrote to DePasquale in a letter obtained by The Chronicle. “I actually lied about the incident to the public, my family, my friends and to God about it, and I’m not proud about it.”
“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,” Mangum told DePasquale.
The Duke hoax likely wasn’t Mangum’s first. She appears to have pilfered Tawana Brawley’s ridiculous tale and changed a few details.
As reported by Fox News in 2007, Mangum claimed that in 1993, when she was 14, three men kidnapped her, drove her to Creedmoor, North Carolina, and raped her.
She filed the report three years later. Fox reported:
The case, however, was not pursued, because the accuser backed away from the charges out of fear for her life, according to her relatives.
Tawana Brawley
Brawley’s story is similar, but far less believable.
In 1987, she disappeared from her home in Wappingers Falls, New York. She was found in a trash bag covered with dog feces. Brawley falsely claimed that four white men — three cops and a prosecutor — kidnapped and sexually assaulted her. The case made hoaxter Al Sharpton, now a talker on MSNBC, a national figure.
A grand jury found that she manufactured the story, likely to avoid a beating from her mother and violent stepfather.
Prosecutor Steven Pagones, one of the accused, filed multiple defamation lawsuits and prevailed.
Brawley is still paying off a $190,000 penalty that has grown because of interest. Pagones filed with a court to garnish her wages.
