Crystal Mangum Says She Lied About Duke Rape, Overturning 2006 Scandal

More than 18 years after she accused three former Duke University lacrosse players of raping her, a fake account she shared in detail, Crystal Mangum admitted she lied about the encounter.

In a webcast interview published Wednesday, Mangum apologized to the men and said her relationship with God made her understand why she made up the story. Mangum is serving prison time on a second-degree murder conviction for killing her boyfriend.

The timeline of the North Carolina case begins in 2006, when Mangum said it was trapped in a bathroomsexually assaulted and raped by David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann at a team party where she was performing as an exotic dancer. The men were custody following her accusations.

“I falsely testified against them saying 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 to Kat.” “I made up a story that wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God.”

For more than a year, the school and lacrosse players were thrust into a media frenzy, subjected to intense public scrutiny and damaging sexual assault allegations that were eventually dropped.

After Mangum’s testimony, Duke told CNN on Friday that he would not comment. The former players did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

Here’s how the events unfolded.

A timeline of events

• March 13, 2006: Mangum is hired as a dancer for a private party thrown by members of the Duke men’s lacrosse team. It takes place at a house on Buchanan Avenue North in Durham. Mangum later accused several players of raping her during the March 14 party.

• March 28, 2006: Duke President Richard Brodhead suspend team play for the men’s lacrosse teama move widely criticized as premature as no formal charges have yet been made. Media attention is intensifying, with early reports painting a picture of privileged white lacrosse players being accused by a black woman. The case becomes a focal point for problems of race, class and privilegeaccording to the Washington Post.

• March 28-30, 2006: DNA tests on Mangum’s body can’t connect any of the lacrosse players at the scene, according to a disciplinary order against prosecutor Mike Nifong by the North Carolina State Bar, but Nifong insists on moving forward with the case. Skepticism about the case begins to grow.

• April 18, 2006: Nifong is officially charging Seligmann and Finnerty with rape, according to him disciplinary order. The charges rest largely on Mangum’s testimony, as forensic evidence was either inconclusive or absent.

• May 15, 2006: Nifong is officially accusing Evans of rape, according to him disciplinary order.

• June 5, 2006: Duke announces that the lacrosse team is reinstated to play the following fall, but public sentiment had already soured.

• December 28, 2006: Nifong is accused of withholding evidence and making misleading statements to the press, which led to an investigation by the state bar, according to disciplinary order.

• April 11, 2007: Roy Cooper — then the state’s attorney general and now its governor — announces that “there is insufficient evidence to proceed with either charge” in a statement impart by Duke Athletics. fees are thrown away.

“We believe these cases were the result of a tragic failure to prosecute and a failure to investigate serious allegations,” Cooper Cooper. said. “Based on the significant inconsistencies between the evidence and the various accounts given by the prosecuting witness, we believe that these three individuals are innocent of these charges.”

• June 16, 2007: Nifong he loses his law license following disciplinary hearings into the handling of the case, including allegations of ethical misconduct and the withholding of evidence. His exclusions is completed by the state bar in July, according to disciplinary order.

• June 18, 2007: Duke announces that he did established with the three lacrosse players agreeing to pay a non-disclosure agreement.

“It is impossible to fully describe what we, our families and our team have endured. As we have said from day one, we are innocent,” Evans, Finnerty and Seligmann said in a statement. “But it took three hundred and ninety-four days, and the intervention of the North Carolina attorney general, before our innocence was officially declared.”

• October 5, 2007: The three players file a civil lawsuit against the City of Durham, Nifong and others, accordingly court documents. Durham later solve the process in part with a one-time grant of $50,000 to the North Carolina Commission on Innocence.

• April 3, 2011: Mangum is CHARGED with the stabbing of her boyfriend, leading to a lengthy criminal trial and is convict of second-degree murder in 2013.

“I hope they can forgive me”

Mangum spent 11 years in prison, which she gets through by reading the Bible and finding humor in her thoughts, she said in the interview with “Let’s talk to Kat.”

She wishes she could help children who have been sexually abused, she told DePasquale. Asked if she could describe her prison experience in one word, she says, “Growth.”

Before becoming an exotic dancer, she studied psychology at North Carolina Central University. The transition came from her search for “validation,” she said in the interview.

“I was looking for love and acceptance from people,” she said. “People to love me, accept me, pay attention to me for validation. But all this you can get in Jesus. He loves us as we are. That’s what I learned in prison.

“I hurt my brothers and I hope they can forgive me and I want them to know that I love them and they didn’t deserve this and I hope they can forgive me. I hope they can heal.”

The danger of false accusations of rape for real victims

An advocate for sexual assault victims said rare cases like this could discourage victims from reporting sexual assault and make people wrongly suspect them.

“False reports hurt not only the falsely accused, but every rape victim,” Jennifer Simmons Kaleba, vice president of communications for RAINN, the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization, told CNN. “There are already too many victims who do not report the crime for fear of not being believed. After a false report in such a high-profile case, even more survivors may be reluctant to come forward for fear that law enforcement will not believe them.”

A study published by Violence against women in 2010 found that false reports of sexual assault ranged from 2 to 10 percent. Most sexual assaults, about 63 percent, are never reported to the police, according to the report National Sexual Violence Resource Center.

Kaleba said she encourages people to consider the nearly half a million rape and sexual assault victims in the U.S. each year, who may now face renewed distrust and question the value of reporting sexual violence.

“Don’t let sparse and false reporting get in the way of sitting with survivors,” Kaleba said.

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