Crystal Gail Mangum has admitted accusations she made of sexual assault were false. Photo / Getty Images
When exotic dancer Crystal Mangum accused Duke University lacrosse players David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann of raping, beating and choking her at a house party in 2006, it sent shock waves through American society.
The horrific nature of the allegations sparked a furious debate about race, class and privilege in college sports.
Across the nation, scores of people, including many of the players’ own professors, presumed their guilt, and over a 13-month period they were suspended from campus, their team coach was fired and the remainder of the side’s season was cancelled.
The case was extensively covered in the press, with five segments about the scandal featuring on news programme 60 Minutes.
While the players were eventually declared innocent the following year, the three men’s lives were changed forever.
“This woman has destroyed everything I worked for in my life. She’s put it on hold. She’s destroyed two other families, and she’s brought shame on a great university,” Evans told CBS at the time of the trial.
“Worst of all, she’s split apart a community and a nation on facts that just didn’t happen and a lie that should have never been told.”
Seligmann added: “Your whole life you try to, you know, stay on the right path and to do the right things.
“And someone can come along and take it all away.
“Just by going like that. Just by pointing their finger. That’s all it takes.”
They had been cleared after investigators failed to find any DNA, witness or other evidence to confirm Mangum’s story.
Meanwhile, the Durham prosecutor who championed the case was disbarred and briefly imprisoned for lying and misconduct.
For the next 18 years, Mangum would refute the lacrosse players’ innocence.
That was, however, until just last week, when Mangum admitted to a true crime podcast host that she had been making the whole thing up for the past two decades.
“I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t and that was wrong,” she told the Let’s Talk with Kat podcast.
The interview was recorded at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women, where Mangum, 46, is serving time for fatally stabbing her boyfriend in 2011.
Mangum, who is eligible to be released from prison for second-degree murder as early as 2026, said she hopes the three falsely accused men can forgive her.
“I want them to know that I love them and they didn’t deserve that,” she said.
The story of the Duke lacrosse players began on the night of March 13, 2006, when she was hired to work as a stripper at a party in Durham, held at the home of the team’s co-captains.
According to the captains, Mangum, who appeared heavily intoxicated, and another stripper, Kim Roberts, arrived at the party around 11pm and were dancing in the living room when they got into an argument with a guest who suggested they perform an intimate act with a broomstick.
Alarmed, the women stopped the show at 12.04am and locked themselves in the bathroom.
Meanwhile, partygoers allegedly gathered outside the door and bayed for them to come out, complaining that they had paid the dancers $400 each for a two-hour performance.
Accounts then vary as to exactly what happened next, but according to Roberts, she briefly left the house.
Mangum previously alleged it was during this time that she was brutally sexually assaulted.
However, in court, Roberts called the claims the other woman was attacked “a crock”.
Shortly before 1am, the two women finally left. But after an argument, police were called to a car park where they found Mangum semi-conscious and took her to a treatment facility.
It was then that she claimed that three men had “hit, kicked and strangled” her while raping without contraception over a “30-minute” period.
Police searched the house and interviewed the captains, all of whom voluntarily gave statements and DNA samples and offered to take lie-detector tests.
Police found no DNA match with any of the 46 members of the team.
The team’s general behaviour won them little support in the court of public opinion.
The authorities revealed as the case got under way that Roberts had reported the partygoers for racism after one of the team allegedly yelled to her car as she was leaving: “We asked for whites, not n*****s”.
And in the hours after the party, one of the guests, Ryan McFadyen had sent a graphic email to his lacrosse teammates that was leaked as public pressure mounted.
The grotesque message made reference to the book American Psycho, in which strippers are killed, skinned and sexually abused.
It was dismissed as dark humour, but was taken publicly as an indication of the three players’ guilt.
McFayden said years later that it was “locker room talk”. “I was making a joke, and I happened to make a dark joke referencing a movie about a serial killer who kills strippers and homeless people and prostitutes, and that tied in perfectly to the storyline of the mostly-white team raping a poor black girl from Durham,” he told Vanity Fair.
The outpouring of anger against the team was further fuelled by Mike Nifong, then-Durham County district attorney and lead prosecutor in the case, who took to the airwaves to give dozens of interviews over the coming weeks, expressing with absolute certainty that Duke lacrosse players had committed the horrific crime.
Nifong, who was running for re-election at the time, told reporters that he had “no doubts” that Mangum was raped at the party and called the team a “bunch of hooligans” whose “daddies could buy them expensive lawyers”.
In the weeks after the party, Mangum returned to hospital complaining of neck, back and knee pain she claimed was caused by the attack, but footage obtained by CBS showed her dancing at a strip club two weeks later. A club manager told the network she had been performing her routine as normal.
As holes in the case became clear, Nifong suggested Mangum’s drink might have been spiked, which would explain her apparent drunkenness and her vague accounts of the attack, which had changed over time.
The prosecutor dropped the rape charges in December as ethics charges were levelled against him, but the case went to trial the following year for the lesser charges of kidnapping and sexual assault.
In court, Nifong’s methods came under further scrutiny, after a DNA expert admitted under cross-examination that the prosecutor had encouraged him to withhold evidence that could have absolved the three men much earlier.
In April 2007, after months of anxious build-up, the case collapsed.
North Carolina Attorney-General Roy Cooper dismissed all charges against the three lacrosse players and declared them innocent, stating there was “no credible evidence that an attack occurred”.
“I was hysterically crying,” Seligmann, told Newsweek, reflecting on the moment the verdict came in. “Everybody was hysterically crying. People were swarmed. It was like a pile-on.”
Cooper chose not to prosecute Mangum at the time as he thought “she may have actually believed the many different stories that she has been telling”.
In the aftermath, the lacrosse players sued Duke University in 2007 and reached a confidential settlement thought to have been worth as much as $20 million each, according to the .
A college spokesperson said: “It is in the best interests of the Duke community to eliminate the possibility of future litigation and move forward.”
Evans, Finnerty and Selligmann, accepted the deal with a pledge to implement a university initiative to “prevent similar injustices”.
The Telegraph approached all three players, Mangum and Nifong for comment.
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