Remember the Duke Lacrosse (non-)rape case from 2006? The team held a wild party in which strippers attended, one of whom claimed she'd been gang-raped -- even though no other witnesses could attest to it. Nevertheless. Duke University abandoned and betrayed their students and the local prosecutor lied to the court to press the case. Activists scolded America over skepticism of Crystal Mangum's claims, demanding that we believe her story even though it kept changing simply because the claims were made.

In the end, the court threw out the charges, DA Mike Nifong got disbarred for perjury, and the students forced Duke into a settlement for defamation. However, Mangum continued to insist that she'd been sexually assaulted, and the allegations hung like a pall over the lives of everyone involved.

Last night, the final shoe dropped on this injustice. A clip of an interview Mangum did with a podcaster circulated last night in which Mangum admited she lied and tried to apologize to the young men whose lives she ruined:

Holy shlit. Crystal Mangum just admitted after 18 years that she made up the r*pe allegation against the 3 Duke Lacrosse players.

She deserves life in prison.pic.twitter.com/lSpC8gwV0i

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) December 13, 2024

She made this admission from a North Carolina prison, where she's serving at least 14 years for the second-degree stabbing murder of her boyfriend. (She had been accused of attempted murder three years earlier with a different boyfriend but pled to lesser charges in 2010.) The admission comes long after the statute of limitations has passed for any legal consequences, and 16 years after Mangum attempted to cash in on her allegations in an autobiography:

“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 said in the interview. “[I] made up a story that wasn't true because I wanted validation from people and not from God.” ...

In her 2008 book “Last Dance for Grace: The Crystal Mangum Story,” Mangum wrote, “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.

DePasquale added that when she initially contacted Mangum, she was not aware that Mangum wanted to apologize. However, Mangum expressed her desire to apologize to the players in her response to DePasquale's request for an interview.

“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.”

Better late than never? You'd have to ask the former players of the lacrosse team that question. At least they now can say that the shadow of that terrible and clearly false accusation has been entirely lifted from their lives. Maybe that's enough, even if it's not really justice for two decades spent living under that shadow and having been made into an avatar for those crusading against "toxic masculinity" and campus culture, etc. 

What about Mangum? One can hope that this is a sincere effort to cleanse her soul, albeit belatedly. However, it's worth noting that Mangum is coming in range of her release date from prison, set at the moment for February 2026. Is she cleansing her soul to get a fresh start in life? Or is Mangum seeking a new book deal to give that fresh start a financial boost? Her track record isn't exactly littered with credibility, after all, but with repeated attempts to manipulate the system through dubious claims and outright lies. 

The bigger lesson here is that this vindicates the American approach to jurisprudence. We cannot just blithely "believe all women" -- or any other perceived victimhood demo -- in convicting people on the basis of allegation alone. We presume innocence in the system, and Crystal Mangum (and Jussie Smollett, and a host of others) demonstrated why. Should we treat such allegations seriously and investigate them properly? Yes, of course. But the demand that we assume guilt leads to more injustice than it resolves, and when the mainstream media promotes that rush to judgment, it turns into a character-assassination virtual lynch mob. 

There is no such thing as group justice in criminal cases, not even when it's called class justice, redistributive justice, privilege-based justice, or whatever. All we have is the rule of law, the presumption of innocence, and the need to force the state to prove cases beyond a reasonable doubt without resorting to lies and corruption, as Mike Nifong did. That's the real lesson from the Crystal Mangum Fraud, which is how this case should have been remembered for the last 18 years.