Fantastic Lies
A Documentary on the Duke Lacrosse Scandal

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The tale of one of the most shameful anti-white hoaxes of the last twenty years has finally come to a close. Crystal Mangum, a black woman who is now serving a lengthy prison sentence for the 2011 murder of her boyfriend, finally admitted that she falsely accused three Duke University lacrosse players of raping her at an off-campus party in 2006. The three students she accused, David Evans, Collin Finnerty, and Reade Seligmann, underwent an ordeal of persecution by the legal system, their school, and much of the media before all charges against them were ultimately dropped. Since then, the innocence of the three has been common knowledge, but until this month, Mangum had never acknowledged her own dishonesty.

As the events of eighteen years ago have reemerged in the news cycle due to Mangum’s confession, it seems an appropriate time to reexamine the case and the anti-white vitriol it revealed. Fantastic Lies, a 2016 documentary film directed by Marina Zenovich, tells the story well. The film is part of a series of documentaries commissioned by the sports television network ESPN. To the credit of Zenovich and the network, Fantastic Lies does not shy away from addressing the role race played in the case.

Fantastic Lies consists in part of contemporaneous footage from news broadcasts and courtroom proceedings. The remainder is made up of interviews with some of the figures involved. Among those who sat for interviews were Seligmann’s mother, Finnerty’s father, attorneys who represented the players, other members of the lacrosse team, Duke professors, and several journalists who had covered the story when it first broke. Evans, Finnerty and Seligmann all declined to be interviewed. Mangum actually agreed to appear, but the prison where she is held denied the filmmaker’s request to interview her.

Fantastic Lies begins by contrasting the campus of Duke University with the rest of the city of Durham, North Carolina, in which it is located. Duke is an academically rigorous institution whose affluent student body hails mostly from outside of North Carolina. Importantly, Durham is very much a racially mixed city. Shots of the pristine grounds of the Duke campus are juxtaposed with dilapidated Durham homes. In the words of a black resident interviewed for the documentary, “Often, when you heard of Durham, you heard of the crime, or racial tension, or poverty.” One journalist said that the city and the university were “like two different cities” that “don’t often interact” and opined that Durham was “ready-made for the kind of controversy that happened.” In the spring of 2006. several Duke lacrosse players were living in a small rented house outside of campus. A former neighbor recalled that they often hosted “well attended” parties and likened the team to “an ad-hoc fraternity.” Viewers learn that lacrosse players at Duke were very popular on campus, led active social lives, and that many came from “well-established families.” The lacrosse team was an elite subset of an elite university, at or near the very top of the Durham social hierarchy. It was also almost entirely white, with forty-six whites and just one black player on the roster.

The team made a costly mistake by choosing to hire strippers as entertainment for one of their parties. On the night of March 13, 2006, two strippers were paid $400 each to perform for the team. One was twenty-eight-year-old Crystal Mangum, a black single mother with a history of mental illness. After one player allegedly made a threatening comment, Mangum and the other dancer exited the house just a few minutes after arriving and refused to return. This angered the team, who had paid for multiple hours of their services. Several players went outside and shouted at the strippers as they left.

Later that night, Mangum falsely told police that she was taken into a bathroom and raped by three of the lacrosse players while being called racial slurs. Portions of Mangum’s written statement to the police are shown on screen, and the allegations are quite vulgar indeed. The entire team was soon summoned to a police station to give samples of their DNA, which were to be compared with DNA found on Mangum’s body and clothing the night of the party.

In the early stages of the investigation, the Duke players were fully cooperative with the police, understandably confident that nothing would come of it. This was a naive and dangerous attitude for them to take. Instead, they ought to have immediately asked for legal representation. Tricia Dowd, the mother of a Duke lacrosse player who was not accused by Mangum, claims that the team was told by university officials not to inform their parents about the accusations. As she tells it “They were just sending eighteen-year-olds and twenty-one-year-olds and putting them in a position to try to make decisions that could be life changing, without speaking to anyone.” According to Dowd, the administration of the university fully believed the athletes and were confident that the story would eventually “go away.” This was a horrifying instance of a university looking out for its own image and giving bad advice that could jeopardize the freedom of its students in order to minimize negative publicity. Amazingly, the team continued to practice as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. Seligmann’s mother recalled that “it was almost bizarre how calm the kids were.”

Viewers are soon introduced to District Attorney Mike Nifong, who took every opportunity to publicize the case and play up the racial angle. Nifong is portrayed as one of the chief villains of the whole affair, as much if not more so than Mangum herself. Though Nifong did not participate in the documentary, footage from his 2006 interviews and speeches is shown on a number of occasions. Ever the self-promoter, the white prosecutor cultivated an image as a crusader against racism and a champion of the black citizens of Durham. At this point, the DNA test results were not back from the state laboratory, and no charges had been brought against any individual players. Still, Nifong was adamant that a crime had occurred. As one would expect, the team was dumbfounded by Nifong’s rhetoric. Colin Finnerty’s father, Kevin, remembered asking his son “How can you be so sure nothing happened when we’re seeing the DA being definitive about what had happened?”

The obvious implication of Nifong’s public pronouncements was that each man on the lacrosse team knew who the assailants were, but were keeping quiet in order to protect them. Students and others embarked on a campaign to pressure the team into revealing the identities of the culprits. Not only were protests against the team held on campus, but crowds of people marched in front of the house where the party was held in an attempt to convince the guilty parties to confess. In contrast to the strong, healthy athletes, those protesting were, on the whole, a sorry looking bunch that would not look out of place at a Black Lives Matter or antifa rally. One group displayed a sign with the word “castrate” on it, and the New Black Panther Party even made an appearance at one of the protests. Posters were hung not only at the house the players rented, but also outside the home of head lacrosse coach Mike Pressler.

The case became a media sensation largely due to the coverage of the New York Times. In explaining the reason his paper had devoted so much energy to covering the lacrosse scandal, former public editor Dan Okrent makes a telling admission:

It was white over black, male over female, rich over poor, it was educated over uneducated. My god, all of the things we know happen in the world, coming together in one place, and for journalists, they start to quiver with a thrill when something like this happens.

In fact, white-on-black violent crime is quite rare compared to the reverse, and white-on-black rapes are rarer still. However, allegations of such a crime comport quite well with the narrative of white villainy and black victimhood that many of the Times journalists seemed to uncritically accept.

Okrent’s quote brought to mind a few lines from an article written by Dr. Robert S Griffin for the Occidental Observer in the aftermath of the George Floyd riots:

The campaign against whites sets up a demonic category—white—and puts every last white person in it, whether they be from Silicon Valley or rural West Virginia, are a janitor or corporate head, old or young, liberal or conservative, or from the distant past or alive now. They are all the same, and they are all bad, bad, bad.

What does that accomplish?

It replaces reality with a narrative. What white people actually did, or do, or are—the incredible complexity of that—becomes a simple, and negative, story. Now, the basis of truth isn’t facts or logical inference; it is the story. All you need to keep the story going is a single instance that seems to affirm it. A police-related death in Minneapolis—ah yes, the story is true.

An alleged sexual assault in North Carolina- ah yes, the story is true. And the chance to loudly proclaim that “truth” caused reporters for the Times to “quiver with a thrill.” Toward the end of the film, Okrent said that “It was a tragedy to see how the best journalists in America could be so wrong about something.”

Yes, he really did claim that the Times employed “the best journalists in America.”

Back on campus, a black professor by the name of Houston A. Baker described the lacrosse team as a “privileged group of white male athletes” and called for coach Mike Pressler to be fired. Eighty-eight members of the faculty signed their names to an advertisement in the Duke student newspaper. Like Mangum’s written statement, this advertisement was shown on screen in Fantastic Lies. Here is its text:

We are listening to our students. We’re also listening to the Durham community, to Duke staff, and to each other. Regardless of the results of the police investigation, what is apparent everyday now is the anger and fear of many students who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism, who see illuminated in this moment’s extraordinary spotlight what they live with everyday. They know that it isn’t just Duke, it isn’t everybody, and it isn’t just individuals making this disaster. But it is a disaster nonetheless. These students are shouting and whispering about what happened to this young woman and to themselves.

The students know that the disaster didn’t begin on March 13th and won’t end with what the police say or the court decides. Like all disasters, this one has a history. And what lies beneath what we’re hearing from our students are questions about the future. This ad, printed in the most easily seen venue on campus, is just one way for us to say that we’re hearing what our students are saying. Some of these things were said by a mixed (in every way possible) group of students on Wednesday, March 29th at an African & African American Studies Program forum, some were printed in an issue of the Independent that came out that same day, and some were said to us inside and outside of the classroom. We’re turning up the volume in a moment when some of the most vulnerable among us are being asked to quiet down while we wait. To the students speaking individually and to the protestors making collective noise, thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard.

The most disturbing aspect of the professors’ statement was their gratitude toward the protestors for “not waiting and making yourselves heard.” The protestors, of course, were being asked to wait until anyone was charged with a crime.

Though this went unmentioned in Fantastic Lies, black preacher, activist, and former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson publicly promised that his organization would pay for Mangum’s college tuition even if she was found to have made the whole story up.

Eventually, the university fired Mike Pressler and cancelled the remainder of the lacrosse season. Jay Bilas, a white attorney who had played basketball at Duke in the early 1980s, wrote a letter criticizing the university for taking these steps and submitted it for publication in the student newspaper. It was not published.

The results of the DNA tests were released, and not one of players was a match, meaning that no arrests could be made. Nevertheless, Nifong soldiered on. At the same time he was prosecuting the case, the district attorney was campaigning for re-election (he would win by less than one thousand votes) and needed black support. His next strategy was to show Mangum a picture of each white player and ask her to identify who her assailants were. No pictures of men who were not on the team were shown to Mangum. This method, a departure from the regular procedures of the Durham police department, all but guaranteed that charges would be brought against innocent men. It was left to Mangum to decide who those men would be. In the words of Reid Seligmann’s attorney Jim Conney “Basically they told her at the beginning ‘these are all the white players on the Duke lacrosse team. Pick three.’” Joe Cheshire, who represented David Evans, observed that “She can’t pick out a wrong person because there’s no one in the lineup other than people that she’s been told were actually at the party.” “No one knew who would be indicted” recalled team member Rob Wellington. Mangum picked Colin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann out of the lineup, and the pair were subsequently arrested and charged. Kevin Finnerty remembered being shocked that Mangum accused his son, as Colin’s appearance did not match the description of her attackers that Mangum had originally provided to the police.

Unsatisfied with the results of the DNA tests that came from the state lab, Nifong then sought out a private company to conduct its own tests. This led to the arrest of David Evans, as his DNA was found to be a possible, but not conclusive, match with DNA found on one of Mangum’s fingernails. The decision to charge Evans turned out to be a blunder on Nifong’s part, as a defiant Evans gave an emotional speech to the press maintaining the innocence of himself and all of his teammates. Evans’ speech attracted public sympathy and seeded doubt in the minds of many as to the players’ guilt.

Defense attorneys soon discovered glaring holes in Nifong’s case. For one thing, cell phone records from Mangum and from the three accused players the night of the party showed that an assault lasting the length of time alleged by Mangum was an impossibility. Then there was the fact that Seligmann went to a bank for part of the time period in which Mangum alleged the assault took place. Security camera footage from the bank confirmed Seligmann’s alibi. These facts were damaging enough to the prosecution, but the case finally came apart when defense attorneys carefully studied the results coming from the private lab.

The second round of tests revealed traces of DNA from “seven to eleven” men on Mangum’s clothing and person, none of whom were on the Duke lacrosse team. Nifong chose not to reveal this information. Defense attorneys were able to obtain a copy of the lab report, which was thousands of pages long and full of terminology that was completely unfamiliar to them. Much to Nifong’s surprise, one of the players’ lawyers had ordered a textbook on DNA off of Amazon.com and the defense team spent days studying it in order to make sense of the report. When questioned at a hearing, the head of the private DNA lab admitted that he and Nifong had deliberately withheld the fact that the tests had detected the DNA of other men.

Nifong was removed from the case, found in contempt of court, and eventually lost his license to practice law. He spent a grand total of one day in a county jail. The North Carolina Attorney General investigated the case, dropped all charges, and publicly declared on behalf of his office that “We believe these three individuals are innocent.” Mangum faced no consequences for lying.

My only criticism of Fantastic Lies is that it portrayed Mangum in a more sympathetic light than she deserved. For instance, her former minister was brought on to discuss the known liar and convicted killer. Mangum, she said “lived in a fantasy world. Reality was something that she made up as she went along.”

That’s certainly one way to describe her.

Additionally, a teammate of Evans Finnerty and Seligmann said that “Nifong did her a disservice” and a black Duke professor characterized Mangum as a “pawn”. This is far too kind. While Nifong is indeed a despicable individual who used Mangum’s accusations to his political advantage, he could not have done so if she had not first made the decision to smear three innocent men as racially-motivated sexual predators.

The reaction to the Duke lacrosse case can be viewed as a precursor to the many hoaxes championed by the Black Lives Matter movement and its political and media allies, while the legal persecution endured by the three falsely accused players foreshadowed the more recent persecution of white men such as Jake Gardner, Kyle Rittenhouse, Gregory and Travis McMichael, and Daniel Penny. All of these men were portrayed not just as criminals, but as “hate” criminals motivated by racial animus.

When whites are falsely accused of committing a racially-motivated act of violence, the false accusation constitutes an attack on the white race as a collective. As Alan Smithee has shown, fake hate crimes are real hate crimes against whites. These sorts of lies have terrible consequences. Not only do they inspire undeserved hostility toward whites on the part of nonwhites, but they also foster feelings of needless guilt in many whites. This guilt acts as a psychological barrier that prevents infected whites from organizing in defense of their racial interests, and leaves them vulnerable future mistreatment.

Fantastic Lies is an outstanding film that puts the truth above false narratives and celebrates a group of white men who had the courage to stand tall amidst a storm of lies, and come out the other side triumphant. I cannot recommend it highly enough.