The grim legacy of the Duke lacrosse scandal

Eighteen years too late, this month Crystal Mangum recanted the false accusations of rape she’d levelled against three Duke University lacrosse players in a notorious 2006 travesty of justice. The men were not convicted, but they were presumed guilty, demonised and subjected to a legal ordeal that dragged on for about a year until the obviously false charges were dropped. The prosecutor who charged them was eventually disbarred. You can find a timeline of the controversy here.

We can’t know the long-term consequences of this nightmare for its three male victims (we can hope they were minimal). But the Duke debacle helped usher in the disastrous #MeToo era, when men accused of sexual misconduct were reflexively presumed guilty and labelled as rapists while their (mostly) female accusers were reflexively honoured as victims.

US colleges and universities began issuing absurdly vague, overly broad definitions of sexual misconduct. Due-process protections for accused students were virtually eliminated from campus hearings, partly pursuant to guidelines issued by the Obama administration under Title IX of federal civil-rights law. In 2010, Duke University issued new rules against sexual misconduct that included prohibitions on indirect, attempted touching – whatever that is.

Federal rules governing campus proceedings were rationalised during the first Trump presidency, with addition of some due-process requirements. The Biden administration responded with a superseding set of more accuser-friendly Title IX rules. They will surely be replaced again during the second Trump presidency.

Trump’s re-election made clear that the #MeToo era is over, and while its onset was a disaster for many men, its demise may prove disastrous for many women. Progressives refused to consider the possibility that some accusations of sexual assault are false and so justified the elimination of due-process requirements for accused men. Trump, his sycophants and supporters, are not just more likely to assume that all accusations are false. They’re also apt to dismiss them as irrelevant. Indeed, while Trump endured some bad publicity back in 2016 for boasting that he grabbed women ‘by the pussy’, he won the presidency anyway and incurred no political damage when he was found liable for sexual abuse after a 2023 jury trial.

Now comes secretary-of-defence nominee Pete Hegseth, accused of rape and harassment, as well as alcohol abuse and financial mismanagement. In a 2018 email, his own mother condemned him as ‘an abuser of women’ who ‘belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego’. ‘Get some help and take an honest look at yourself’, she wrote. Not surprisingly, she now takes it back.

Hegseth, of course, denies all these accusations, while also proclaiming himself ‘a different man than I was years ago, and that’s a redemption story that I think a lot of Americans appreciate’. In other words, I didn’t do it, but if I did I wouldn’t do it again today.

But the rape accusations dating back to 2017 have not gone away, partly because his alleged victim went to the police. They investigated and issued a report in 2018, which has recently been publicly released. The local district attorney declined to prosecute, citing an absence of proof beyond a reasonable doubt – which is not the same as an absence of evidence or proof. Hegseth admitted having sex with his accuser, claiming it was consensual. He procured a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) and settled with her financially when she threatened a civil suit.

Hegseth’s attorney now claims that the alleged victim was ‘the aggressor’, which might make you wonder why she reported being assaulted to the police. And he says she is no longer bound by the NDA, making her free to identify herself and speak publicly about the alleged attack, or testify before Congress. For the accuser, this sets up a Catch 22: Hegseth’s supporters will proclaim that her failure to speak up publicly is evidence that the allegations are false. But if she does speak up she’ll be subject to serious harassment, even death threats, and will likely have to go into hiding. She’ll also be sued by Hegseth for defamation, according to his attorney.

I’d advise her to remain silent and anonymous, even if her allegations are true, even if she would be extremely credible and persuasive in presenting them. They wouldn’t matter. Some senators, I suspect, will vote to confirm Hegseth while believing many or most of the allegations against him, including claims of alcoholism and financial mismanagement.

Do allegations of rape and sexual harassment matter? Perhaps not to voters who re-elected Donald Trump after he was found liable for sexual abuse. But the military, which Hegseth would oversee, has struggled with incidents of sexual assault and the equal treatment of women. Until recently, Hegseth opposed assigning women to combat roles and also condemned admitting gay and transgender people to the military as ‘Marxist’. (If there are valid objections to transgender troops, they have nothing to do with Marxism.) Naturally, Hegseth now claims to have changed his mind about gays in the military and women in combat, but once appointed he’ll obviously be free to change it back.

Looking back, women may see what lies ahead – a cultural environment in which sexual assault is trivialised and women are better off keeping quiet about it. We see a resurgence of chivalry, with all the inequalities, restrictions, presumptions of frailty and lack of agency that chivalry entails. We know what Trump meant when he promised to ‘protect the women of our country’ whether ‘the women like it or not’.

Wendy Kaminer is an author, a lawyer and a former national board member of the American Civil Liberties Union.