A commissioned report on Duke University’s response to allegations that members of the Duke lacrosse team had gang-raped a North Carolina State University student was released Monday (news story here, full report in pdf format here). Although the report’s focus is on Duke’s initial response (which was judged too slow, and too dependent on second- and third-hand sources), this paragraph from the report is the reason it’s in the news:
After the victim of the alleged assaults was taken to the Emergency Room of the Duke Hospital in the early morning hours of March 14, having earlier told Durham police that she was raped and sexually assaulted by approximately 20 white members of a Duke team (a charge later modified to allege an attack by three individuals in a bathroom), the official report of the Duke Police Department was submitted and reviewed by the Duke Police Director, Robert Dean, at 7:30 a.m. on March 14.
Predictably, a legion of right–wing bloggers have jumped on this as proof that Mary Doe, the (alleged) rape victim, is lying.
And it’s not just the bloggers. Dan Abrams, on MSNBC’s “Abrams Report” on May 9th, described this story as follows:
A new independent report said the accuser in the Duke rape investigation initially said it was 20 players who raped her, then changed her story to three. Is it time for the D.A. to drop the charges?
I believe Mary Doe was raped at that party, as she claims – but I’m open to the possibility I’m mistaken. Nonetheless, this story – as damning as it sounds when you hear the headline version – doesn’t convince me, because it disintegrates into nothing on closer examination.
The claim that Mary Doe ever said she was raped by 20 men is substantiated by only one source – this police report (pdf link), written by officer Christopher Day. Day wrote:
The female was picked up at the Kroger on Hillborough Rd., and she was claiming that she was raped by approximately 20 white males at 610 N. Buchanan Street. […]
The victim changed her story several times, and eventually Durham Police stated that charges would not exceed misdemeanor simple ass[ault] against the occupants of 610 N. Buchanan.
That may seem pretty damning. But on closer reading of the report, one thing stands out: Officer Day never heard Mary Doe say she’d been raped by 20 men, or change her story. In fact, he never met Mary Doe; the report makes it clear that Officer Day went to 610 North Buchanan when this report came in, and spent some time running down license plates to see who owned the cars parked on Buchanan. So this report is secondhand information at best, and perhaps third-hand or forth-hand.
To make matters worse, no police officer who directly heard Mary Doe say “I was raped by 20 men” is identified, or (so far) has come forward. And the Durham government doesn’t seem to be supporting Day’s version of events:
Durham City Manager Patrick Baker told Eyewitness News earlier Tuesday that he had never heard that she claimed 20 men had raped her. […]
Baker is standing behind the city’s police officers, saying the Duke officer who wrote the report got secondhand information.
“He did not have a conversation with our officer,” Baker said in a telephone interview Tuesday night. “He did not have a conversation with the victim. He prepared his report based on conversations he overheard and the context of that conversation.”
So what has been reported as “the victim’s claim” is actually one campus cop’s interpretation of an overheard conversation between two other cops discussing their interpretation of Mary Doe’s statements in the earliest hours of the investigation. I don’t find that persuasive – and neither should a jury.
By the way, what shape was Mary Doe in to be giving testimony, in the first hours of the investigation? The same Duke University report quotes a different police officer – who, unlike Officer Day, spoke to Mary Doe in person:
One female member of the Duke Police Department, who was on the scene at the Emergency Department of the hospital and who attempted to calm down and reassure the young woman, saw that she was “crying uncontrollably and visibly shaken… shaking, crying, and upset.”
If any Durham police officer claims to have personally heard Doe say 20 men raped her – and so far, no officer has publicly made that claim – I still wouldn’t think much of the claim, especially if the police officer hadn’t been trained in interviewing traumatized victims. If a cop asks a victim “how many people were there,” and she answers “twenty,” the cop could easily interpret that as meaning “20 men raped me” – especially if the cop wasn’t taking the allegations seriously (because she’s a stripper, black, poor, seems dazed, etc). But Doe could have thought the cop was asking how many men were at the party. (InMyHumbleOpinion made a similar point in TalkLeft comments). Experts agree:
Scott Berkowitz, president of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, a victim-rights group, said the first police officers to speak with a rape victim often don’t have the training and experience needed to accurately judge the merits of a complaint. […] “It’s important to note that once the experienced folks got there and started investigating this, they found her story credible and concluded that a violent crime took place,” he said.
The Duke report did say a female campus police officer was at they hospital where police took the accuser after the party, and she descried her as “crying uncontrollably and visibly shaken … shaking, crying and upset.”
Such behavior, Berkowitz said, isn’t uncommon.
“Dealing with witnesses immediately after any trauma is terribly complicated,” he said. “They’re emotional. They’re not focused on the narrative. They’re focused on the sheer terror that they just went through, so folks who have experience at it get the knack for how to deal with them and how to ask questions and how to back off and give her a little time.”
On Abrams’ MSNBC show, Duke report co-author William Bowen carefully backed away from the certain-sounding language of his report:
I myself would not put a lot of emphasis on the difference between 20 and three. This was a large gathering of people. The woman claimed that she was badly treated, very badly treated, and then the specifics of the three people in the bathroom came out later.
Interviewed on the same show, former District Attorney Norm Early raised similar questions:
Right now we have a situation where we`re talking about an amorphous entity, the Duke Police Department, the Durham Police Department. Who said it? Under what circumstances did they allegedly hear this?
Were there others around who could have heard the same thing? Was this one of the individuals who was conveying to the victim the entire time that this was no big deal. It was not going anywhere by gesture or by mannerisms or just by their demeanor. [… It] could be very much like… we`re talking about her relating the story and saying there were 20 people involved, where there are a whole bunch of people involved and then she eventually gets to the point where she says three of them in a bathroom. That is entirely possible. And until you are able to narrow down who heard it and what they heard and under what circumstances they heard it, you are not going to be able to ascertain whether she`s talking about being raped by 20 people or raped only by the three.
The “let’s not leap to judgement, and by the way she’s obviously lying” crowd thinks this new story vindicates their view. But my guess is that – lacking any police officer who claims to have directly heard Mary Doe say “I was raped by twenty men” – this story will go nowhere. And even if an officer does come forward, the possibility that Doe, due to shock and trauma, simply wasn’t speaking in a clear or organized fashion can’t reasonably be dismissed.
* * *
Looking at this latest story from a broader perspective, this is an example of what I think of as “The Platonic Rape Victim Fallacy” – the idea that there is a single, correct fashion in which all True Rape Victims behave. If a rape victim acts in any other way – for example, in in the earliest hours after the rape she fails to produce a simple, coherent, well-organized narrative when talking to police – then according to the Plationic Rape Victim Fallacy, she wasn’t raped at all. I’ll post more later on the Platonic Rape Victim Fallacy, which comes up frequently in discussions of the Duke rape case, and in most other publicly-discussed rape cases.
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ah, even you managed to do it too…
Why aren’t the captions about this story : Durham Police may have misled Duke officials.
That’s the gist of the story. Why is even the best of intentions (Amp’s) leading with the possibility that the woman lied?
Or maybe it’s all for the titilation… Tell me that’s not what you were going for Amp? To smear this woman’s image just the teensiest bit to get people to read your thoughts? Tell me why, after writing all that you did, you opened with the hook that this woman might be lying. We’re intelligent and curious people Amp. You don’t have to cast aspersions, not matter how eye catching, to get our attention.
Gee, thanks for the benefit of the doubt.
The title is badly thought out. My thought was that I wanted to put the phrases “duke rape” and “20 men” into the same blog title, so that people searching for info on this story will be able to find this blog entry. I also thought that the title, taken as a whole, implied that Mary Doe didn’t lie. Obviously, that wasn’t clear enough, considering how badly you misread it.
Keep in mind that for me, a lot of the purpose of “Alas” is to be a resource for feminists googling for evidence and arguments about these issues. The idea isn’t to get your attention, Q Grrl, but to get Google’s attention.
On the other hand, although I think you badly misread me (and in an unkind way), you have a legitimate point about the title of this post. I’ll change the title to something that can’t be misread.
[Edited by Amp an hour later to remove excess snark. Sorry about that, Q Grrl.]
right on, amp. the platonic rape victim fallacy is an excellent concept to describe the way that the burden of proof is often placed in the lap of people who have been deeply traumatized and who are expected behave like perfect angels. if the survivor is a sex worker, or has substance issues, or is poor, or is…you know…HUMAN, they are assumed to be lying.
most sexual assaults/rapes occur between people who know each other, and often the perpetrator has far more social status than the survivor.
i’ve been trying to avoid most media representations of this case, and most blog postings about it because the comments sections reveal some really jacked individuals saying some deeply hurtful and offensive things. but i appreciated your thoughts on the report.
I posted my reaction to the May 4 report on my blog but since then I’ve been surprised at how quickly those who buy into the defense spin are making the same mistake that the Duke leadership made and taking unsubstantiated opinions as fact.
Personally I would have liked:
Duke Police Director makes lame attempt to cover his butt: Administration tipped off team of police investigation.
or:
Ex Princeton University President proves unable to write a coherent sentence: High School English teacher commits suicide.
No jury will ever see this report offered as evidence; that was not the motivation for preparing it.
The motivation was to investigate how Duke’s staff handled the information as it became available. Were the correct people in the chain timely notified, what information were they provided, and what actions did they then undertake?
What this document does for the defense is point their investigators in a particular direction and give them a focus for their interrogations (I mean, cross-examination) of Durham and Duke Police Officers.
Reconstructing that overheard conversation will not be a difficult task. Cops’ movements are logged meticulously, so identifying the participants is as simple as opening a calendar.
Realize too, these are not merely witnesses, these are law enforcement officers. Their reports are even more sacrosanct than an accuser’s allegation. If people start doubting the credibility of the Durham or Duke police in any way, that weakens the prosecution’s case and strengthens the defense.
One correction to the first paragraph – it is a North Carolina Central University student.
[Thanks! Correction made! –Amp]
Well done, Amp. I like “Nonesense” in the head.
You have every right to snark Amp.
I’m really upset about how this story has been framed — and not just by you. For me, it’s one of those instances where the subtlety and pervasiveness of misogyny is so apparent to women, particularly rape victims, but is not apparent to most guys. I don’t know how to explain it well — but I know it’s there, my visceral reaction lets me know it’s there.
From the sound of it, I wouldn’t be surprised of the officer in question would back down about the report in question when asked about it.
Amp, your post was truncated about halfway through for some reason.
[Yeesh! Fixed now. Thanks for letting me know. –Amp]
Is this report germane to the rape prosecution? Presuming it’s true (and I don’t), would the fact that such a claim was made by the victim and then later modified by her be germane to the trial?
If it is, the bottom line is that this claim, second-hand though it is, is in an official police report. So the defense is going to check it out.
In looking at the report, PO Masurek seems to have been at the ER, talked to the victim, and called LT Best, who then got the ball rolling with the Durham police. PO Masurek would seem to be the source of the report of this claim.
Since a second-hand report of this claim did find it’s way into a police report, it seems PO Day should be asked who said this. If PO Day doesn’t come up with a name, then the report is discredited. If PO Day does come up with a name, whoever it would be (PO Masurek?) should be interviewed to see if he or she heard this from the victim directly, or if it was from someone else in the ER, and so on down the line. If it’s hearsay, it should be debunked.
Where’s PO Masurek’s report?
I am constantly amazed by just how much sentiment, covert *and* overt, I have seen that basically says that because the woman is/was in the sex industry, she must be lying like a rug. I shouldn’t be, I suppose. It really does speak volumes about just how far we’ve really come wrt attitudes about sexuality.
this is of course in addition to the she’s-black-so-she’s-lying, she’s-a-woman-so-she’s-lying, she’s-poor-so-she’s-lying…
See, here’s a really, really good example of the only appropriate title for this story from:
http://www.wral.com/news/9189103/detail.html
You can get it all in there without casting aspersions — even if those aspersions “help” others find the story later.
First DNA link possible in lacrosse case
By John Stevenson : The Herald-Sun
May 11, 2006 : 12:20 am ET
DURHAM — Tissue found under the fingernail of an exotic dancer who claimed she was raped at a Duke University lacrosse party may match a player who was there, several well-placed sources said Wednesday.
Analyzing the tissue, scientists concluded it came from the same genetic pool and was “consistent” with the bodily makeup of one of 46 lacrosse players who gave DNA samples for testing, the sources said.
At the same time, scientists ruled out a possible match with any of the other 45 students, according to the sources.
If accurate, the fingernail tissue match would offer the first DNA evidence potentially linking the dancer and an alleged attacker.
But because a complete DNA pattern was not obtained from the tissue, it was not possible to match it with the nearly 100 percent certainty that DNA results usually offer, the sources added.
The dancer told police she clawed at three attackers as they raped and sodomized her for 30 minutes during the March 13-14 lacrosse house party at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd.
Police later recovered several stick-on acrylic fingernails from a trashcan, and the tissue in question was found under one of those nails, the sources said.
District Attorney Mike Nifong was said to be away from his office all day Wednesday and could not be reached for comment.
The State Bureau of Investigation did an initial round of DNA testing in the lacrosse case. But according to defense attorneys, the SBI found no DNA from the 46 lacrosse players in or on the dancer’s body, on her clothing and belongings or under her fingernails.
But Nifong decided to hire a private laboratory to do additional testing. He has said he expects a final report from that lab by Monday.
A DNA expert said Wednesday that one way a DNA report sometimes says DNA is “consistent” with a particular person is when there’s a partial DNA profile of fewer than all 13 genetic markers commonly used in testing kits.
In that case, the number of markers available determines the reliability of the match, said Theodore D. Kessis, owner of Applied DNA Resources in Columbus, Ohio.
“It really depends then upon how partial is that profile,” he said in a telephone interview. “A lot of people are of the opinion, including myself, that if it’s supposed to test for 13, it should get 13, and something less than 13 is starting to hinge on the reliability of the result.
“When you get down into the two or three partial match, you get numbers that might be 1 in 6, it might be 1 in 10, so what happens then is the question of what’s the probative value of the report. … People play the lottery on worse odds.”
So far, two lacrosse players have been indicted on rape charges: Duke sophomores Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty.
The alleged victim reportedly picked those two out of a photo lineup and identified them with what she claimed was 100 percent certainty.
Nifong said earlier he was pursuing the possibility of another indictment, although reports indicated the dancer was able to identify a third person with only 90 percent certainty. WRAL-TV, citing a transcript of the photo identification session the dancer had with police, reported Wednesday that she indicated a fourth player also may have been involved in assaulting her.
Tissue found under the dancer’s fingernails was consistent with the third man’s DNA pattern, sources told The Herald-Sun on Wednesday.
In addition, the sources said a male pubic hair had been linked to the case. But because the hair lacked a root, no identifiable DNA was obtained from it, they said. The only thing that could be determined was that the hair came from a white man, the sources said.
They did not pinpoint where the hair was found. But when police investigate rape cases, they normally comb through the alleged victim’s pubic hair to determine whether male hairs are intermingled.
On DNA from hair, Kessis agreed that a common method for extracting and analyzing DNA, called nuclear DNA, usually requires tissue from a hair root. Another method, however, called mitochondrial DNA, can obtain DNA from hair shafts through DNA sequencing. That method yields results that are “not quite as probative,” with matching probabilities typically between 1 in 200 and 1 in 4,000 to 5,000.
In another development Wednesday, defense attorney Bill Cotter obtained a monthlong postponement of Finnerty’s preliminary appearance in Durham County Superior Court. The appearance had been scheduled for May 18. But Judge Ron Stephens granted a delay until the week of June 19.
Cotter said he needed the delay because he had not yet received enough “discovery material” from the District Attorney’s Office.
Although the lawyer declined to be specific, such material normally includes things like police notes, medical reports and statements made to officers by victims and suspects.
So far, Seligmann has not requested a postponement of his May 18 preliminary court appearance.
It’s a war between the liberals and the conservatives. It is a shame that liberals are on the side of this woman, and that conservatives are not. Both sides should be advocating for this woman. There must have been proof that she had been raped. Semen or bruises, etc. I remember reading about a fingernail, etc. The truth will come out loud and clear, but I do not think that the WASP conservatives will want to hear or see it. Shoot, they can’t even handle it now. Being quiet and just letting this woman suffer, and using the good ol’ “blame the victim” tactic always seems to be viable with black women.
The State Bureau of Investigation did an initial round of DNA testing in the lacrosse case. But according to defense attorneys, the SBI found no DNA from the 46 lacrosse players in or on the dancer’s body, on her clothing and belongings or under her fingernails. But Nifong decided to hire a private laboratory to do additional testing. He has said he expects a final report from that lab by Monday.
The State lab found nothing, but a private lab did? If I’m a taxpayer in the State of Georgia, I’m wondering what I’m paying for.
I wonder what inspired AG Nifong to hire a private lab after the State lab came up blank? What does he know about the State lab?
What gets me is that if she were a man, she’d be a hero. She’s a plucky poor single mother, doing whatever it takes to support her kids…..if she were a single father, she’d be canonized. Imagine a plucky single dad who got attacked by rich white boys while working a hard and dangerous job to support his kid? That incident in her past would just an example of high-spirited hijnks. If our single dad had been raped as a fourteen-year-old, his stance now would be a sign of bravery. Just because she’s a woman, it’s seen as a sign of mendacity. Women lie: all women lie. They are guilty till proven innocent, and even then, well, they still don’t deserve to ruin a man’s life. She asked for it. Men, of course, never ask for it.
If she were a guy, she’d be a hero in this scenario.
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