"IT'S NOT ABOUT THE TRUTH ANYMORE"

Okay, an admission of regret. I could just erase some of what I wrote in the previous blog, but that would be dishonest.

The more I read about the Duke rape case, the more I actually do sympathize with the players involved. They were stupid for hiring strippers whom they did not know to perform at their party (my rule: Always hire strippers you've previously dated; just to be safe). But as you read the Wikipedia entry on the case--and I'm not claiming that it is the 100% truth--you do get the sense of an accuser with almost zero credibility.

If the accounts are accurate, she had already had sex with three different people that day (at Notre Dame, where I went to school, we'd call that a prolific decade). Anyway, putting yourself in Duke president Richard Brodhead or athletic director Joe Avela, it's difficult to say that you'd act differently, no? Especially in the light of fellow team member Ryan McFadyen's profane email...even if he was just making a sophomoric attempt at irony.

Former Duke coach Mike Pressler , who resigned in the wake of the scandal, has recently published a book entitled, "It's Not About The Truth". The title emanates from a conversation Pressler (now the head coach at Bryant University in Rhode Island) had with Avela shortly before resigning in which he begged his boss, "Can't we just wait until the truth comes out?"

Avela's reply became the book's title.

The case has become a litmus test for one's politics and racial perspectives, and that's how come the Duke lacrosse story transcends sports. Anybody who spent four years at college can completely appreciate and understand how the Duke players got themselves into this situation: off-campus party, a few games of beer pong, somebody decides to pull a Joel Goodson, and then the next thing you know you're dealing with a legal-and-media barrage that makes Guido the Killer Pimp look like a toy poodle. And then someone writes an off-color email that gets released into the wrong hands (if you learn anything in life in the internet age, it's that anything you write to anyone can become the province of the last person you'd want to have read it...which is why I prefer to blog...I already know everyone can see it).

In short, I can imagine this happening to me and my friends from college and while I don't think any of us would have used the "N-word" or told the stripper what to do with a broomstick, I also know that a nineteen year-old's judgment can be impaired by a few games of beer pong.

Then there's the accuser. Is she getting a free pass in all of this? How you reply to that question is why this is such a powderkeg? Yes, the accused were a privileged group. Upper middle-class Caucasian males who would graduate from a prestigious university and probably never know the hopelessness, financially and in other ways, that the accuser lives with every day. But is that in itself a crime? And did any disrespect they show her merit her actions against them? If this case is a referendum as to how you live your life, who comes off worse?

Anyway, these are the things you wonder about as you wait for a lacrosse game to begin.