"Believe women" was always an idiotic principle. The only principle we should ever follow is Believe Evidence. Back in 2006, DNA exonerated these three men, but the DA forged ahead anyway. Then the media credulously jumped on the bandwagon because the false story fit their male-bashing race-baiting narrative. Now the woman who falsely accused these three innocent men has confessed that she made the entire thing up (She is now in prison for murder of her boyfriend in 2016).

This article by Ted Balaker is titled: “I testified falsely”Woman who accused three Duke lacrosse players of rape admits she lied. Excerpt from this article: "The court threw out the charges, DA Mike Nifong was disbarred, and the students forced Duke into a settlement for defamation."

Ten years ago, I produced a documentary short for FIRE that features K.C. Johnson, co-author of the book Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case. Here’s how Johnson summarized the episode:

This was a case that served different agendas of differing groups. For [the DA] Mike Nifong, he wanted guilt because it would help his cause in the primary. For the Duke faculty members, portraying their own students as racist advanced an on-campus agenda of making more hires dealing with race, class, and gender, and requiring more courses in race, class, and gender.

And for The New York Times, this was a case that fit very much the basic assumptions of a typical Times journalist that white, male athletes were out of control, with both sexual and racial connotations, and that advancing this would sort of advance a broader ideological agenda of The Times. And so it was almost a perfect storm of a case in which a variety of different groups could exploit the case for their own purposes

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