Yet Moron Duke Lacrosse Rape StoryLa Shawn Barber has a
terrific post up on the subject, including a link to
this article which indicates that my take is probably right:
Attorney Bill Thomas, who declined to identify the player he represents, said photos taken by a student at the party the night in question prove the rape never happened. They show the woman, an exotic dancer hired to dance at the party, had extensive cuts and bruises on her body when she arrived to the house.
Other photos show the woman lying on the ground as if she were asleep or intoxicated; another photo shows the alleged victim smiling and trying to get inside the house, Thomas said. All of the photos are time-stamped before the rape reportedly occurred.
"All of these statements you've heard ... about this brutal assault, rape, kidnapping and robbery which occurred, I believe that the public will soon be able to learn the truth, and that these allegations are totally false and without merit," Thomas said.Also check out this (unintentionally)
hilarious article on lacrosse.
More than any other sport, lacrosse represents the marriage of athletic aggression and upper-class entitlement. While a squash player might consider himself upper-crust, he can't prove his superiority by checking you onto your ass the way a lacrosse defenseman can. And while lacrosse may share with football a love for contact, it is far more socioeconomically insulated than the grid game (except in odd places like Maryland, where it's managed to cross class lines). Some aficionados take pride in the fact that their sport was invented by Native Americans, but I don't imagine many members of the Onondaga Nation end up playing lax at Colgate.
Still, how could college lacrosse players be any more misogynous than your typical football-team steakhead? Perhaps it's because, unlike their football brethren, an unusually large proportion of college lacrosse players spend their high school years in sheltered, all-boys academies before heading off to liberal co-ed colleges. Most guys from single-sex schools are able to adjust. Others join the lacrosse team. The worst of this lot become creatures that are, in the words of a friend of mine, "half William Kennedy Smith, half Lawrence Phillips." In the warm enclave of the locker room, safe from the budding feminists and comp-lit majors, their identity becomes more cemented. How else to explain the report in a Duke school paper that, roughly two weeks after the alleged rape, members of the team were spotted drinking in a Durham bar, chanting, "Duke lacrosse!"
