Newspaper editors are forever reminding their staffs that many libel suits are filed primarily because an unhappy party, after calling the paper to complain about his or her treatment in print, was brushed off or ignored. People rarely want to become plaintiffs in long, expensive legal battles. They just want somebody to listen while they yell.

I thought about that bit of newsroom wisdom when I read that 38 Duke lacrosse players, none of whom were charged in the now-infamous prosecution/persecution, have sued the university for the emotional distress they allegedly suffered when Duke stood aside and let Mike Nifong make a mockery of the justice system. My only complaint is that the lawsuit isn’t focused on the dozens of individual Duke faculty members who — after an emotionally unbalanced stripper made a false claim of rape — immediately assumed the allegations were true, and branded the lacrosse players as violent, drunken thugs.

One professor even wrote the Duke administration a long letter demanding that innocent people be made safe from such vile creatures: “How soon will confidence be restored to our university as a place where minds, souls, and bodies can feel safe from agents, perpetrators, and abettors of white privilege, irresponsibility, debauchery and violence?” the professor asked. (That astonishing letter, written even before the investigation was fully underway, and the Duke provost’s tsk-tsk reply, can be found here.)

Later, when Duke settled the lawsuit filed against it by the three players who’d been charged in the false crime, it shielded those faculty members from any separate legal actions that the players might have been considering.

Now a separate group of players, still smarting from the stigma they suffered on campus simply for being lacrosse team members, come looking for their pound of flesh. They didn’t name Nifong in their lawsuit because his recent bankruptcy filing gives him a certain protection against such civil actions. Nor did they name the stripper/accuser because … well, because she’s a head case. That left the Duke administration, which has only wagged its finger in disapproval at the faculty members who behaved so outrageously in the beginning.

Even though those offending faculty members have suffered virtually no consequence to their behavior, they’ve cloaked themselves in victimhood. Their response to complaints about their actions has been to decry what they see as “attempts at intimidation directed against faculty who comment on larger social and political issues …” In short, they feel no responsibility for helping to whip up the mob against the wrongfully accused players. In fact, one of those faculty members (with no appreciation of the irony of her stance) tolerates no expressions of disgust with her conduct — she reports antagonistic phone messages to the campus police.

“I’m not going to be intimidated into modulating speech,” she says.

No wonder the players have sued. I’d do the same thing if I picked up the phone to complain about my portrayal in the paper, and found that the reporter claimed to be the victim — and that I was the abuser.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 1:01 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.