No news in this news
I can understand the reluctance of mainstream news outlets to touch the news that the woman who made false rape accusations against three Duke lacrosse players — “three” being the number she settled on only after giving authorities wildly varying accounts of an event that never happened — has now graduated from college. It’s a quicksand story, in the sense that to even mention this news is to become mired in the lacrosse mess once again.
The only clear shot at it would be to treat it as a feel-good story — the saga of a woman who has confronted her culpability in a near-miscarriage of justice of epic proportions and subsequently rehabilitated her life. But there’s no evidence she’s done so. The alternative is to speculate as to what kind of institution of higher education could issue a degree to someone as mentally and emotionally unstable as the accuser has been shown to be. But there lies quicksand even deeper and more treacherous.
As best I can determine, the only mention of the matter published in the News & Observer were these two sentences, buried far down in a story about the graduation ceremonies at N.C. Central University:
Crystal Gail Mangum, the woman at the root of the Duke lacrosse case and the phony gang-rape allegations dismissed by the state attorney general, was among the graduates Saturday. Mangum, in a cap and gown, flashed a smile to a friend after posing for an official graduation photo with her degree.
WRAL-TV took a different tack, focusing on the controversy that accompanied the publication of a column in the Duke Chronicle, in which the writer — after pointing out that Mangum had violated NCCU’s conduct codes — announced that she “will never again take an NCCU degree seriously.”
Beyond those two things, virtually nothing.
But maybe that’s as it should be. If you have a soul, your desire to see Mangum endure retribution and scorn eventually gives way to the hope that the poor woman will someday find a path through the thicket of deceit she created, and come to grips with the trauma she wrought. If Mangum has a soul, she will see that the only way it will ever have peace is if she starts on that path now.
In both cases, those are journeys best made privately, not publicly.