Book Review: The Price of Silence

The Price of Silence:The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of Our Great Universities

by William C. Cohan

Scribner, 2014 

After the usual prologue of thank-you notes and other acknowledgments, William Cohan's big new nonfiction work The Price of Silence gets right down to the business of recounting in abundant detail the scandal that engulfed Duke University in 2006:

Although no one knew it yet, Duke's perception of itself, as well as how the university was perceived by the rest of the world, began to change sometime around midnight on Monday, March 14, 2006, after a night of shenanigans and heavy drinking by forty-one of the forty-seven members of the tight-knit varsity lacrosse team - all but one of whom were white. The party took place in a nondescript rental house at 610 North Buchanan Boulevard, off Duke's East Campus, where three of the lacrosse players lived. It was spring break, and the rest of the Duke campus was quiet. Two days before, the Duke lacrosse team, then ranked third in the country, had defeated twentieth-ranked Loyola 9-7 in San Diego, improving its record to 5-1. After the Loyola win, coach Mike Pressler said, "Now we look ahead to one of the most difficult weeks in Duke lacrosse history," a reference to the team's upcoming March 18 match against rival University of North Carolina, followed by games against Cornell and Georgetown in quick succession. Little did Pressler know that for whatever reason - boredom, feeling sorry for themselves for having to be in town when everyone else was on spring break, or simply because they could - most of the guys on his lacrosse team would decide to have their own version of Girls Gone Wild on North Buchanan Boulevard in Durham, North Carolina.

Even if you know nothing about the Duke case, you'll be almost immediately hooked by Cohan's driving, supremely confident prose. He's an experienced freelance reporter, a bestselling author and contributing editor for Vanity Fair, a conributor to The Atlantic and The New York Times — an old hand, in other words, at shaping great masses of material into coherent narratives and then making those narratives gripping.

He does that from the first page of The Price of Silence to the last, telling the story of those bored lacrosse athletes who called a pair of strippers to their drunken party, behaved boorishly toward them, and then had some of their teammates subsequently accused by one of the strippers, Crystal Mangum, of gang-rape. The trial that followed, in which a district attorney named Mike Nifong prosecuted three Duke players in an elaborate case involving a police rape kit and DNA evidence, made national and international headlines, and those news stories only became more energetic when in 2007 the North Carolina Attorney General dismissed the case and Duke agreed to pay the accused players some very large sums of money in reparation. Crystal Mangum's story of what happened that night fell apart in virtually all of its details (she was initially so intoxicated she got her own name wrong); the accused players had lock-solid alibis that exonerated them; Nifong was disbarred as a result of his behavior during the trial. The term "rush to judgment" was bandied about, and the sad faces of the three accused lacrosse players became icons of a huge miscarriage of justice.

Mike Nifong is one of Cohan's most fervent sources for The Price of Silence, and although Nifong is on record apologizing to the accused players and the people of North Carolina, he's got predictable reservations even now, nearly a decade later:

"Here's what I believe. I believe that something occurred to Crystal Mangum that night that triggered a post-traumatic stress reaction. That's what I believe. Now, just what the nature of that was - whether it was a physical assault or whether something that occurred here - and we don't know everything that occurred and we'll never known that. It's not something that's knowable at this time. But, I believe that she reacted the way she did that night because she was under the influence of a post-traumatic stress reaction."

A disgraced attorney clinging to some shred of justification for his sabotaging of his own career is a pathetic but entirely understandable thing. What's far, far more puzzling in The Price of Silence is the fact that Cohan persistently agrees with Nifong, often in virtually the same language:

Despite the swirl of events and the various conflicting stories about what had happened in the bathroom at 610 North Buchanan, it certainly seemed that something untoward had happened to Crystal Mangum in the early morning hours of March 14 at the hands of a bunch of white Duke lacrosse player. What precisely had happened and who did what to whom would become - in the next year - the subject of intense scrutiny and analysis, both in the justice system and the court of public opinion.Had Mangum portrayed the events accurately, or was her story total fiction?

This is the tough little mystery at the heart of Cohan's book, this bizarre fact that he appears to consider case still live somehow, when in reality the answer to his parting question is an unqualified yes: Crystal Mangum's story was total fiction. She was nearly incoherently intoxicated by the time she showed up at North Buchanan Boulevard; she was virtually never out of the sight of the other stripper the players hired; that other stripper was contemptuously incredulous about Mangum's story; the rape kit showed no signs of assault; the DNA exonerated the accused; the accused had eye-witnessed alibis; Nifong fudged evidence disclosure in order to keep his case afloat ... the body-blows just keep coming (Cohan's older readers will be vividly reminded of the Tawana Brawley case from 1987).

Despite the conspiracy-theory overtones of Cohan's book title, there's no shadowy power-elite pulling strings to make sure "their boys" go free. Rather, the players were exonerated because no crime took place. Cohan's book is a riveting, detailed day-by-day account of what happened in the case, but he's grossly irresponsible to echo Mike Nifong's insistence that "something happened" when it's certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that nothing did. If you're going to enjoy his book (and his book is otherwise enormously enjoyable), you're going to have to overlook that one very awkward aspect of it all.