That Night at Duke

Strip shows weren't too unusual at Duke. Frats and other teams, male and female, were known to hire dancers to strut and carry on while students drank beer and hooted. Normally, some members of the lacrosse team patronized a strip joint called Teasers Men's Club, but because others were underage or had lost their fake IDs, Evans and his co-captains decided to hold the party at the slightly run-down house that the three young men rented just off campus.

The night didn't go well from the start. After an afternoon and evening of desultory drinking games such as Beer Pong, about 30 players were sprawled on the floor or sitting on a ring of couches arranged around the stage—a ratty, tan carpet. Evans explained to his teammates that he and the other captains had requested white dancers, but that a black woman and a Hispanic woman had shown up. No one seemed to care, according to the statement given to police by Zash. One of the strippers appeared to be intoxicated and had trouble standing up, much less dancing. Halfheartedly, she began kissing the other dancer, Kim Roberts.

Later, when the night was played up as a violent bacchanal, a "Boys Gone Wild" situation, Seligmann would reflect that anyone watching the real thing would have been "bored to tears." At the time, he says, "we didn't know how to react. It was disgusting. I was very uncomfortable and I wasn't the only one." Indeed, in a photo taken by one of the players and obtained by NEWSWEEK, Seligmann appears to be recoiling as he watches the dancers. Other players, dressed in khakis and polo shirts, plastic cups in hand, seem indifferent, chatting with each other or looking around as the two women fumbled and groped.

The performance lasted all of five minutes. One of the players crudely inquired if the dancers had any sex toys. Roberts, the dancer Evans identified as "Hispanic" (she is actually part African-American, part Asian), asked if the player's penis was too small, according to all three captains' police statements. The player then brandished a broomstick and said, "Use this"—or words to that effect. ("My inclination is that there was not any reference to the players' genitalia during their act," says Mark Simeon, Roberts's lawyer. "She didn't seem offended at all about the question of using sex toys. What upset her was the brandishing of a broomstick.")

The exchange broke up the performance. Roberts and the other dancer fled to the bathroom. Some of the players angrily protested that they had been hustled or shortchanged and demanded their money back—$800, paid in advance, for a two-hour show. A few suggested calling the police.

By this time, at about 12:15 a.m., Seligmann had already left the party. At 12:14, his cell-phone records show, he called a cab. After the taxi dropped him off at an ATM for cash, he bought some takeout burgers and returned to his dorm. Finnerty, too, was out the door, off with some other players to get tacos at a Mexican joint a mile away. His cell-phone records show him beginning to make calls at 12:22, just about the time he was later alleged to have been raping the other dancer, the one who filed the charges.