That Night at Duke

The players decided to lie low—not to wear lacrosse regalia or announce that they were members of the team. One night about a week after the incident, Finnerty and another player noticed a Take Back the Night rally as they walked to the library. Curious, they went over to hear the speakers decry sexual assault on campus. Activists were handing out WANTED posters with pictures of the team. A student came up and began talking to Finnerty's teammate. Before the student walked off, he pulled out a tape recorder and made a show of hitting the STOP button, to make clear he had been recording the conversation. "You could see that something big was going on," recalled Finnerty, who wondered if he'd see the conversation in print.

Just how big was apparent three weeks later, when Finnerty sat beside his father in court, waiting to be arraigned for rape. As father and son tried to stare straight ahead, newspeople thrust cameras in their faces and slipped them cards with phone numbers. A couple of preachers came up, saying, "Get down on your knees, pray with me." "It was, like, 'No thank you'," recalls Kevin Finnerty, Collin's father.

The university shunned the indicted players. They were banned from setting foot on campus. The Finnertys met with Duke president Richard Brodhead to plead with him; they wanted him to stress the presumption of innocence. Brodhead told them, "As a parent, I feel for you, but as the president there is only so much I can do for you," say the Finnertys. It was "the ostrich head in the sand," says Kevin Finnerty. (Referring to the Duke case generally, Brodhead said last week that he regretted the "entire episode.")

For the press, it was an irresistible tale, with its stew of race, sex and class. It was a story that had every ingredient that the press savors. There were entitled rich kids at an exclusive university; there was a white prosecutor who seemed to be playing the race card to get elected by black voters; there was a sympathetic alleged victim, a black woman who was an exotic dancer, but who was also a single mother who said that she was a student at a local college. And lastly, there was an allegation of the most lurid kind of sexual violence. The press needed there to have been a rape to keep the story going. It was much too dull to consider that the lacrosse players deserved the presumption of innocence. Finnerty's girlfriend, Jessica, would throw things at the TV. For weeks, NEWSWEEK's cover story on the case, illustrated with mug shots of Finnerty and Seligmann (Evans had not yet been indicted), sat on a table in the family den before Finnerty finally got around to reading it. "The title ['Sex, Lies and Duke'] was pretty bad," Finnerty recalled.

Seligmann found the stereotyping especially painful. Recruited by Harvard and Yale, he had proudly chosen Duke. Now he was being portrayed, at least by implication, as a dumb jock. Some elements of the Duke community, like the girls' lacrosse team, rallied behind the players, but the faculty seemed to write them off as racists and thugs. "It was a very lonely feeling," Seligmann recalled. "You were looking for people to step up and be behind you when you most needed them. Certain people weren't there."

Seligmann had a seemingly airtight alibi—he had left the party before the alleged rape occurred, and he could prove it with receipts and phone records. In early summer, when Nifong disclosed the evidence in the case (as required by law), Seligmann pored through the documents as he was being driven from the courthouse. At first, he was encouraged. There was nothing there—no DNA or physical evidence, and the accuser seemed to have changed her story numerous times. But then it dawned on Seligmann that the very lack of evidence made Nifong's determination all the more eerie and worrisome. There was seemingly nothing that would stop him.