The Duke Thing Ain't Over

Strippergate continues.

The Duke lacrosse team as a collective unit still claims that no sexual assaults of a stripper occurred on the night in question.

The Durham prosecutor, attorney general, head cop, whatever his title, is just as confident that something did happen. When the DNA results get back, he plans to charge some players.

The DNA looms very large in this legend.

Now, however, there's something new. The integrity of one of the women is being questioned.  You be the judge.

There has been a report that the woman who called police on that same night, in the same area of the assault, claiming to have been insulted by students yelling racial epithets as she walked by, was -- TA-DA! -- the second stripper. Hmmm. Why would she do that? To set the stage for something else?

Unlike the first stripper who claims she was sexually assaulted, the second woman is not a student anywhere. She does however have an arrest record. Allegedly. Aha. The plot thickens.

Meanwhile, you gotta give Duke credit. Instead of waiting for the DNA to come back, they're kicking ass and taking names.  You also have to ask, if race weren't the subtext, would they have made the same decisions?

So far, the LAX team's season is over. [LAX = lacrosse, get it?] Their legitimate chances for a national championship are toast. I wonder if cancelling the rest of their games is a first for a Division I team ranked as high as Duke was this year. They were expected to meet Johns Hopkins again in the NCAA finals. Not going to happen.

The coach of the team has resigned. Or, if you prefer, the president of the university supposedly asked for his resignation and he obliged. The trail of bad behavior by players has to end somewhere.  But usually the coach gets a pass. Unless he's caught on film drinking and groping coeds at a party. Not this time. The buck not only made it all the way up to him, but it bitch slapped his sorry ass.

One of the lascrosse players sent out an inflammatory email shortly after the night in question that was disturbing for its sexual implications and Hannibal Lecter-like message about killing and skinning strippers, so he's been suspended. 

Like all schools of higher learning with the required layers of bureaucracy, committees and commissions have been established to determine how and why the team got so far out of whack. With racism running like a river of mud underneath it all.

If these blue ribbon panels discover that the women have been lying and the whole mess was a hoax, perpetrated by some nasty ass females bent on showing those smarty pants rich boys a thing or two, there will be more lawsuits -- this time for rushing to judgment.

In retrospect, will ending the team's season, suspending a player, and firing the coach turn out to be just the knee jerk response of a predominantly white university feeling pressured to do something now about hundreds of years of racial injustice?

Or will the DNA actually point a guilty finger?

I can't wait.