Thursday, January 11: Post closed to commenting but continue discussion at Stripper-Accuser’s New Version of Gang-Rape Fantasy.
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Note: Post and article round-ups at The Johnsville News and LieStoppers.
GUILTY Until Proven Innocent
Reade Seligmann, one of the Duke lacrosse players indicted for “raping” a stripper, is going through what countless others have gone through. Falsely accused of a heinous crime, he’s had to face the possibility of prison, see the disappointment and worry in his family’s faces, and endure negative media attention, all because an egomaniac race-baited his way against a brick wall.
Seligmann didn’t rape, assault, or kidnap the stripper-accuser, and he has the paper trail to prove it. But for almost a year he’s lived under the curse of a rogue prosecutor intent on making an example of him.
Seligmann spoke to Newsweek about what the past year has been like for him and his family. An excerpt:
Seligmann now awaited a call from the prosecutor that would tell him if he was one of the players she’d singled out. He felt certain he would be cleared. The call came. Reade, 20, was being indicted for first-degree rape, kidnapping and sexual offense. He had a strong alibi…cell-phone records would show he was busy calling his girlfriend at the time the alleged crime was taking place…but the D.A. declined to hear it. As he heard the news, Reade looked at his dad. It was the first time he’d ever seen his father cry. Then it hit him: how was he going to tell his mom? Kathy Seligmann was home in New Jersey with her three other boys. He dialed her number. “Mom,” he said, “she picked me.”
Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans are learning a hard lesson. Actions have consequences. For future reference, I advise them to avoid the kind of women who strip and slut themselves out for a living. They will be exonerated because Mike Nifong does not have a case against them. He’ll succumb, eventually, to professional pressure to drop the case and resign from office. Until then, the families must remain confident that justice will prevail.
Media Awakens, Cover-Up Revealed, Backlash Ensues
Mainstream media (MSM) have turned against Mike Nifong. It’s funny how they “reported” his version of events as though it were gospel in the beginning. Never have I seen left-leaning journalists parroting a district attorney and cops the way they’ve done in this case. They weren’t simply reporting facts. They wanted to believe three white men gang-raped a black woman. Compared to how they covered the “Duke rape,” MSM virtually ignore black-on-white rapes and intraracial crimes in general. Deathly dull.
Who among them could resist incessantly reporting on and editorializing about an “oppressed” black woman being brutalized by “rich” white men? Nifong played the race card to the hilt, even going so far as to speak at the black college the stripper-accuser attended. One pea-brained black student said the men should be prosecuted whether they committed the crime or not. “It would be justice for things that happened in the past.”
For those who cover the crime beat in the Durham area, it must have been like striking gold: a black victim stripping for a living “to feed her kids,” loud, rude, and drunk white athletes, race and class divisions, town-and-gown issues.
But it couldn’t last because Nifong doesn’t have a case; he never had a case. At first he was confident that the woman was raped, saying, “There won’t be any arrests before next week. I have decided not to make arrests until DNA evidence is back.” Nifong intended to arrest lacrosse players all along, so he pulled a CYA maneuver before the results came back. Even if there were no match, he said, it wouldn’t necessarily exonerate anyone. “The attackers could have used condoms or might not have been team members.” (Source)
The problem is that the stripper-accuser said no condoms were used, and Nifong knew or should have known what his own witness told doctors and nurses. But as I said, he intended to arrest and indict someone who attended that party, and we’ll probably never know why he risked his career and his freedom to do it.
Once that first round of DNA tests came back negative, those who branded the men guilty waited for Nifong’s assurances that a gang-rape indeed happened at the party. They were bolstered by the second round, which was “inconclusive.” It turns out that David Evans’s DNA was found on top of one of the stripper-accuser’s fake fingernails (retrieved from the bathroom trashcan), not underneath, where you’d expect to find it if she had been fighting off an attacker. Considering that Evans lived in the house and used the bathroom, Nifong’s new “evidence” was just as weak as his character.
By this time, people who still wanted to believe Nifong had a case assumed that he had “something up his sleeve,” a smoking gun he’d dramatically reveal. But in real life, it doesn’t work that way. Prosecutors are required to turn over evidence in a timely manner, and if Nifong had anything dramatic at that point — helpful or harmful to the defense — he was obligated to reveal it.
But we all know he didn’t have anything against the lacrosse players, not one shred of evidence linking them to any gang-rape. Determined to find some kind of DNA match between his lying witness and the men he indicted, Nifong sent the DNA to Brian Meehan’s laboratory for more stringent testing. Nifong was gonged again. No match between the players and the stripper-accuser.
But there was a match between several men and the stripper-accuser, and Nifong withheld this information from the defense. Under cross examination, Meehan confessed: Nifong and I agreed not to report it.
That’s when the leftist national media woke up from its man-bites-dog trance. Nifong had no choice but to drop the rape charge. The Washington Post went on record: It’s time to drop all charges. The Los Angeles: Ditto. [Update: Yesterday, the Ashville Citizen-Times apologized for its biased coverage.]
Nifong’s colleagues filed charges against him and asked him to recuse himself from the case. Still shameless, he’s holding on. After his swearing-in last week, he had the nerve to say this: “I don’t feel that I’m part of the problem. I feel that I have assisted in revealing the problem. Durham has some healing to do. And I need to be part of that healing process, and I need to have something to do with how we move forward.” (Source)
What does one say about such a man? Nifong obviously is the problem. Armed with the sharp edge of race and class division and his own issues with Duke University and lacrosse players, Nifong sliced through innocent lives and re-opened wounds of existing racial tensions. He appealed to the depraved part of the human heart that wants to see others fall, whether guilty or not, out of envy, jealousy, resentment, and anger.
The consequences of Mike Nifong’s abuse of power will reverberate throughout Durham for years to come. And the people who voted the scoundrel back in office will deserve every bit of the fallout when he’s finally forced to resign in disgrace.
(Second photo credit: The News & Observer)
