Presumed Guilty (page 2 of 7)

A Storm Is Brewing

It was past 4 a.m. when the police finally dropped the boys back at their house, exhausted, frazzled and stripped of their cell phones and computers. Gottlieb and Clayton told them not to mention this to anyone.

Before long, however, the police, as well as Mike Nifong, the Durham County district attorney who took charge of the case, were convincing the world that the Duke lacrosse players had been uncooperative, putting up “a stonewall of silence.”

The captains’ first inkling that the party they’d hosted on March 13 would end up being more than a waste of money and a bad memory came during a bowling trip on March 15, the night before the cops showed up. Coach Mike Pressler got an urgent message from Sue Wasiolek, dean of students, who said the team had hired strippers. One was now charging gang rape.

Pressler called his four captains aside and confronted them. Yes, they’d hired strippers, they admitted. But nobody touched them, they swore.

The coach knew his team well. After coaching lacrosse for 24 years—at Virginia Military Institute, at West Point, at Ohio Wesleyan, and at Duke for 16 years—Pressler considered this one of his favorite groups of players. Sue Pressler, his wife, thought of them as family: “They were everything you’d want your kid to be—polite, courteous young men.” Though angry about the strippers, Coach Pressler believed his players. Calling the dean back, he handed the phone to Dan Flannery and then to Matt Zash.

The boys said it was a lie. Dean Wasiolek advised them to cooperate with police and tell the truth, and not to hire attorneys or tell anyone about the charges, they recalled. Nothing would come of this.

Now, after a few hours’ sleep on March 17, Evans, Flannery and Zash met with Pressler and Chris Kennedy, senior associate athletic director. Kennedy said the captains must tell their parents immediately and that they’d need attorneys. When he called his father from Pressler’s office, Dave Evans later recalled, “I told him I was in trouble, that something bad had happened. I didn’t need him to yell at me, I just needed him to listen. That’s what he did. He [didn’t dwell on] how stupid we’d been, which I freely admit.”

• • Breakthroughs
• • Generation Y
• • Unbelievable
• • Cracking Cases

• The Duke Lacrosse Rape Case
• Which professors signed the damning document that was published in The Chronicle? What were the media headlines that indicted the team in spite of the evidence? What did DA Mike Nifong say that got him disbarred? Find out here.
• 
• Binge Drinking on Campus
• The hidden epidemic of social drinking at campuses across the country.
• 
• Teens Having No-Strings Sex
• Teen girls are buying into the sleaze we're selling.
• 
• Let's Put the Heat on Campus Cheats
• The scandal of college cheating.
• 

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• Virginia Cervasio: Making It Matter
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• Quiz: What's Your Celebrity Cause IQ?