Spectacular Magazine May 2014 May 2014 | Page 14

Price of Silence CONTINUES why they were attacking her. “I kept asking them, why are you doing this to me?” she continued. “Why? And they just kept saying that, ‘I thought black girls liked it rough. Thought they liked it like this.’” She said the man standing in front of her was David Evans. The other guys were behind her shoving the broomstick up her anus. She said Evans forced her to give him oral sex by trying to put his penis in her mouth, and then he ejaculated. “I know for a fact that it happened,” she said. “I’ve been carrying a lot of guilt because I was drinking and I was flirting. And I went back in the house. And my memory is kinda fuzzy. So it’s a possibility that I may have picked the wrong people.” She said the attack went on for “15 to 30 minutes” but she was not sure how or why it stopped. “All I know is that a door opened, and I was so happy ’cause I thought I was gonna die,” she said. “All I know is, that door opened. I thought they were gonna kill me. Yeah, because like seconds earlier or minutes earlier, they were nice. I mean, they were sweet. It seemed like 14 they turned into a different person, and I just couldn’t understand how they changed so fast. So I’m figuring, if they changed in that manner, then maybe they’ll try to kill me next. All I know is they picked me up and put my clothes back. They picked me up and take me outside and just dumped me on the porch. They just threw me outside on the porch and closed the door. And then, like, one of the guys picked me up and puts my arm around his neck. And I kinda felt like he kinda felt bad about what had happened. And he placed me in the back of Kim’s car.” She said she thought Reade Seligmann was the one who felt guilty and carried her to the car. What about his alibi? She said she never saw the evidence of his alibi. “My problem with that is none of the evidence was actually verified in court,” she said. “...Anybody can stand on television and say, ‘I have an alibi.’” She said she had asked the Attorney General’s Office for access to the evidence. “I was told all the evidence was destroyed for my case,” she said. “I can’t even get access to my own hospital records.” She said her life did not turn out as she had planned. She never expected to be in jail for supposedly killing her boyfriend. She never thought she would be reviled for accusing the three lacrosse players of attacking her. “It’s very frustrating when you know something is true but you can’t prove it,” she said. “And then you have people that hate you, and you don’t even know why. I have like millions of people around the country that hate me, and they’ve never met me. I guess they feel like I’m a vindictive person. And so that’s their reaction or retaliation. I guess because my case never made it to trial [and] that the actual truth never came out. And the way the media makes it sound is that I just went to the police station and said, ‘These guys raped me, get ’em.’ That’s the way they make it sound. But that’s not the way it happened. I never even pressed charges. I went to the hospital for help. I mean, if it really had been up to me, I probably woulda just said leave it alone and went on with my life. I probably woulda kept it to myself. And a lot of times I wished I had. I used to think that the judicial system was so straightforward. If it’s true, it’ll come out and everything will be SPECTACULAR MAGAZINE | May 2014 | www.spectacularmag.com fine. Now I have a completely different view. It’s not even a matter of innocence or guilt. It’s a matter of who’s more powerful or who has the most resources or who can persuade public opinion. And it’s very frustrating. I think that our system needs to be built on something stronger than public opinion. And basically that’s what my case came out to, popular opinion.” As I got up to leave, Mangum stood up and put her hand against the Plexiglas. “Get me outta here,” she said. Adapted from THE PRICE OF SILENCE: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of Our Great Universities by William D. Cohan, published April 8, 2014 by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.” SPECTACULAR MAGAZINE RADIO SHOW Tuesday May 20 @ 4pm GUEST William Coham (Author) The Price of Silence