After work one day in January 2007, Scott McConnell left his office at the magazine The American Conservative in Arlington, Virginia, and walked to a nearby Thai restaurant that was hosting a panel discussion about the Duke lacrosse scandal. Nine months earlier, three members of the university’s men’s lacrosse team had been accused of raping a black woman they had hired as a stripper. Much of the Duke community, including 88 professors who signed a statement calling the situation a “social disaster,” declared this was merely the latest and most egregious example of the racist, sexist, and privileged behavior that permeated the elite campus. Jesse Jackson showed up, as did news trucks from every major network, and most of the reporting coalesced around the same narrative: A group of wealthy, white men had taken advantage of a poor, black woman, just as white men had done for centuries.
McConnell and his magazine had largely ignored the scandal; identity politics weren’t top of mind for conservative media then, and most outlets weren’t especially interested in defending a group of rich jocks who had hired a stripper. But by January, the case was imploding. The accuser had changed her story more than half a dozen times, one of the players had a well-documented alibi, and DNA tests found no match with any member of the team, a fact the prosecutors initially hid from the defense. McConnell was reminded of The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s novel about 1980s New York in which an overzealous prosecutor, the media, and the city’s liberal elite rushed to condemn an innocent white man accused of killing a black man. “There was this palpable yearning among the liberal establishment for guilty white people they could put on trial,” McConnell said, of the lacrosse case.
