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Well isn’t this interesting.

A headline this week: 

The Victim Involved in the Infamous Duke Lacrosse Players Sexual Assault Case Admits She Lied

For those who came in late, back there in the Stone Age of 2006, three Duke University lacrosse players were accused of raping a stripper, a stripper who happened to be black. Her name: Crystal Magnum. The players denied the allegations. 

And then.

And then the media went out of the way to believe the players were lying. Not to mention going ballistic when the three young men were acquitted. Eight years later, Vanity Fair profiled the story, writing this: 

“When three Duke University lacrosse players were falsely accused of rape, in 2006, the media descended on Durham, North Carolina, quickly turning the case into a story of race and privilege.”

Today, over here at the university’s communications site, is a considerable “Archive of Sample Media Coverage.”  The sample includes such headlines as these:

The Washington Post via the Associated Press: “Prosecutor Expresses Confidence in Duke Case.” 

The New York Times: “Indulging Athletes Isn’t Class Matter.” The Times made a point of playing up the twin devils of race and class, writing: 

If financial means is the common denominator for those who refuse to surmount the unholy team code of silence and can still count on unfailing support from clueless community officials and university administrators who ignore early behavioral warning signs, to what do we attribute the long list of athletic department lockdowns that have typically followed the sexual assaults that are as endemic to the big-time college sports machine as the recruiting rat race?

The New York Times: Files From Duke Rape Case Give Details but No Answers 

By disclosing pieces of evidence favorable to the defendants, the defense has created an image of a case heading for the rocks. But an examination of the entire 1,850 pages of evidence gathered by the prosecution in the four months after the accusation yields a more ambiguous picture.

On and on went media stories, making the case a kind of national obsession. Another story, this one in the Washington Post, noted: “President Obama this year formed a task force that aims to prevent sexual assault on campus.”

And now? This week comes this story appearing on Fox News: Crystal Mangum confesses to lying about being raped by Duke lacrosse players in 2006

The story reports: 

“Former stripper and current murder convict Crystal Mangum confessed to lying about being raped by Duke Lacrosse players in an interview on the independent media outlet “Let’s Talk With Kat” on Thursday.

‘I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t and that was wrong, and I betrayed the trust of a lot of other people who believed in me,’ Mangum said. ‘[I] made up a story that wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God.’

Mangum, who is serving a prison sentence for murdering her boyfriend, falsely accused three Duke players of raping her while she was performing at a team party in March 2006. The players she accused were arrested, igniting a national controversy and conversations about racism.”

In other words? 

In other words the massive media coverage of the case, coverage that set up the theme of rich, arrogant white guys raping a poor black woman was all a massive untruth. The jury believed the boys – who told the truth. But the boys were subjected to massive negative media coverage.

Why? 

It’s hard to escape the idea that the real privilege in all of this coverage was coming from left-wing “journalists” who deliberately ignored the truth coming from the Duke players because it ran up against the left-wing stereotypes of race and class that the journos apply to all of their coverage of issues involving race and class.

Now, 18 years later, the alleged “victim” of the rape by the Duke lacrosse guys comes forth to confess that she, in fact, made up the entire story, from start to finish. Her reason for making the rape story up? 

“[I] made up a story that wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God.” 

Sad to say, in a disturbing fashion, in the day she was given that “validation from people” – those people being the liberal media of the day that wanted to insist on validating her because of their own biases on issues of race and class.

You can’t make it up.

Unless, of course, you are the liberal media.