The Duke lacrosse story just keeps getting more surreal. The AP is reporting that the accuser also claimed she was raped by three men back in 1996, but no charges were ever filed:

The woman who says she was raped by three members of Duke’s lacrosse team also told police 10 years ago she was raped by three men, filing a 1996 complaint claiming she had been assaulted three years earlier when she was 14.

Authorities in nearby Creedmoor said Thursday that none of the men named in the decade-old report was ever charged but they didn’t have details why.

A phone number for the accuser has been disconnected and her family declined to comment to The Associated Press. But relatives told Essence magazine in an online story this week that the woman declined to pursue the case out of fear for her safety.

…According to the Creedmoor police report in August 1996, when the woman was 18, she told officers she was raped and beaten by three men “for a continual time” in 1993, when she was 14. She told police she was attacked at an “unspecified location” on a street in Creedmoor, a town 15 miles northeast of Durham.

This is going to raise a lot of suspicion. The odds of Nifong getting a conviction are looking lower and lower.

Update 4/28 7:45 AM: Bizarre. The woman’s father is saying that she wasn’t raped in the alleged incident she reported to Creedmoor police:

The woman who said three men raped her at a party held by members of the Duke University lacrosse team made a similar report 10 years ago in a nearby town.

Creedmoor Police Chief Ted Pollard said Thursday that a woman matching the full name and birth date of the accuser in the Durham case filed a report with his department Aug. 18, 1996, saying she was raped by three men three years earlier, when she was 14.

Pollard said that the archived records from that time are sketchy but that it appears none of the three men named in the 1996 complaint was arrested.

The woman’s father said Thursday his daughter was not raped in the 1996 incident.

“They didn’t do anything to her,” he said.

The father said his daughter was held against her will by a group of men who had picked her up from school in Durham and drove her to Creedmoor. She was not sexually assaulted or injured in the encounter, he said, and she was returned home safely the same day.

The 1996 accusation came to light Thursday after Essence.com, the Web site of Essence, a lifestyle magazine, reported in a news update that the accuser’s mother had said her daughter was raped by several men in Creedmoor when she was a teenager. When contacted by The News & Observer on Thursday, the mother said the magazine misrepresented her comments. She refused to elaborate on what her daughter had reported to the Creedmoor police.

“I’m not going to tell you anything,” the mother said.

But the father separately told the AP he didn’t “remember” if his daughter was sexually assaulted in the incident:

A phone number for the accuser has been disconnected, and her father said Thursday night he remembered little about the incident except going with police to a home where he said his daughter was being held “against her will.”

Asked if she was sexually assaulted, he said, “I can’t remember.” In an interview with the News & Observer of Raleigh, posted Thursday night on the paper’s Web site, he said the men “didn’t do anything to her.”