Brendan Nyhan

Tensions continue to rise here in Durham, where a Duke administrator sent an all-campus email about a possible gang threat to students in the neighborhood where the alleged rape occurred.

The student newspaper report begins as follows:

Durham Police Department officers approached residents outside houses on N. Buchanan Boulevard shortly after 6 p.m. Friday night, telling them that there were threats of gang violence targeted at Duke students.

DPD desk officer D. Myatt said rumors of the threat originated from the magistrate’s office. A magistrate, however, said he was unaware of any such rumors.

“Duke and Durham police have substantially increased patrol coverage of the area, including Trinity Park, Ninth Street and East Campus,” wrote Larry Moneta, vice president for student affairs, in an e-mail sent to all students 10 p.m. Friday evening.

Meanwhile, the DA is saying that no charges will be filed until at least April 10, prolonging the state of uncertainty that is pervading the campus:

District Attorney Mike Nifong said Friday that no charges will be filed in the investigation of a report of rape at a Duke University lacrosse party until at least the week of April 10. He also said he won’t release DNA results that had been expected next week.

The tests, which are comparing the DNA of 46 lacrosse players with samples taken from the accuser as well as from towels, rags and rugs in the house where the party was held, could be completed next week, Nifong said.

But Nifong said he had no plans to announce the state’s evidence before a trial.

“That’s just not how we do business, and I would not anticipate that we would treat this case any differently,” Nifong said in an interview.

Finally, the News & Observer has put together a timeline of the night of the incident based in part on statements by a neighbor:

Men began to socialize at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. on Monday, March 13, nearly 12 hours before a woman said she had been raped by three men at a party where Duke lacrosse players were present. There was a flurry of activity in the period between about 11:30 p.m. and 1 a.m. Here is how events unfolded, according to information in court documents, police reports and interviews with the accuser, plus accounts given by Jason Bissey, who lives next door to 610 N. Buchanan, in interviews and in a statement to police. Times of the 911 calls and police movements are exact. Others are estimates.

2 p.m.: Bissey sees at least five men standing in the backyard of 610 Buchanan drinking beer.

4 p.m.: Bissey sees several young men drinking in the backyard.

8:30 p.m.: The accuser is called by her escort agency and told to report to the Buchanan Boulevard house that night.

11:30 p.m.: Bissey, after being out for a while, returns to his apartment . Several young men are gathered near the back door of 610 Buchanan.

11:50 p.m.: Bissey, on his porch, notices two women walk to the back of the house, where a man greets them.

Midnight: Bissey sees the two women go into the house.

12:20 TO 12:30 a.m.: Tuesday, March 14, Bissey hears voices in the alley beside the house. At least two men are discussing money, one saying, “It’s only $100.” Bissey sees a man leaning into the window of a car parked outside the house. One of the women he saw earlier gets out of the car and says she needs to get her shoe. She walks to the back door of the house.

Between 12:45 AND 1 A.M.: Bissey sees a car, which at least one of the women had been in earlier, speed away. One man standing across from the house, on the Duke campus, shouts, “… Thank your grandpa for my nice cotton shirt.” Several men come out of the house; Bissey hears at least one of them say, “Guys, let’s go,” repeatedly. Within minutes, there is silence. The lights at 610 Buchanan are dim, and no one is outside.

12:53 a.m.: An unidentified woman calls 911 and says a man near 610 Buchanan called her and a friend a racial slur.

12:55 a.m.: Police arrive and see evidence of a party at the house, but no stragglers. No one answers the door, and police can’t find the woman who called 911.

1:06 a.m.: Police leave.

1:22 a.m. A security guard calls 911, reporting that a woman is in a parked car at the Kroger grocery store on Hillsborough Road and won’t get out. The guard says the woman appears to be intoxicated and is hardly speaking or moving.

1:32 a.m.: Police arrive at Kroger. They talk to the woman, who reports that she was raped at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. She is taken to Duke Hospital for tests, and a nurse finds evidence consistent with an assault.

This timeline appears to resolve some of the questions I raised earlier. In particular, if the victim thought the assault lasted approximately 30 minutes, that’s roughly consistent with her re-entering the house between 12:20 and 12:30 AM and leaving between 12:45 AM and 12:55 AM. And the neighbor hearing the team leaving the house during that time appears to address questions about why the house was dark and quiet when police arrived at 12:55 AM.

Yesterday, in a move timed to coincide with Senate hearings on Russ Feingold’s proposal to censure President Bush for illegal domestic wiretapping, GOP chairman Ken Mehlman sent an email to supporters that read as follows (PDF):

Terrorists are at war with our country. And we have a choice.

Either we use every tool available to fight and win the War on Terror … or we heed the calls of Democrats who would censure and impeach the President for fighting the terrorists.

Watch our new web video, “Censure? Impeachment?,” which outlines the stakes in this fight.

On September 11, the President made a solemn commitment to protect the American people. The President made his choice. And many Democrats are making theirs, calling a program to defeat al Qaeda terrorists inside the U.S. an illegal and an “impeachable offense.”

Where do you stand? Watch the video. And take action by signing our petition against repeated Democrat attempts to weaken these efforts to fight the terrorists and keep American families safe.

Sincerely,
Ken Mehlman
Chairman, Republican National Committee

Following the GOP playbook in the wiretapping debate, Mehlman again suggests Democrats don’t want to protect Americans and are seeking to hamper the fight against terrorism, stating that “Democrats … would censure and impeach the President for fighting the terrorists” and referring to “Democrat attempts to weaken these efforts to fight the terrorists and keep American families safe.” Similarly, the web video Mehlman refers to runs alongside the tagline “Tell Democrats to Stop Weakening Our National Security.”

During the hearings on censure that took place yesterday, Senate Republicans went even further, suggesting that the call to censure President Bush is dangerous and would aid the terrorists:

Five Republicans at the hearing took turns attacking the idea as a reckless stunt that could embolden terrorists…

Republicans argued that censure would undermine the president’s efforts to fight terrorism.

“This hearing, I think, is beyond the pale,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.

Mr. Cornyn argued that the censure proposal could send a “perverse and false message” of presidential weakness to terrorists around the world and thus “make the jobs of our soldiers and diplomats harder and place them at greater risk.”

Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, added, “Let’s don’t play games with their lives.”

As common as these anti-democratic tactics have become since 9/11, they still turn my stomach. We are strong enough to fight the war on terror and have a robust democracy at home. We don’t have to choose one or the other.

This morning, the News and Observer and Herald Sun both have stories providing new details about the confusing, contradictory timeline of the 911 calls on the night of the alleged Duke lacrosse rape.

Here’s the N&O:

When police visited a house near Duke University on March 14 to investigate a 911 call about racial slurs, they found the house — where neighbors had witnessed a rowdy party earlier in the evening — completely quiet.

The 911 call came about 30 minutes before a second 911 call led police to a woman who told them she had been sexually assaulted at that same residence, at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd., during a party held that night by members of the Duke men’s lacrosse team. The house had been leased to three of the lacrosse players, and 46 team members have since been ordered to submit to DNA testing. Those test results are expected next week…

Police said they don’t know who made the 911 call to report the racial slurs, and the complainant was gone when police arrived at the house. But Durham police spokeswoman Kammie Michael said Thursday that they are convinced the call was not made by the same woman who later said she was raped and sodomized by three men at the party.

Police released new details Thursday on what they found when responding to that first call:

A woman called police at 12:53 the morning of March 14 to report that a white man at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. yelled a racial slur at her and a black friend as they passed the house.

Two officers, who were patrolling in the area, arrived at 12:55 a.m. and spent 11 minutes looking for the woman who called in the complaint, Michael said. The officers knocked on the door of the house, but there was no answer. They looked in the windows and walked through the yard and alley beside the house, Michael said.

They saw cups, beer cans and beer kegs. Officers spoke to a neighbor, who said there had been a party. A check of the neighborhood didn’t lead to the woman who called 911, and Michael said the caller’s information — name, phone number or address — did not appear on the dispatcher’s computer when the call came in.

A lawyer representing one of the players raised suspicion about the two 911 calls, saying they were “mighty coincidental.”

Durham lawyer James “Butch” Williams said he thinks the woman who initially called 911 to report the use of racial slurs also is involved in the rape investigation. He wouldn’t go so far as to call the allegations “false reports,” but he said it was suspicious that the caller knew the numbers to the house near where the slurs were shouted, though the house number is not easily seen from the street.

And here’s the Herald Sun:

Two Durham police officers were investigating a reported disturbance at a Duke lacrosse party just 16 minutes before the alleged victim of a gang-rape there showed up at a grocery store more than 2 miles away to call for help.

But police found nothing at the scene, a police spokeswoman said…

Police arrived at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. just two minutes after a woman called 911 to report she and her black friend had been verbally accosted by men outside the house yelling a racial slur early on March 14, according to computer dispatch records.

"Officers responded to the call at 610 N. Buchanan within a minute of the dispatch. The complainant was not on the scene and no one seemed to be at the house, according to the officers, so they cleared the scene after checking the area for several minutes," said police spokeswoman Kammie Michael.

The dispatch records show officers were on the scene for more than 11 minutes.

"Where are all these white guys raising hell?" asked an incredulous James D. "Butch" Williams, who represents a lacrosse captain who lived at the house and voluntarily submitted to a DNA test shortly after one of two exotic dancers hired to entertain at the party said she was raped, sodomized and beaten by three white men there. "When the people start digging the least little bit, they’re gong to find out things don’t make sense."

…Williams questioned the strength of the evidence. He implied Thursday that the 911 calls might have been a scam and that the entire incident was staged.

In her call reporting the racial slur, the unidentified woman offered different versions of the incident. She variously said she had driven by the house, had walked by the house and was sitting in front of the house at the time she was talking to the 911 dispatcher. She initially said one male near the Duke wall hurled the racial epithet, and later said a group of people came out of 610 N. Buchanan yelling at her and her friend. The wall and the house are on opposite sides of a dimly lit street.

"There are a number of discrepancies that point toward a contrived situation — maybe," said Williams.

The attorney said he didn’t know why anyone might perpetrate such a potential hoax.

"I can’t speak to speculation," he added. "But once you tell one lie, you’ve got to tell another and another and another. You’re caught up in a web of lies."

According to official police logs obtained by The Herald-Sun, the first 911 call was received at 12:53. a.m. on March 14, and the first officer arrived at 610 N. Buchanan at 12:55 a.m. A second unit responded, and both departed by 1:06 a.m.

The second 911 call, from the Kroger store on Hillsborough Road, initially was dispatched as an intoxicated person but later was changed to a rape case allegedly involving those at the lacrosse party. The call was placed at 1:22 a.m., 27 minutes after the police arrived to investigate the first 911 call and 16 minutes after they left the scene. The Kroger store is 2.3 miles from 610 N. Buchanan.

The second caller later told police that she had found the victim walking on North Buchanan and then drove her to the store to get help.

Williams, who has a private investigator working on the case, noted that the Police Department is closer — nine-tenths of a mile away — than the Kroger store and wondered why the victim would have been driven to a grocery store farther away.

Michael, the police spokeswoman, was quoted in a published report saying the woman who drove to the Kroger store was the second exotic dancer hired by the lacrosse players. Earlier Michael told The Herald-Sun the driver was not the second dancer.

Again, these may be the sort of inconsistencies that arise in any investigation based on eyewitness testimony, but why was the house dark and quiet at 12:55? Where was the dancer?

Today, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen writes:

So common is the statement “Bush lied” that it seems sometimes that I am the only blue-state person who does not think it is true. Then, last week, the indomitable Helen Thomas changed all that with a single question. She asked George Bush why he wanted “to go to war” from the moment he “stepped into the White House,” and the president said, “You know, I didn’t want war.” With that, the last blue-state skeptic folded.

Liberal bloggers are already up in arms about Cohen’s delayed conversion. Brad DeLong claims that “The Washington Post will never recover its reputation as long as it continues to employ people in the unreality-based community like Richard Cohen,” while Tapped’s Ezra Klein writes that “Richard Cohen’s admission that he didn’t realize that Bush had lied until sometime last week is a bit absurd. If you don’t think Bush is a liar, you simply haven’t been paying attention. And if you haven’t been paying attention, maybe you shouldn’t be a Washington Post political columnist.”

But as we wrote in All the President’s Spin, what’s surprising is that Bush rarely tells outright lies. He makes deceptive statements all the time (the book documents countless examples from the 2001-2004 period), but they are almost always half-truths or sins of omission rather than self-evidently false.

To be sure, Cohen has seemed almost comically naive and out of touch in recent years. The Post should replace him as soon as possible. But the “Bush lied” cartoon character is silly.

As ATPS explains, the reason Bush has gotten away with so much is precisely because he rarely gets caught in outright lies. Instead, he uses technically true language to leave a false impression with his audience, a practice that takes advantage of the practices of “objective” journalism. I’m disappointed that our analysis didn’t make more of an impression on DeLong and Klein, two bloggers whom I respect.

Today’s Duke Chronicle features an article on the lacrosse rape investigation that raises further questions.

First, the (alleged) victim’s claim that the dancers returned to the house and were separated before the assault does not match the account of the second dancer, who says she remained outside. In addition, the second dancer turns out to have been the person who drove the victim to a grocery store after the alleged assault:

Police initiated the investigation after a March 13 party at which three members of the lacrosse team allegedly raped, sodomized and strangled the victim, one of two exotic dancers hired to perform at the party.

The victim claimed the men were getting “excited and aggressive” when she and her companion were dancing. The frightened women left the house but were approached by one member of the team, who urged them to return.

The victim’s account, according to the warrant, stated that the two dancers were separated once inside the house.

Nifong, however, said Wednesday that the second woman never re-entered the dwelling, adding that she stayed at her car because partygoers were talking to her while the alleged victim entered the house alone.

Michael said DPD investigators have located and interviewed the other woman but would not release details of her account. Michael said the second dancer was the person who drove the alleged victim to the Kroger grocery store on Hillsborough Road, where a store security guard called 911.

Why do their accounts not match? In addition, why did the second dancer allegedly tell the grocery store security guard that she was driving by the party?

Altmon [the guard] also said the driver of the car told her she didn’t go to the party with the alleged victim. The driver said she was driving near the party scene when she saw the alleged victim walking outside. “She said she saw a whole lot of Duke guys hollering at her” and using racial slurs, Altmon said. She said the driver said she stopped to pick up the woman and brought her to the Kroger to call police.

Second, we now know that three lacrosse players voluntarily gave DNA samples before the order compelling 46 people to give samples was issued:

Nifong also said the police contacted lacrosse head coach Mike Pressler and asked if the players would voluntarily submit to DNA testing. A meeting was set, but an attorney subsequently contacted the police to cancel the appointment, Nifong explained.

DPD then obtained an order to mandate the DNA testing of 46 of the 47 members of the team.

Both Nifong and Michael said three members of the lacrosse team-the residents of 610 N. Buchanan Blvd.-voluntarily submitted to police questioning and suspect testing after the first warrant was issued.

Two of the three men questioned and tested were not named by the alleged victim in the warrant.

What happened with the voluntary DNA tests that were initially submitted? Were they negative, and did that prompt the order to test more players?

Via Deadspin, the Smoking Gun website has posted the search warrant for the infamous Duke lacrosse house at 610 North Buchanan Blvd in Durham.

Today’s Durham Herald Sun includes a report on apparent inconsistencies in a 911 call to police the night of the alleged Duke lacrosse rape:

A defense attorney is questioning the phone call from an anonymous woman to 911 dispatchers in which she claimed someone yelled racial epithets at her and her friend outside the house where the alleged gang rape by members of the Duke lacrosse team occurred.

The call was placed at 12:53 a.m. on March 14, 29 minutes before the alleged rape itself was reported. In it, the woman says a man yelled "nigger" at her and her friend.

The existence of the call was revealed by Durham police Tuesday afternoon. It prompted Duke President Richard Brodhead to issue a statement Wednesday calling the slur "disgusting."

"I am sorry the woman and her friend were subjected to such abuse," Brodhead said.

But Butch Williams, an attorney representing one of the lacrosse team members — none of whom has been charged with a crime — is questioning the validity of the woman’s statements in the call.

He said inconsistencies are part of a pattern that lead him to believe "that a lot of these allegations that have been made never happened."

Initially, the woman described the event this way:

"I was driving down near Duke’s campus and it’s me and my black girlfriend and the guy, there’s like a white guy by the Duke wall and he just hollered out nigger to me."

After the dispatcher asked the woman for her location, she described the incident a second time. In the second description, she was walking rather than driving, and more than one person had used the slur:

"It’s right in front of 610 Buchanan [Blvd.] and they came — I saw them all come out like a big frat house and me and my black girlfriend are walking by and they called us niggers."

Williams said another inconsistency lies in the three times the woman on the tape states the address of the house.

"I’ve been out there," he said, "And [the house number] doesn’t show from the street."

A reporter from The Herald-Sun went to the house at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. on Wednesday and there were no numbers on the house. The faded imprint of the numbers is halfway down the front door of the house, a location obscured by the porch railings.

Williams said he believes that the woman on the first 911 call was more involved with the events of that night than she stated on the tape.

"She’s part of the situation," Williams said.

How did she know the number, and why did her story change? Is this just normal eyewitness inconsistency, or a sign of something more serious?

Update 3/31 1:26 PM: A reader points out that the search warrant for the house at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. states that “[t]he numbers 610 are black and are on the front door of the residence.” So was the warrant wrong, or were the numbers removed after the fact?

This morning, a front page New York Times story took the Duke lacrosse rape allegations to the national level:

Duke University suspended the season of its nationally ranked men’s lacrosse team Tuesday while the authorities investigated allegations that a woman from a nearby college who had agreed to dance at a private party attended by many team members had been sexually assaulted.

The incident on March 13, which occurred at an off-campus house owned by the university, has brought into sharp relief long-simmering tensions between the private university and the city. The woman is black, most of the team members are white and law-enforcement officials say they are investigating allegations that racial epithets were shouted at the woman.

Residents, students and faculty members have staged at least five protests in the last four days, including one Tuesday night outside the building where Duke’s president, Richard H. Brodhead, was holding a news conference. They are upset with the silence of team members and the university’s handling of the case.

Mr. Brodhead’s announcement that the team’s season was being suspended came five days after 46 of 47 members of the Blue Devils lacrosse team provided DNA samples to Durham police investigators. The team’s roster includes 26 players from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut high schools. Mr. Brodhead said that he met with the team’s captains Tuesday morning and that they apologized for the embarrassment they had caused themselves, their families, the athletic department and the university. They also denied the allegations made by the woman, who said she had been assaulted in a bathroom by three team members.

Here’s today’s report on Brodhead’s decision from the student newspaper here. But, more importantly, today’s Duke Chronicle also includes this explosive story, which includes new details on alleged physical evidence of rape and another case of lacrosse team members shouting racial epithets:

The Durham Police Department released tapes Tuesday of 911 calls recorded in the early hours of March 14 during and after a party at which members of the men’s lacrosse team allegedly gang-raped, sodomized and strangled an exotic dancer.

The captains of the team “unequivocally” denied the sexual assault and rape allegations in a statement-the group’s first public statement about the situation.

President Richard Brodhead said at a press conference Tuesday evening that the captains had denied to administrators that sex “of any kind” occurred with the dancer, reportedly a 27-year-old black student at North Carolina Central University.

District Attorney Mike Nifong said Tuesday on MSNBC’s The Abrams Report that the circumstances of the case exclude the possibility that there was no sexual activity.

“I am convinced that there was a rape,” Nifong said, adding that nurses observed vaginal trauma upon examining the alleged victim.

Teammates who did not commit or observe the alleged assault are potentially liable for charges of aiding and abetting the crime because of teammate relationships, he added.

In the newly released 911 tapes, a female caller who was driving past 610 N. Buchanan Blvd.-a residence leased by three members of the lacrosse team and the scene of the party where the alleged rape occurred-reported that a white man yelled racial slurs at her from in front of the residence.

“He just hollered out n- to me, and I’m just so angry I didn’t know who to call,” she said to the 911 operator.

The Durham Herald Sun has also filed a report with new details:

Meanwhile, new details of the alleged rape have emerged from the court order used to obtain DNA samples from 46 lacrosse players last week.

According to the Police Department’s application for the order, medical records gave credence to the victim’s allegations.

The records “revealed the victim had signs, symptoms and injuries consistent with being raped and sexually assaulted vaginally and anally,” according to the document.

A forensic sexual assault nurse conducted the evaluation, the document said, and stated that the victim’s “injuries and her behavior were consistent with a traumatic experience.”

Also, the city released a recording Tuesday of a call an unidentified woman made to 911 dispatchers the night of the alleged rape in which she claimed to have been walking outside the house where the lacrosse party was held. The woman reported that a man standing in front of the wall near 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. called her and a black friend “niggers” as they walked past the residence.

The woman told the dispatcher that she “isn’t hurt or anything,” but that she simply wanted to report the incident. The dispatcher gave no indication that she would send a police cruiser to the area.

The alleged rape victim is black and told police that the lacrosse players at the party, all of whom were white, also used racial slurs.

Police spokeswoman Kammie Michael did not answer questions about the time between the woman’s call and the call reporting the alleged rape, which came from a security guard at the Kroger on Hillsborough Road.

Michael said the alleged rape victim was not the same woman who called about the racial slur. But Michael did not respond to a question asking whether the woman who called about the racial slur was the woman who accompanied the alleged rape victim to the party.

When the Kroger security guard called police, she told the dispatcher that the alleged victim was sitting in a car and was “intoxicated, drunk or something.” The guard said the woman wouldn’t get out of the car.

The guard told the dispatcher that the owner of the car was standing with her at the customer service station.

Michael did not answer a question asking whether the alleged rape victim was intoxicated.

But in an interview Tuesday night, the guard, Angel Altmon, said that once she went to the car and saw the woman, she no longer thought she was intoxicated. In particular, there was no odor of alcohol, Altmon said.

“Somebody must have slipped her something, because she wasn’t drunk,” Altmon said. “If she was drunk I would have smelled something.”

Altmon said she didn’t see any bruises on the woman, although it was dark. She said the woman was wearing just one high-heeled shoe and see-through lingerie.

Altmon also said the driver of the car told her she didn’t go to the party with the alleged victim. The driver said she was driving near the party scene when she saw the alleged victim walking outside. “She said she saw a whole lot of Duke guys hollering at her” and using racial slurs, Altmon said. She said the driver said she stopped to pick up the woman and brought her to the Kroger to call police.

At the same time, however, people on campus are so upset that there’s a danger of a lynch mob mentality, as this quote illustrates:

Nearly 200 people gathered outside campus administrator offices Monday to express anger and demand action in response to a rape investigation involving the men’s lacrosse team.

The incident has sparked outrage on and off campus about sexual violence, classism and racism.

“I am outraged that there’s a silence. … I am outraged that legal rights are used to quiet this issue,” said Meenakshi Chivukula, a junior from Medfield, Mass.

PS: Audio clips of the 9/11 calls are available in the online version of a Raleigh News & Observer article.

Update 3/29 12:33 PM: President Brodhead’s statement on the team’s suspension is here.

Last September, I noted this graphic from Barry Burden at Harvard, which suggests approval of President Bush drives the approval ratings of Congress:

The latest issue of Time includes details from a leaked memo suggesting that Republicans agree:

In an internal Republican Party memo provided to Time, Jan
van Lohuizen, a longtime Bush pollster, warns candidates tempted to
distance themselves that “President Bush drives our image and will do
so until we have real national front-runners for the ’08 nomination.
If he drops, we all drop.” Another Republican strategist describes
the problem for g.o.p. candidates this way: “Adding weight to the
anchor doesn’t help them.”

This is what economists call an externality. The president’s approval affects the fortunes of the whole party, but his incentives are different than those of members of Congress. So you see these ugly splits where party members want to distance themselves from unpopular presidents like Bush but fear turning the public further against the leader of their party. It’s a nasty problem with no good solutions.

[Update 2/4/11: This post was written immediately after the allegations emerged and does not reflect my views on the case. I raised questions early about inconsistencies in the accuser’s account and became a vocal critic of Mike Nifong’s prosecution. The charges were later dropped and Nifong was eventually disbarred for prosecutorial misconduct.]

Here in Durham, the local community and campus are in turmoil as disturbing details emerge of a racially charged incident in which white members of the Duke lacrosse team allegedly gang-raped an African American stripper at an off-campus house:

The woman who says she was raped last week by three members of the Duke University lacrosse team thought she would be dancing for five men at a bachelor party, she said Friday. But when she arrived that night, she found herself surrounded by more than 40.

Just moments after she and another exotic dancer started to perform, she said, men in the house started barking racial slurs. The two women, both black, stopped dancing.

“We started to cry,” she said. “We were so scared.”

Forty-six members of the men’s lacrosse team submitted DNA samples Thursday in the unusual case. As of late Friday, there had been no arrests…

Details of the accusations were made public this week in a warrant authorizing a search of the three-bedroom rental house where the attack is alleged to have taken place…

The accuser had worked for an escort company for two months, doing one-on-one dates about three times a week.

“It wasn’t the greatest job,” she said, her voice trailing off. But with two children, and a full class load at N.C. Central University, it paid well and fit her schedule.

This was the first time she had been hired to dance provocatively for a group, she said. There was no security to protect her, and as the men became aggressive, the two women started to leave. After some of the men apologized for the behavior, the women went back inside, according to police. That’s when the woman was pulled into a bathroom and raped and sodomized, police said…

Jason Bissey, who was on his porch next door during the party, saw the victim that night. He said Friday that he wishes he had called police at the first sign something was wrong.

He saw at least 30 men go into the white three-bedroom house, which Duke officials say is rented by three lacrosse team captains.

Bissey saw two women arrive and, after they were in the house 20 minutes, come out. As they got into a car, men shouted, Bissey said.

“Some of them were saying things like, ‘I want my money back,’ ” Bissey said.

He recalled the racially charged statements at least one man was yelling at the victim.

“When I was outside, one guy yelled at her, ‘… Thank your grandpa for my cotton shirt,’ ” Bissey said.

After a few minutes, everything seemed to calm down, he said. One of the women headed back into the house, saying she forgot her shoes.

Days later, Bissey learned one of the young women reported being raped.

I’m disgusted. The lacrosse team has already forfeited two games. I hope they forfeit the rest of the season.

Update 3/26 11:45 AM: This story is about to get a lot bigger — Drudge has a link up, and I suspect the national media won’t be far behind.

Update 3/28 8:30 AM: I want to be absolutely clear that all the players are innocent until proven guilty, as a commenter notes. The DNA results may be back in as little as a week, so we need to sit tight for at least that long before any serious decisions are made.