Angry they have been charged with a rape they say they did not commit, three members of Duke University’s lacrosse team say in an upcoming television interview that the accusations have hurt their lives and those of their families for good — even if they end up being cleared.
”You don’t know what that does to me and to my family and to the people that care about me,” said Reade Seligmann (20) who was interviewed on CBS’s 60 Minutes along with Collin Finnerty (20) and David Evans (23). The network on Friday released excerpts of the interviews, which are to air on Sunday and are Seligmann’s and Finnerty’s first public comments about the charges.
A grand jury has indicted them on charges of rape, kidnapping and sexual offence. Defence attorneys have strongly proclaimed their innocence, and Evans did so personally following his indictment in May.
The accuser, a student at nearby North Carolina Central University, told police she was raped in a bathroom by three men at a March 13 off-campus team party where she had been hired as a stripper.
”I never expected anyone to get indicted, let alone myself,” Finnerty said. ”It’s changed my life, no matter what happens from here on out. It’s probably going to be something that defines me my whole life.”
Evan said the accuser ”has destroyed everything I worked for in my life” and ”split apart a community and a nation on facts that just didn’t happen and a lie that should never have been told.”
District attorney Mike Nifong, who has come under fire in Durham and elsewhere for his aggressive pursuit of the case, was out of town at a conference on Friday. He has generally refused to comment about the case.
Along with the three players, the 60 Minutes report includes an interview with Kim Roberts, another dancer hired to perform at the party.
According to the CBS excerpts, Roberts contradicts the accuser’s statement to police that the two women were holding onto each other when three men separated them and pulled the accuser into the bathroom. She said it didn’t happen.
That version of events is one of several the accuser has told police. Seligmann’s attorney has said they number at least a dozen, and the details have varied, including the number of men who assaulted her.
Roberts also told CBS that the accuser gave no indication that she had been assaulted or raped. ”She obviously wasn’t hurt … because she was fine,” Roberts said.
But in an April interview with the Associated Press (AP), Roberts said that while the accuser arrived at the party sober, she was so incoherent by the time the women left the party that she was unable to say where she lived.
Roberts told the AP in April she was not in the bathroom, ”so I can’t say a rape occurred — and I never will.” She told police the rape allegations were a ”crock” and that she was with the accuser the entire time they were at the party, according to documents filed by the defence in June.
Also on Friday, a judge refused to sanction defence attorneys for conducting a poll of Durham residents about the case, ruling any influential effects of the survey would be relatively minor. – Sapa-AP