Campuses Creating their Own Reality: The Triumph of the False Narrative

William L. Anderson reports:

people who are falsely accused are not merely inconvenienced. I have been involved with a few cases in which individuals were falsely accused. Tonya Craft did not see her daughter for more than two years after being wrongfully-accused by a Northwest Georgia prosecutor who believed he could ride a conviction to the governorship of his state. She was fired from her teaching job, forced to stay away from children, and she and her family were forced to spend more than a million dollars (most of it borrowed or scraped from an inheritance) to fight charges that were transparently false.

(When I talked to a representative of the Georgia State Bar about the prosecutorial misconduct in that case, the official flippantly replied, “Hey, she was acquitted, wasn’t she?” When I told her that the family was forced to spend everything it had – and her parents and others also did things like remortgage their homes and the like to raise funds – she was not moved. And when I told her about things the prosecutors had done that were illegal under the Georgia statutes, she laughed and spat out, “They were just doing their jobs.” When I asked her if “doing their jobs” included subornation of perjury, lying to jurors and the public, and violating other laws and rules she was supposed to be enforcing, she hung up. So much for the “gatekeepers” in Georgia – and probably every other state of the union.)

The Duke Lacrosse Case was even worse. The defense legal fees for a year of representation and investigation were more than five million dollars, and the personal costs were staggering. Stress alone put Kathy Seligmann, a mother of one of the three defendants, in the hospital, as her health failed. The grandfather of David Evans, another defendant, was heartbroken over the false indictments and he died prematurely in the summer of 2006. David Evans, Sr., was diagnosed with a type of diabetes that is brought on by stress.

Other families tell me of the death threats, the media vans parked outside their houses, and the constant harassment that all of the lacrosse players faced as the Duke campus exploded with rent-a-protesters and the typical faculty and student activists that were eager to demonstrate their “outrage” and self-righteousness. Duke faculty members engaged in grade retaliation and personal attacks against lacrosse players who were their students.

Article well worth your time.