This is public. It needs to be.

[commieprincess]

Duke lacrosse team suspended after allegations of gang rape. Most of the team was apparently at the party; however, no one has come forward about what happened. This happened over spring break, but the story only became public late last week. All but one of the players have been DNA tested, and the Duke President has suspended the team while the

Comments

[chevauchee]

I'm with you on pretty much everything except feeling conflicted over the names being published. It's not hard to find the names of the team, the roster was made public prior to the allegations, and the only way there would be to allow them some privacy until charges were filed (or not, if the DNA evidence exonerates them) is if the media were to not mention which team or even which school was accused. Which either means sweeping the whole thing under the rug (opposed to that; this is newsworthy and should be reported on) or to coyly state that a team from Duke, or a lacrosse team from somewhere, had been accused. At which point either all male Duke athletes become suspects or all lacrosse players do and, since I think none of the other area schools have male lacrosse teams (based on a casual googling, I could be wrong), we're right back to the finger pointing straight at the team

[danisse]

The team captains have publicly stated that no sex of any kind was had, so it will be interesting to see the DNA results.

[chevauchee]

Yeah, it pretty much hangs on the DNA at this point, doesn't it? If it comes back matching, it's gonna be very nasty, very fast. Hell, even if it doesn't match, it's gonna be nasty. Yech. What an ugly situation.

[commieprincess]

Your point about publicizing the names is true -- I don't think they should have made more of an effort to keep it secret, and I have no problem with saying "the Duke lacrosse team" and not being coy about it. (Though Carolina, at least, has a lacrosse team, too. Not specifying the schoool would've made things even nastier, then.) But I think there's a difference, even if it's mostly semantic in this case, between saying that and publishing their actual names. They clearly don't get the same level of protection as the victim, but I think it's important to respect the policy of not publishing suspects' names until they're officially charged. Even if they were de facto identifiable in this case, the distinction is worth preserving.

We could probably add class issues to the race and sex issues. After all, she was 'just' a stripper to the guys who hired her, not a student, daughter and motherI totally agree; to me, that's kinda subsumed in the whole Duke/Durham thing. Duke is a pretty expensive, majority white (I think), private