Crystal Gail Mangum In the Hot Seat (article)

Crystal Gayle Mangum Charged in DV Incident

February 18th, 2010 by Robert Franklin, Esq.

Here's our old friend Crystal Gayle Mangum again (WRAL, 2/18/10).

She first won national fame by falsely accusing three Lacrosse players at Duke University of rape. From the outset, Mangum's claims were patently unbelievable, there was no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of any of the young men and what evidence did come to light clearly pointed to their innocence.

Despite all that, the rape charges were splashed across the national television, radio and print news media, with prominent national commentators engaging in the most scurrilous tactics to impute guilt to the innocent. Duke University itself got in on the act when 88 faculty members signed a document that essentially convicted the young men without trial.

The rape charges hung over the young men like a sword of Damocles for over a year before the North Carolina Attorney General finally dropped all charges and pronounced the players 'innocent.'

Now Mangum is back in the news. She was arrested last night and is charged with attempted murder, five counts of arson, assault and battery, communicating threats, child abuse, injury to personal property, identity theft and resisting a public officer. That's quite a night's work.

Those charges stem from an altercation she had with her boyfriend, and are unquestionably overblown. I mean, attempted murder? Please. The bottom line seems to be that she attacked Walker, scratched him, tossed his clothes in the bathtub and set them on fire. She lied to the police about her identity and resisted arrest. None of that is résumé material, but it's also not attempted murder.

Still, Mangum seems to have abused the children in some way and in any case exposed them to her domestic violence. Of course it looks like she did the same to Walker.

And speaking of domestic violence, that term is nowhere used in the article linked to. The almost invariable refusal by the news media to call domestic violence by a woman against a man "domestic violence," is an ongoing scandal. It contributes to the public's widespread inaccurate belief that domestic violence is overwhelmingly a male-on-female phenomenon. It's not, as 35 years of research into the matter show clearly. In fact, about 50% of DV is done by women to men and more than that is initiated by women. The most recent study to show the same pattern recorded data from Scotland. It came out in December of 2009 and showed that 5% of men and 5% of women said they'd been the victim of a DV incident in the past year.

For her attack on the reputations and liberty of the three Lacrosse players, Crystal Gayle Mangum was never charged with a crime. Now she's charged with attempted murder for what looks like a relatively minor DV incident. Of course if she had been in prison for her false rape claims, the DV incident would never have happened.