Dick of the Week, Dec 13-19: Crystal Mangum

Duke University is fairly overrun with smarmy dicks, so for us to essentially come to the defense of those very dicks takes a serious amount of dickery on the part of someone else.  Most of us will remember how, back in March 20o6, three Duke lacrosse players were accused by North Carolina Central University student Crystal Mangum of raping her at a party.  The media jumped all over the story, aided by the fact that the three Duke players were white, while Crystal was black, with the words “racism,” “hate crime,” and other accusations of racial motivation for the alleged crime.  Said one NCCU student interviewed by Newsweek, “‘This is a race issue. People at Duke have a lot of money on their side.’Another student said…he wanted to see the Duke students prosecuted whether they were guilty of not. ‘It would be justice for things that happened in the past.'”  The three lacrosse players were strung up by the media and essentially convicted in the court of public opinion long before any legal decision was reached.  Their lives changed forever, the Duke students were left with few options as they were now known as little more than “those rapists.”

The media were dicks for rushing to judgment.  The Duke players were dicks for…well, let’s face it, for attending Duke and playing lacrosse.  And Crystal was a dick for…oh yeah, falsely accusing all of them.  Yes, as we all know, the case was dropped and all three players were found innocent on all counts.  Maybe the biggest dick of all?  The prosecutor, who was eventually disbarred for “dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation.”  But this week’s entry isn’t about that story–this was the past, and we have moved on.  Hey, the Duke men’s lacrosse team even won a championship in 2010!  And good for them (we say grudgingly).  However, just when the story had more or less blown over, just when Crystal Mangum was out of the news, and after the North Carolina Attorney General had already decided not to press charges over her false accusations…she had to get herself back in the news.

Any press is good press, right?

Yes, Crystal Mangum was “found guilty by a North Carolina jury of misdemeanor child abuse and damaging property,” two charges amid a series of allegations that included “child abuse or neglect, injury to personal property, and resisting a public officer,” not to mention a felony arson charge on which the judge declared a mistrial.  To provide some clarity on the arson charge, the Washington Post provides the following details:

“Police said Mangum piled her boyfriend’s clothing into a bathtub and set it on fire while her three children and two police officers were inside the apartment.”

I…we…what?!  What planet is this woman from?  I mean let’s be honest, her life experience has been a little different from ours.  We never worked as an stripper, dancer, or escort.  So obviously her perspective is a little skewed.  But honestly.  Just when we stopped really caring about her, she pulls this?  Let’s even look at that last link again.  Public sympathy was beginning to come back around to her!  Sympathetic articles were running, people were accepting that she had a tough life that contributed to the mistakes that she made.  Hell, even the mother of one of the accused Duke players said, “You know, when I’m trying to get over the rage, I am thinking about so deeply this young woman who has been abused by men all her life.”

Newsweek reports that when she was first arrested, the initial charges filed against her were “attempted first-degree murder, assault and battery, communicating threats, injury to personal property, identity theft, resisting a public officer, five counts of arson, and three counts of misdemeanor child abuse.”  The child abuse stems at least party from the phone call her child placed to police, which went along the lines of “Please hurry, my mom is going to die,” occurring when Crystal was fighting with and threatening her boyfriend.  Certainly a capable mother, in no way endangering her child.

Not pictured: good parenting.

It’s a huge disappointment to see this happen.  It’s not like no one could have sympathy with her–Crystal has had a tough life.  But having been granted a new lease on that life by the Attorney General deciding against prosecuting her for running the Duke players through hell, Crystal responded by committing a myriad of crimes and demonstrating once again the she has, at best, a tenuous grip on reality.  The players moved on with their lives, but she has been unable to do the same–weird, since when you’ve been working as an escort for much of your life, you wouldn’t think that there would be THAT much further down to go.  But, she found a way to sink deeper, get back in the news, and rekindle the public scorn that she had left behind.  For all this, she is our Dick of the Week.

Honorable Mentions

CNN: This week, CNN decided to run an article about how liver donations can go horribly, terrifyingly wrong. Complete with specific cases of deaths following liver transplants.  Statistics like “38% of liver donors have some kind of complication” definitely go a long way towards helping their case, too.  Their case which is…what, exactly?  Like it isn’t difficult enough to get people to donate their organs already!  Nothing like terrifying us into keeping our goddamn organs, assholes.  I guarantee that any doctor who read that article immediately said to himself, “Goddammit.”

Michelle Obama:  Well, let’s be honest, Queen Michelle was probably going to make the list at some point.  But having the balls to call a $2,500 dress a “thrift store dress” is just Goddamn insulting to those of us who do buy clothes at thrift stores.  To be honest, $2,500 probably could have bought everything in the thrift stores in the town I grew up in.  Hell, $2,500 probably could have bought the thrift store itself.

Donald Sterling: Donald Sterling might actually be the biggest dick ever, so a Dick Hall of Fame post will certainly be done on him in the near future.   But heckling your own players when you run what is consistently one of the absolute worst teams in the NBA?  That is some severely dickish behavior.  You sign his checks, Donald!  What the hell did you sign him in the first place if you just wanted to heckle him?  Are you racist or someth–oh, yeah.