Duke Dudes Are Innocent: Time for a Party?
North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper announced today that the three chief suspects in the infamous Duke trial had been acquitted of all remaining charges of raping a stripper last year.
This is great news for the accused, who are all former Duke students… and it’s also probably a relief for Duke itself, which in addition to all the unwanted attention, also suffered a very real drop in undergraduate applications this fall.
But the verdict settles conduct on only one night, with just one stripper. In the aftermath of a trial (and some say witch hunt) that polarized the country for 13 months, it’s worth going back to that summer, with a story published in the June 15, 2006 edition of ROLLING STONE.
For the piece, we sent Janet Reitman to the Durham campus to document the Duke party scene. Her report — “Sex and Scandal at Duke” — left very little to the imagination.
That Duke kids party hard shouldn’t be much of a surprise. They take academics seriously, keeping the school high in national rankings most years. But as Reitman’s story shows, their A+-earning appetite for excellence is just as robust when it comes to jell-o shots, nude wrestling and the sometimes controversial college ritual of hooking up.
Check out the piece and take a moment to reflect. Is this the last we’ll hear about Duke?