The story is rather a mess, and we may never really know the whole thing accurately
The lacrosse team, and in particular some members of it, seem to have had a bit of a history of loutish behavior. There was some reason to believe they were extraordinarily insensitive to the woman they hired as a stripper, including some foul racist comments; at one point, the stripper seems to have passed out on the porch of the house, which was regarded as a photo-opportunity and not much more. After the alleged event, an unpleasant email was circulated. So a natural initial impression of the allegations might be that there was something to it
The case broke as the town was about to hold elections for DA, and one of the challengers immediately accused the incumbent of playing the case for political gain. But those accusations can easily be read as politically motivated
The university administration showed itself interested primarily interested in external impressions, as administrations often seem to be: they wanted the whole thing to go away, and later when some players sued them I think the administration quickly settled so they could move on to other matters that interested them more, instead of mucking around forever in that swamp
Some university professors thought it might provide a good opportunity to discuss racism and sexism and perceptions of racism and sexism, but the rightwing noise machine kicked in and unfairly misrepresented many of those efforts as unfair "politically correct" attacks on the lacrosse players
Unsurprisingly, the stripper herself eventually turned out to be a fairly unattractive individual, with some profound personal issues unhelped by all the attention, and she subsequently had much more serious criminal encounters with the law herself
The DA himself was ultimately found in contempt of court, supposedly for withholding evidence, spent one night in jail, and was then disbarred. I read what of the public record I could easily get at the time, and I really never understood exactly what was so material about the evidence he was slow to hand over -- but I'm not an attorney, so maybe there was some important issue there
The whole thing was a media circus from day one: reporting was sloppy and sensationalist; the rightwing had particular distraction interests at the time in turning the Durham DA into a national story; and I suspect a number of commonly-believed "facts" about the case are actually myths. There were genuine town-gown and class fault-lines, as well as real evidence of some ugly racism and sexism. I doubt anybody would have considered the DAs acts grounds to disbar, had the accused been poor black kids instead of rich white kids -- though, as I've tried to indicate above, I can't say with certainty that the disbarment was inappropriate. The endless litigation from the students seems opportunistic to me -- though, again, I could of course be wrong
= new reply since forum marked as read
