Remember the Duke lacrosse case? Crystal Mangum, a black stripper, accused three white Duke lacrosse players of raping her. This was, of course, false, and the stripper who had attended the party with Mangum, where the so-called rape took place, called her claims “a crock”. There was no evidence whatsoever that Mangum had been raped, but that didn’t stop the rush to judgment. District Attorney Mike Nifong rushed to prosecute the three players, while police completely bungled the investigation. So-called feminists also rushed to crucify the lacrosse players, ignoring all evidence that showed Mangum was lying, and smeared the reputations of the lacrosse players, simply because they were white men accused of raping a black woman.

Now, 10 years later, ESPN is releasing a 30 for 30 documentary on the Duke lacrosse case, which has brought it back to the feminist forefront. At Slate’s Double X blog, Christina Cauterucci talks about the “real villains” in the Duke lacrosse case, but strangely, feminazis are not included on her list. Instead, it all seems like a “fake but accurate” rant where Cauterucci laments that the Duke lacrosse players weren’t wrongfully convicted.

Watching the scandal unfold a decade later, viewers will undoubtedly spend much of the film trying to pinpoint where it all went wrong, where the momentum of a country hungry for justice overtook any serious investigation of the alleged crime. (All three players were cleared of the crimes in court and in overwhelming public opinion, though Mangum still maintains that she was assaulted.) The film, which premieres Sunday, March 13—exactly 10 years after the lacrosse team’s fateful party—comes down hard on district attorney Mike Nifong, who would eventually be jailed and disbarred for intentionally withholding evidence in the case.

… Even so, it’s a bizarre experience to watch a documentary that expects the viewer to root for a bunch of accused rapists. Fantastic Lies follows the arc of most mainstream sports movies: There’s a coach with a heart of gold—Mike Pressler, who tells the team, “our darkest days are upon us” and gets several minutes of praise from former players and their parents in the film. There are fresh-faced athletes fighting inauspicious odds, and having each other’s backs, and all that. There’s even a pep talk, though it comes from an older attorney who assures Bannon that he’s “great” and “different” to pump him up before he eviscerates the prosecution’s manipulated DNA evidence at trial.

But the underdogs who eke out a well-deserved win in this sports flick are actually a bunch of wealthy white guys who ended up with multimillion-dollar settlements from Duke and jobs in investment banking. The lacrosse team did have that party with those dancers, whom they paid with the money the school gave them to subsidize their meals during their on-campus spring break. Players did use racial slurs to describe Mangum and her fellow dancer. One did write an email less than an hour after the alleged attack that said, at the next party with strippers, “I plan on killing the bitches as soon as the[y] walk in and proceding to cut their skin off while cumming in my duke issue spandex.” Nifong and his enablers did the three indicted players a grave injustice, but it’s hard to muster a full 90 minutes of righteous anger on their behalf.

… Instead, the case should be a reminder of the danger of hanging all hopes for race, gender, and class restitution on a perfect story that might not hold up. “Every person with every agenda wanted it to be true,” says the mother of indicted player Reade Seligmann in the film. Thanks to the bungled misdeeds of a media-happy district attorney with an eye on his own reelection campaign, they got no catharsis—they got scammed.

So because the victims in this case are white and wealthy, we should be perfectly fine with their being falsely accused of rape? We should hold back on our righteous outrage, because being branded a rapist is totally fine, as long as the accused fits the “right” mold? Cauterucci also makes sure to point out that Mangum still asserts that she was raped, and the insinuation in the article is clear: sure, it looks like these guys were wrongfully accused and went through hell for nothing, but hey, the story might be true… and besides, we can’t feel bad for white guys with money anyway.

Let’s talk about Crystal Mangum. This is a woman with a history of making outlandish claims. She has said that when she was 14, she was kidnapped by three men and raped. While serving in the Navy, she accused her then-husband of trying to kill her… but then never appeared in court and dropped the charges. She was arrested in 2002 for stealing a taxi and leading police on a high-speed chase while drunk, almost hitting a police officer at one point. After the Duke lacrosse case, in 2010, she was arrested for arson after setting her then-boyfriend’s clothes on fire during an argument in front of police officers. She was arrested again that year for not complying with her child visitation order. In 2011, she was arrested for stabbing her ex-boyfriend multiple times. He later died in the hospital. As he was dying, he told police that he had been trying to get away from Mangum as she stabbed him, which the forensic evidence supported. She was convicted of second-degree murder.

So yes, clearly, this is a reliable person whose testimony we absolutely should believe in, despite the fact that all evidence shows she’s lying. But what the heck — let’s continue entertaining fantasies that she might be telling the truth. It’s only a bunch of rich white guys, right?

In any case, Cauterucci wants to talk about the villains of the Duke lacrosse case. The answer to that is easy: the feminists who did (and clearly continue to) rush to judgment and unfairly smear a group of innocent men as rapists, and now offer no apology whatsoever for damaging the reputation of these innocent men. The lynch mob was led, coincidentally, by Double X blogger Amanda Marcotte. She complained about media coverage keeping to that whole “innocent until proven guilty” thing that’s kind of the cornerstone of the American legal system, because white men accused of rape shouldn’t get the presumption of innocence until proven otherwise in Marcotte’s eyes.

“In the meantime, I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good fucking god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and fucked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out.”

Yep — she wrote this after the charges had been thrown out, because all evidence had proven that Mangum was lying, including DNA evidence. She had more venom to spew, though:

“At bare minimum, the Duke Lacrosse team felt entitled to humiliate the strippers they hired because they were women and they were even paid for. At worst, they felt entitled to gang rape a woman for those reasons.”

There are a lot of other examples (like from Jill Filipovic and the National Organization for Women). Consider Jessica Valenti’s take on what was unfortunate about the situation:

As soon as the first few stories surfaced about whether the young woman had filed rape charges before, or about her mental health or the fact that she was young, black, on welfare, and an exotic dancer, the media coverage took a drastic turn and it played out just as feminists and racial justice activists had feared it would. To make matters worse, the story turned out to be a moment of dreaded racial opportunism, manipulated by a white DA to gain the confidence of the black majority in Durham. The unforunate consequence in this scenario, in regard to the Duke rape case, is that once the charges were dropped, the traditional discourse of “black strippers are lying whores” became the dominant narrative once again, a clear setback for racial dialogue in the mainstream media.

The unfortunate consequence is not that three men were unjustly accused of a horrific crime, and that the accusation almost ruined their lives. It’s that the media discourse isn’t what Valenti wants it to be. And while clearly not all, or even most, black strippers are lying whores, in Mangum’s case, the facts of the situation are that Mangum is black, she is a stripper, and she is a liar. (The examination after she claimed to be raped, which happened that very night, showed absolutely no physical evidence whatsoever that Mangum was raped, beaten, choked, or sodomized, as she claimed.)

The ten year anniversary may be bringing the Duke lacrosse case back to the forefront, but even now, feminists can’t own up to the role that they played in nearly destroying the reputations of three innocent men, their despicable rush to judgment, and even now, the inability to even admit that these men were the victims of a liar who has a history of both violence and making false accusations. If Cauterucci wants to find out who the villains of the Duke lacrosse case were, she can go look straight in the mirror, because it’s the feminazis themselves.