Rape case divides Durham

DURHAM, N.C. — The case seems to fit the stereotypes so perfectly.

The purported rapists are white, the woman is black.

The men go to Duke University, the expensive private college with the championship sports teams and big television deals. The woman studies across town at chronically underfunded North Carolina Central University.

The men are lacrosse jocks, many of them recruited from tony Northern prep schools. She’s a 27-year-old divorced mother of two who went to the Duke students’ house to do some exotic dancing and make a little extra money.

It’s so easy to see the incident at the shabby university-owned house — just a mile from the iconic Gothic Duke Chapel — in terms of powerlessness and privilege, town and gown, black and white. Many on campus and in the streets of this gritty working-class vertex of the famed Research Triangle are framing it just that way.

But not everybody is comfortable with that.

“I think along with the awfulness of the incident has come a real desire to condemn a lot of the Duke students because they are people of privilege, maybe,” Durham resident Paul Montgomery said as he stood outside the Trinity Park house where the party happened. “I just hope people kind of take into account that there is … more than meets the eye.”

The white, three-bedroom house with the crumbling black shutters sits on the edge of Walltown, a predominantly black and poor neighborhood outside the school’s low stone wall where many residents still refer to Duke as “the plantation.”

On the night of March 13, a black woman made a tearful call to 911 to complain that a white man from the house at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. — which was being leased by three lacrosse team members — had shouted a racial slur at her and a friend. She told police that someone had recently defaced a neighborhood car with the letters “KKK.”

“I’m just so angry I didn’t know who to call,” the woman sobbed in rage. “They didn’t harm me in any way, but I just feel so completely offended, I can’t even believe it.”

That same night, a woman says she and a partner went there expecting to entertain a bachelor party of five, but that they soon found themselves surrounded by more than 40 drunken men barking racial slurs.

“We started to cry,” she told the News & Observer of Raleigh. “We were so scared.”

She told police she and her friend left the house. Jason Bissey was smoking a cigarette on the front porch next door and said he heard some of the party demand a refund.

He heard one shout an obscenity followed by, “Thank your grandpa for my nice cotton shirt.”

Someone from the house apologized and coaxed the women back inside. It was then, the woman says, that she was dragged into a bathroom and raped, beaten and choked by three men for a half hour.

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