Did Levicy Just Bust Gottlieb?

Duke University Medical Center Nurse Tara Levicy may have offered a nice bonus for those who endured the marathon fourth day of Defendant Nifong's trial. Under oath, Levicy testified that, following her interview with Investigator Benjamin Himan by telephone on March 16, 2006, she was not interviewed by law enforcement again until January 2007.

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Levicy's testimony appears to belie the assertions made by DPD Sgt. Mark Gottlieb in his homegrown notes and willingly published by the NY Times to lead off Duff Wilson's Save-the-Hoax front page editorial disguised as a news story. Although Levicy claims to have had no LE interviews from her initial March 16, 2006 chat with Inv. Himan until January of 2007, Wilson recounts details of the miracle fill-in-the-blanks interview of Levicy, supposedly conducted by Sgt. Gottlieb, on March 21, 2006.

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When Wilson's article appeared in August, we expressed doubts about his article and Gottlieb's notes:

The article leads in the opening paragraph with a conversation between Gottlieb and the SANE nurse recounted in Gottlieb’s notes.

It is now apparently this conversation that formed the basis for the statement in the affidavits for the search warrants that medical records and interviews revealed signs and symptoms consistent with a vaginal and anal rape. The article states:

On March 21, a week after an African-American woman charged that she had been raped by three white Duke University lacrosse players, the police sergeant supervising the investigation met with the sexual-assault nurse who had examined the woman in the emergency room. The sergeant, Mark D. Gottlieb, reviewed the medical report, which did not say much: some swelling, no visible bruises.

But the sergeant’s case notes also recount what the nurse told him in response to his questions:

...that the woman appeared to be in so much pain that it took “an extended period of time” to examine her, and that the “blunt force trauma” seen in the examination “was consistent with the sexual assault that was alleged by the victim.”

This opening paragraph immediately raises several questions. If Gottlieb reviewed the report on March 21st, why does the report indicate that it was not printed until March 30th and why did Himan have to go pick it up on April 4th? Why is Himan the investigator that called the SANE nurse and the one that that signed the affidavit yet Gottlieb is the one who spoke to the nurse in person (apparently without Himan) and the one who heard all significant injuries, many of which are not documented? Why didn’t Himan talk to the SANE nurse with Gottlieb? If Gottlieb’s report wasn’t written, how did Himan know what the interviews and medical records revealed when he signed the affidavits? If the accuser was in so much pain, why were there not more injuries detailed in the medical report? Was this pain noted by other examining physicians in their reports? Is “blunt force trauma” a medical term that appears elsewhere in any of the medical reports?

Assuming that Levicy's sworn testimony tonight was accurate and truthful, there appears to be additional reason to question the gullibilty of Duff Wilson, the credibility of Sgt. Gottlieb, and the legality of the orders and warrants based on the apparently imagined interview.