Nartey: Threat to Coach's Daughter Not A Threat Because It Wasn't Anonymous
Excerpt from "The Untold Story of the Duke Case" by Don Yaeger and Mike Pressler:
On March 27, 2006, at 1:59pm, a young African-American student from Duke sent Pressler two emails that nearly sent him spiraling out of control. The first message that appeared made it clear to Pressler that this student was one of the fifty million who assumed his lacrosse players were guilty. It read:RE: SOME THINGS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN WINNING A FEW GAMES. END THE SEASON UNTIL THE ALLEGED RAPISTS ARE FOUND! YOU'LL BE A MUCH BETTER COACH FOR IT.Although this message made a bold statement, it was the next email, which Pressler received just two minutes later from this same student, that would absolutely infuriate him. Only six words were in the subject line, but those six words shot rage through every bone in ressler's body:RE: WHAT IF JANET LYNN WERE NEXT???As any father of a teenage daughter could imagine, this crossed a line that far exceeded what Pressler was prepared to handle. The sender's name was Chauncey Nartey. He was only a junior at Duke and had developed a reputation for being a vocal African-American activist on campus.
"I turned the email over to my attorney and he said you could have him arrested." Pressler said. "We chose not to do that. We chose to report it to the dean of students, Larry Moneta, and have hm deal with it."
Pressler's outrage only intensified when he learned how the Duke administration dealt with Nartey. "This is what they did," said pressler. "They said 'Chauncey, don't do it again. Okay? and you should write the coach an apology'"
That was it. Nothing more than a mere slap on the wrist.
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Nartney realized the error of his ways...two months later. He contacted Pressler again, this time mailing a letter directly to Pressler's home address. This was a letter of apology.
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Before refusing further comment, he did explain why he believed his emails should not have been considered "a threat." "The email I sent -- I sent two-- I sent them from my Duke email address," Nartey said, explaining his twisted logic. "I sent them with my name attached. It wasn't like any anonymous thing. I knew I was going to be attached to it, so it wasn't any sort of threat."
Nartey also admitted that it was "a mistake" to bring Pressler's daughter into the mix "just because I didn't think it would be so heavily misconstrued." He went on to say "it was a stupid thing to mention his daughter, in retrospect, but at the time I thought if somebody can't see why it's inappropriate to move forward with athletics in this sort of situation then perhaps that parallel could be drawn by incorporating someone near and dear to him. And again, foolish, but that the rationale was that was that you can draw the parallel."
6 comments:
Mike Pressler is a much bigger man than any of the people at Duke who had authority over him. Does anyone think that had one of the LAX players written threats to a faculty member, that he would have been able to get away with it?
Nartey has no excuse, none. I'm glad that he apologized, although by trying to justify what he said, the apology sounds a bit hollow.
I will predict that this thing is going to get even uglier, as more and more information about Duke comes out. This is inevitable, and it will hurt the university much more than the LAX allegations ever did.
Two months later he apologizes. That would be after Discovery & DNA tests had showed how ridiclous these charges were.
Brodhead has to go for the sake of Duke! Just like Pressler had to go for the sake of Duke.
Damn that Karma!
I think Pressler should have never trusted his university and pressed criminal charges against Nartey. Forget asking about the coach's daughter. Nartey needed to start worrying about that big Bubba in his cell.
you are idiots. the statement is not a direct threat. it does not state that the writer is going to rape the coach's daughter. what it does ask is what the coach would do or say if his own daughter(not the daughter of Travis Manguam) was the next victim of the team or of a sexual assault in general. no cop in his right mind would define this as a threat.
lets take the mcfayden email, now there is a threat as the writer says that he will mutilate the next strippers as soon as they enter the door and then says he will be so sexually gratified by this he will then ejaculate in his lax duke blue spandex. there is a bug difference between the two.
And illegally found and released, and taken out of the context of the book "American Psycho," which was, by the way, the discussion of which this email was a part and which was also required reading for this student's class. No, Nartey's email, in the context of what was happening at the time, was clearly a specific threat and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Oh, and should Nartey be tried, that evidence won't even be tainted by the fact that it was collected illegally, unlike the McFayden email. Tell me, is being stupid like sleepwalking?
It would be interesting to interview Nartey about his feelings on the matter after Cooper declared the players innocent.
Did he regret his actions and his rush to judgement against the team? Has he apologized to the players for thinking the worst of them? And taking any actions (as a campus activist) that could be viewed as to creating a hostile environment for the players.
Cooper said that a lot of people owed a lot of other people apologies. To date, there has been a journalist here and there, and Mike Nifong - insincere as it may be.
It's pretty intersting to make the comparison but at least Mike Nifong apologized which must have been really, really hard for him to do. In that one area, one could argue that his character is above that of Brodhead, Burness, the DPD, the Council, and a few newspapers out there.
Those hitting Ryan for his private email show a serious lack of critical thinking skills.
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