Lacrosse Players' Case a Trial for Parents

An hour before the game, with Georgetown warming up on the field, the game was canceled.

Jeff Clute was driving down from Potomac when his son Tom called. "My son was very upset," Clute said. "He asked me to turn around and go home."

Tkac was just outside Durham when Chris called. She knew something had to be terribly wrong. She got a speeding ticket as she raced to Duke.

For six hours that Saturday, parents crowded inside the lacrosse facility with then-Coach Mike Pressler and school administrators to hear about the status of the rape investigation.

Clute said his son told him that he had not witnessed anything at the party, and was so concerned about the allegations that he had gone to the captains to ask whether anything had happened. "The captain looked him the eye and said nothing happened," said Clute, a government contractor.

The parents went on faith, unable to reconcile the children they know with the deeds alleged.

That weekend, Durham exploded with protests and vigils. In the days that followed, Nifong, running for election in a heated campaign in a city evenly split by race, was emphatic in his public pronouncement of guilt, talking about "gang-rape activity" and "racial slurs."

"Even our close friends said, 'Something must have happened in that house,' " Walsh said.

Life on Modern Campus

The parents themselves went on trial. Their affluence, their child-rearing, their world of private schools, the careful pipelines to success that they had laid for their sons, were scrutinized and judged. They were pummeled daily with harsh caricatures of their kids.

The party at the lacrosse house had been no cotillion. Besides the drinking and hiring of strippers, a player reportedly held up a broomstick when one of the dancers asked for a sex toy. There was the now-infamous comment a neighbor heard, "Hey bitch, thank your grandpa for my nice cotton shirt." And there was the e-mail, sent by a player after the party saying that "after tonights show," he planned on killing and skinning some strippers while sexually fulfilling himself in his Duke shorts.

Parents would later say they had their eyes opened to modern campus life. Walsh said he had no idea that hiring strippers for parties was so prevalent. "You see it in New York; it's the preferred type of entertainment for Wall Street," he said. "I'm not advocating it. It's open for discussion. But it's not behavior that is totally deplorable."

Tkac took a dimmer view. "Hiring a stripper is just as inappropriate as being a stripper," she said.