Free Republic

Coming in September Find you local channel on her website Full Court Press is a national, weekly news show helmed by lawyer and veteran anchor, Greta Van Susteren. Greta has spent more than 20 years in news, digging for facts and searching for solutions to issues that affect us all. Full Court Press will continue in this tradition while adding a new facet: taking an up-close look at how national laws and policies impact local communities and individuals. We will spotlight groups across the country and strive to understand the full impact of inside the Beltway politics on the average...

The woman who has accused Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of raping her while they were Duke students 20 years ago also says a Duke basketball player raped her. In response to Fairfax’s denials, Meredith Watson’s lawyer released a statement claiming she was also raped by a basketball player and, when she reported the attack to a school administrator, received no assistance. The player’s name was not released nor was the name of the school administrator. According to a report in The News & Observer in 1999, Duke went through a major reshuffling at its administrative level. Several administrators had...

False accusers, administrators, prosecutors – no one learned from her lesson It appears to be the end of the road for Crystal Mangum. The accuser at the center of the Duke University lacrosse gang-rape hoax was denied another trial after her conviction for lethally stabbing her boyfriend five years ago. We last covered Mangum three years ago when she asked for a new trial, saying the jury was improperly informed of her attack on another man in 2010. Mangum claimed the butter-knife stabbing was an act of self-defense against a violent boyfriend, but the jury didn’t believe her and she...

Lynch mobs are not a pretty sight. But what is a pretty sight, even a beautiful one, is someone standing by the side of the road trying to call halt. In 2006, we saw the thronging of another lynch mob, this time in Durham, North Carolina. Three Duke University students were falsely accused of rape, in a case so flimsy that it should have been dismissed in five minutes. Steve Miller, then a student-columnist for the Duke University newspaper, stood up virtually alone against the 300 articles of the Herald-Sun. He stood up against the satellite trucks parked bumper to...

The New York Times’ coverage of alleged sexual assault on college campuses “seems of a piece with the leftist bias I noticed within the Times newsroom regarding climate change, gay marriage, abortion, affirmative action, labor, and other hot-button issues.” Tom Jolly, New York Times sports editor, confessed in February 2008 that he regretted aspects of his paper’s much-criticized coverage of the Duke lacrosse case. He vowed to do better. “Knowledge gained by hindsight has informed our approach to other stories since then,” said Jolly, who later became an associate managing editor. But The Times did not do better. Its handling...

One way to look at the election of Donald Trump is that it is a repudiation of the cult of political correctness that thrives — metastasizes might be a better word — on college and university campuses. One particularly egregious example, the bogus prosecution of Duke University lacrosse players in 2006 and 2007, seems to have had particular reverberations in producing election results this year, a decade later. For a definitive account of the disgraceful behavior of Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong, Duke President Richard Brodhead and dozens of members of the Duke faculty, see KC Johnson and Stuart...

Columnist David Brooks is the house "conservative" of the New York Times which means he is currently busy consoling his fellow liberals over Donald Trump's election victory. Brooks, in his column today titled The View From Trump Tower but which could more accurately be labeled "The View From Ivory Tower," describes texting people "off the ledge." Ironically it is Brooks himself who leaps off that ledge at the end of his column due to his extreme Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Drew Pinsky’s six-year-old HLN show, “Dr. Drew On Call,” has been canceled by CNN, effective Sept. 22. CNN Money, in its reporting of the announcement, connected it to a broader shakeup at HLN, including the end of Nancy Grace’s flamboyant show devoted to criminal court cases. But the decision came eight days after Pinsky’s comments on a radio show on Aug. 17 questioning the health and medical care of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president. After looking at bits and pieces of Clinton’s health-care records she made public in 2015, he said he was “gravely...

A poll released Friday afternoon by the conservative group North Carolina Civitas showed Gov. Pat McCrory has the lowest approval ratings of his administration and trailing Attorney General Roy Cooper in the race for governor. The poll of 600 likely voters was done April 23-25 and has a margin of error of 4 percent. The poll shows 49 percent of North Carolinians have an unfavorable view of McCrory, the highest percentage since he has been governor. Only 39 percent have a favorable opinion, the lowest number of his time in office. In an October poll, by comparison, McCrory had a...

the story of a black female stripper who made up a lie to blame a white lacrosse team of a gang rape as a distraction when she needed a defence to prevent the state from taking her children away from her. then a white prosecutor; seeking re-election knowingly, withheld evidence that cleared the lacrosse team. The white prosecutor overwhelmly won the black votes until the truth came out. The first five minutes of "Fantastic Lies" might make lacrosse fans cringe. White privileged athletes. Partyers. A de facto frat house. The labels thrown out, true or not, will likely lure a...

Put on Florida Democratic Party's campaign-endorsing council NEW YORK – The Florida prosecutor who brought battery charges against Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, supports Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president. An article published by the Palm Beach Post on Nov. 17, 2015, has been circulating since Tuesday evening because it lists Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg as a member 150-member Florida Leadership Council, which was established by the Democratic Party to promote Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy. The article states that Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg and Tax Collector Anne Gannon “are also part of Clinton’s Florida...

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is firing back after conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks called for the GOP to reject Trump. “While I have never met @nytdavidbrooks of the NY Times, I consider him one of the dumbest of all pundits- he has no sense of the real world!” Trump tweeted early Saturday morning. “Reading @nytdavidbrooks of the NY Times is a total waste of time, he is a clown with no awareness of the world around him- dummy!” he added.

This story is part one in a two-part investigative series. The second part will examine the culture in the Parking and Transportation Services Department and will be published later this week. A parking attendant has alleged that Executive Vice President Tallman Trask, the University’s primary financial and administrative officer, used a racial slur after hitting her with his car. EVP Tallman Trask oversees Duke’s finances and administration. The parking attendant, Shelvia Underwood of Raleigh-based McLaurin Parking and Transportation, claims that Trask hit her with with his vehicle Aug. 30, 2014, before a Duke football game against Elon University, and called...

Next month will be the tenth anniversary of the spring break party that triggered the Duke lacrosse case. That incident probably remains the highest-profile false rape claim in recent U.S. history—rivaled only by the claim against University of Virginia fraternity members leveled, and then retracted, by Rolling Stone. That both of these false accusations occurred on a campus should come as no surprise. A general disinterest in due process for accused students combined with a one-sided intellectual atmosphere on questions related to gender make universities poorly suited to evaluate sexual assault allegations. The lacrosse case, moreover, added race and class...

This week on 60 Minutes, Armen Keteyian interviewed Coach Mike Pressler, the lacrosse coach who was forced to resign after three of his players were accused of brutally attacking and raping an exotic dancer at a team party in 2006. It's a story 60 Minutes co-producers Michael Radutzky and Tanya Simon remember well. They followed the case from the time the accusations were made in March of 2006 -- to a year later in 2007 when the players were declared innocent. In that time, 60 Minutes produced three detailed reports on the strange details surrounding the case, and conducted interviews...

The first thing President Teresa Sullivan of the University of Virginia needs to do in the wake of what now appears to be a faux rape scandal is to apologize to the victims – that is, to the members of Phi Kappa Psi, who have been vilified, forced to move off campus into motels, and suffered suspicions even from family members and close friends. That would be the human and moral response. That Sullivan will not do so is nearly as certain as the chance of her taking false accusations as a matter that needs university attention. This is for...

Teresa Sullivan, the president of the University of Virginia — the campus at the heart of the Rolling Stone magazine debacle over its since-debunked rape claim piece — has become the target of a Change.org petition that calls for her immediate firing. The petition has only gathered a few signatures so far, but its text is blunt. It reads: "University of Virginia president Teresa Sullivan vandalized our legal system by immediately assuming the guilt of innocent men after an anonymous accuser without evidence cried, 'Rape!' Sullivan suspended activities of all fraternities (not just the one fraternity the accuser mentions), and...

It was 1 a.m. on a Saturday when the call came. A friend, a University of Virginia freshman who earlier said she had a date that evening with a handsome junior from her chemistry class, was in hysterics. Something bad had happened. Arriving at her side, three students —“Randall,” “Andy” and “Cindy” as they were identified in an explosive Rolling Stone account — told The Washington Post that they found their friend in tears. Jackie appeared traumatized, saying her date ended horrifically, with the older student parking his car at his fraternity, asking her to come inside, and then forcing...

Teresa Sullivan, president of the University of Virginia, said all the right things when fraternity members at her school were accused of gang rape: she followed the PC playbook and nobody could fault her for missing her lines. She automatically assumed guilt, and was fast off the mark to let everyone know that the university opposed rape and stood with rape survivors (as if that was ever in doubt). She didn't wait for the facts, she dropped the presumption of innocence, and ran with the hounds. The wrongs described in Rolling Stone are appalling and have caused all of us...

Loretta Lynch, who has been nominated by President Obama to replace Eric Holder as Attorney General, took part in a 2007 panel discussion at Duke Law School prompted by the Duke lacrosse rape case. Lynch's comments provide insight into her mindset and raise unsettling questions about her commitment to equal justice and the rights of the accused. The event took place on September 28, 2007. The wounds were still raw for members of the Duke lacrosse team, their families, and in a sense, the entire nation. That same month, Michael Nifong, the former District Attorney who had knowingly pursued...