Nifong's Allies

Two earlier posts examined the two most disturbing elements of William D. Cohan’s lionization of Mike Nifong: the dismissal of basic prosecutorial ethics, and the evidence-free manner in which Cohan casts aspersions on innocent people.

Today’s post looks at the book’s treatment of Nifong’s key allies—former SANE-nurse-in-training Tara Levicy; former DPD Sgt. Mark Gottlieb; the Durham Police Department; and convicted murderer Crystal Mangum.

Former SANE-nurse-in-training Tara Levicy

While his book is mostly chronological in presentation, Cohan makes two critical departures to bolster his pro-Nifong narrative. The first (p. 31) comes with Levicy. Mangum, of course, told Levicy that her attackers didn’t use condoms, and described an attack in which specifics made clear that the alleged perpetrators could not have used condoms. Levicy produced the claim in her report, and Nifong repeated it frequently in his pre-primary publicity barrage. This notation also was critical to determining the importance of the DNA evidence—since if the attackers didn’t use condoms, they would have almost certainly left DNA.

Months later, Levicy “recalled” that the attackers might not have used condoms—to coincide with the lack of any DNA matches to a member of the lacrosse team. But Cohan relays this information in a much different way: “Levicy also later conceded Mangum wasn’t sure.” He does not say how much “later” this concession came.

First, there’s no evidence that Mangum ever told Levicy she was unsure her “attackers” used condoms. Levicy’s written report suggests exactly the opposite. Second, Cohan provides no context as to how Levicy reached this conclusion, or its importance in the case as a whole. Instead, the “recollection” is treated as routine. Levicy . . . discovered . . . that condoms might have been used only after Nifong had revealed that no DNA matches existed—and had been hammered in the public for his DNA failings. Levicy then came along to suggest that maybe the DNA wasn’t important after all.

Levicy’s job—as a SANE nurse-in-training—was to memorialize what Mangum told her, not to adjust Mangum’s version months after the fact in a way that plugged in holes in Nifong’s case. And Cohan neglects entirely Levicy’s subsequent recollection that she had forgotten (testimony, perhaps, to her inexperience) to include in her report the time Mangum said that the attack occurred (around 1.00am, poking yet more holes in the many Mangum tall tales).

Cohan also discusses (seemingly to minimize) Levicy’s ideological biases (p. 33) by relaying that the “assumption” Levicy was a true-believer feminist on rape issues came from her “time with Planned Parenthood and an article she wrote in 2003.” Cohan doesn’t mention Levicy’s Wendy Murphy-like statement to defense attorneys that she never encountered a woman who lied about being raped. (Cohan might have encountered that statement if he had sought to interview the defense attorneys.)

Cohan uses Nifong’s words to bolster Levicy, quoting (p. 171) the disgraced ex-prosecutor saying that Levicy would have been a “really convincing witness” who had “every incentive to do this by the book.” Since Cohan glossed over Levicy’s willingness to toss out the book—by adjusting her recollection of what Mangum told her to fit Nifong’s evolving story—this comment is laughable.

Finally, publicity material accompanying the publication makes an odd claim: “For the first time, Cohan makes public the medical report that rape[sic, SANE] nurse [in training] Tara Levicy conducted on Mangum . . . What Mangum told Levicy that night is stunning and has never before been revealed.” [emphasis added] Yet virtually everyone who has covered the case in depth (Joe Neff, Stuart Taylor and I, 60 Minutes, even Duff Wilson) had seen (and reported on) the document prepared by Levicy. Given Wilson’s editorial perspective, Cohan isn’t even the first person to have uncritically accepted the Levicy report’s findings. The publicity document makes a similarly incorrect claim about Cohan being the first to reveal material from Mangum’s medical visits to UNC Hospital. Much like Cohan’s assertion to “Morning Joe” that Bob Steel spoke to him for the “first time” about the case, when in fact Steel had previously spoken to Peter Boyer and to Stuart, it appears that Cohan employs a flexible definition of the word “first.”

The Gottlieb Report

Cohan’s other departure from chronology comes with the “straight-from-memory” report, from which he repeatedly quotes. An example of just how deceptively Cohan employs the document comes in his description of the Himan/Gottlieb meeting with Mangum on 16 March 2006. At that meeting, Himan’s contemporaneous notes were enormously helpful to the defense, since they provided Mangum’s wholly unrealistic descriptions of the three “attackers.” Gottlieb’s report, on the other hand, awkwardly papered over the myriad inconsistencies in Mangum’s stories that had emerged in the four months between the meeting and the ex-sergeant penning his “straight-from-memory” document.

Which description does Cohan use? Gottlieb’s, for the first two pages of his discussion of the interview session: “The detectives [sic] noted that she ‘had a very slow gate that was obviously painful while she was walking.” That “note” never came from Himan, despite what Cohan asserts. Cohan reproduces Gottlieb’s claim of bruising—even though contemporaneous photos showed no such thing.

Most important, Cohan leads (p. 62) with the months-after-the-fact descriptions provided in the Gottlieb report before mentioning the wholly contradictory descriptions recorded at the time by Himan. Readers are never informed that Gottlieb’s “descriptions” allegedly came straight from memory, months after the fact, after serious questions had been raised about the IDs of Seligmann and Finnerty. This is the precise formulation employed in the ridiculed Duff Wilson piece from the Times—although at least Wilson, unlike Cohan, conceded that he was quoting from a document produced months after the fact.

Even out of chronological order, Cohan never mentions how the report was constructed (months after the events it allegedly described, and not from contemporaneous hand-written notes). Perhaps to avoid certain criticism on this front, he tries to cover himself by mentioning, on page 401, “Gottlieb’s newly-drafted thirty-three page chronology of the case”—without ever explaining how this was the document that he was using, and credibly, hundreds of pages earlier in the book.

Cohan, obviously, knew of the questions behind the straight-from-memory “report.” His decision to conceal the Gottlieb document’s provenance can only be interpreted as malicious.

Cohan protects Gottlieb’s credibility on one other occasion. Fitting his pattern of minimizing or just excluding material that doesn’t look good, Cohan describes the grand jury appearance (p. 260) while ignoring the critical summary in Gottlieb’s deposition to the bar. He thus can ignore the fact that Gottlieb gave false testimony—that Mangum’s story was consistent after she spoke to Levicy—to the grand jury.

Nifong: The Investigation & Motivation

In the Gottlieb report, the officer recalled a meeting with Capt. Lamb in which the DPD was hereafter required to report to Nifong. And after that day (27 March), every major investigative decision in the case (most notably the decision to send DNA samples to inquiry and the rigged April 2006 photo array) received Nifong’s input.

Nifong doesn’t deny that his meeting with Lamb occurred, but Cohan gives Nifong a chance (unchallenged) to walk back the record. He was merely, he told Cohan, offering himself for “advice” (at that point, he hadn’t handled a criminal case in nearly a decade: what sort of advice could he give to police?). Nifong maintained that he “never” (p. 81) would have told Lamb he was going to be running the case. Cohan lets Nifong have the last word on the question, and then simply moves on, without asking him to reconcile his after-the-fact denial with the record of the case.

(Cohan gives no indication of having tried to contact Lamb to discuss Nifong’s sudden memory change.)

Why did Nifong take such a prominent role in the criminal investigation? According to Cohan, “his critics also thought they understood why he did it.” He was “trailing badly”—scare quotes in original—in the polls. The wording suggests his “critics” were wrong, without the author ever quite coming out and saying so, and without either citing a poll showing Nifong winning before the case erupted, or explaining how Nifong could have won given his fundraising had dried up.

So did politics motivate Nifong? Who knows? How should anyone expect the “definitive, magisterial” account to answer the question? Cohan just moves on, as he regularly does whenever he can’t come up with an excuse for Nifong’s conduct.

Mangum

Cohan notes that Mangum did not present a convincing version of events to the special prosecutors, but he appears to attribute her difficulties to the prosecutors themselves (especially Jim Coman, who had the temerity to ask Mangum to address the myriad contradictions in her myriad stories). Without revealing his source for the information, Cohan writes that Mangum “felt disrespected, a feeling she had never felt from either Nifong or the police.”

Perhaps the above, which does not appear in quotation marks in the book, came from Cohan’s prison interview with Mangum, before her release on bail and subsequent conviction for murder. During this discussion, Mangum tells Cohan yet another story, different from those she offered to Levicy, Gottlieb, or the special prosecutors—that she was assaulted with a broomstick, and that her exam at Duke Hospital found “wooden pieces” in her vaginal and anal area. Of course no “wooden pieces” were found.

This, at least briefly, appears to be too much even for Cohan, who points out that no wooden pieces were found.

But he quickly moves along and allows Mangum to tell the rest of her new story—including a wild claim (p. 520) that Reade Seligmann carried her to the car. There is, of course, a photo of the two guys that carried her to the car (neither was Seligmann), since Seligmann was nowhere near the house at the time. Cohan doesn’t point that out in the passage. No need, apparently, to excessively undermine the credibility of the book’s victim.

The impression that readers come away from the framing of the passage is not that Mangum is delusional, but that something probably happened to her, and she might now just be a little confused. Indeed, Cohan, who insisted in his TV appearances in labeling Mangum as a “victim,” has recently termed her “quite poised, quite intelligent, quite articulate, and quite clear thinking.”

A reminder: Cohan here is describing a convicted murderer, who had a massive—albeit closed—psychological case file.