Selena on Selena

In her screed against the lacrosse team in Sunday’s New York Times, Selena Roberts presented the new “party line”—she (and the Times) have been criticizing the culture, not the crime. She writes:

To many, the alleged crime and culture are intertwined . . . but the alleged crime and the culture are mutually exclusive.

In the first section of the item quoted above, Roberts, perhaps, might have been speaking of this columnist, who wrote on March 31, 2006:

The season is over, but the paradox lives on in Duke’s lacrosse team, a group of privileged players of fine pedigree entangled in a night that threatens to belie their social standing as human beings.

And this:

But why is it so hard to gather the facts? Why is any whisper of a detail akin to snitching? “The idea of breaking ranks within a team is identified as weak,’’ said Katie Gentile, an assistant professor and the director of the Women’s Center at John Jay College, adding, ‘‘The bottom line is, your self-esteem is more valuable to you than someone else’s life.”

And this:

Does President Brodhead dare to confront the culture behind the lacrosse team’s code of silence or would he fear being ridiculed as a snitch?

It certainly seems that the above columnist is among those that Roberts now criticizes for contending that “the alleged crime and culture are intertwined.”

The name of that March 31, 2006 columnist?

Selena Roberts.