Crystal Does the Party

Mangum opens her “invent-all” memoir with her latest story about her introduction into the world of exotic dancing; and then a wildly non-credible recapitulation of the party.

Here’s the serial fabricator on how she allegedly got into exotic dancing.

It would be much more money than I could ever earn up on stage, and I didn't like the atmosphere in the clubs that much anyway. The one thing she pointed out about me was that I did not have a pimp like the other girls at the club. I wasn't a prostitute and wouldn't have all of what that meant hanging over me . . . Since I was going into this strictly as a performer, sex with complete strangers was not something I was ever willing to consider.

So from where, exactly, did all that DNA from multiple unidentified males originate? Mangum doesn’t even bother to try to lie: she just doesn’t mention the finding.

Here’s how Mangum describes getting to the party:

I know there has been some discussion and eyebrows raised about having people drive me to my gigs. Having a driver is part of the business for a vast majority of the girls. Not only does the driver make sure you get where you need to go but also serves as protection.

Mangum leaves out a rather significant point: the reason she needed a driver was because she had no drivers’ license. She lost her license after stealing a taxi in a drunken outburst and then trying to run down a police officer.

Her usual driver, she recalls, was fellow NCCU student Jerriel Johnson: “Jerriel also knew my boyfriend and that made it more comfortable for Mat to know that I was being watched after.”

Johnson, of course, is the person who admitted in his police statement that he had sexual relations with Mangum. The serial fabricator doesn’t say if they told her boyfriend about their affair.

Mangum devotes the bulk of her party chapter, however, to a blow-by-blow refutation of the Attorney General’s report, as if Roy Cooper, his prosecutors, and the State Bureau of Investigation had simply made up their report.

Writes she,

Frustrated and not exactly sure where 610 North Buchanan was, I called my dad for better directions. He pointed us right to where we needed to go. We arrived at the house at about 11:15 pm.

Mangum had previously claimed she arrived at the party around 11.45—a version of events corroborated by Roberts, neighbor Brian Bissey, her cellphone records, and the credit card receipts of “driver” Brian Taylor. In her December 2006 attempted frame, Mangum revised her arrival time to 11.00pm—to make up for the fact that both Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty had airtight alibis for the time of the alleged “rape” based on her 11.45 arrival. Now she’s split the difference and claimed she arrived at 11.15pm—which would still suggest (based on her cellphone records) that she was either planning or performing a nude dance as she happily chatted on the phone with her father, asking him for directions to 610 N. Buchanan.

Mangum darkly hints at a date rape drug, since “we will never be sure what was in the drinks that Dan gave us.” And yet she describes herself throughout the chapter as not under the effects of any drug.

Shortly after her arrival at the house, Mangum recalls racial epithets—joining Mike Nifong and Duff Wilson of the New York Times as the only people still clinging to this version of events:

Then I heard it for the first time; someone in the crowd was referring to us as “black bitches.” It was not said just once. It was almost as if that was our names.

And yet: Kim Roberts—a person, it’s perfectly clear, who was extremely sensitive to racial insults—never mentioned such obviously inflammatory behavior. Nor did Devon Sherwood—the African-American player on the team, who was present for the party.

Mangum continues her long-existing (and scarcely credible) pattern of treating Kim Roberts as the more disgusting of the two dancers:

We had only been performing a matter of minutes and Nikki had taken things way beyond anything I had planned. I glanced and saw her panties lying beside her.

Yet Mangum has to come up with some way to account for the fact that photos showed her both on the floor in both a sexually suggestive and seemingly drunk state. In an almost hilarious passage, Mangum claims that her utter shock (shock!) at Roberts’ loose behavior—and not her drunkenness/drug-induced status—caused her to fall on the floor and appear to be either drunk or high:

The way I ended up on the floor was completely an accident and the result of my complete and utter surprise at what was going on.

Again, all who believe that can sign up for Mike Nifong’s campaign to become the next Supreme Court Justice.

How did the dance come to a conclusion?

“We need to get out of here. They are going to try and use that broom on us,” Nikki screamed at me over the chaos. She looked scared and I felt it. By now I heard the words nigger, bitch, and other names. They were definitely not happy with the performance.

Again, Roberts—a person, it’s perfectly clear, who was extremely sensitive to racial insults—never mentioned such racist insults occurring inside, during the party. Nor did she ever tell police that she had said anything like, “We need to get out of here. They are going to try and use that broom on us.”

This version of events, it seems, combines the “timid Crystal” presented in the April 6, 2006 police report and the “Crystal-changes-her-story-to-address-all-the exculpatory-evidence” Mangum offered in the Linwood Wilson December 2006 frame.

Mangum, who admitted that she closely followed media reports about the case, sometimes attempts to fit into her story known facts that undermined her myriad claims. For instance, photos showed Mangum banging on the back door, with a smile on her face, trying to get back into the house around 12.30am. But Matt Zash had locked the door, in part to keep the clearly imbalanced Mangum out.

In Mangum’s new version of events, Zash locked the door after she returned to the house: “I felt even more in a panic when I saw one of the guys go to the door we had just entered, to close and lock it behind us. That struck me as odd since people had been moving freely in and out all night. That move seemed especially sinister in light of the way everyone was acting.”

How, then, do we explain the photos of Mangum outside the locked door? Perhaps the woman who alleged rape-by-levitation also believes she could simultaneously be inside and outside the house.

Mangum falls back on her April 6, 2006 version of the beginning of the “rape,” when one of her “attackers” uttered a 1950s-movie line: “Sweetheart, you can’t leave.” And such almost comical lines came amidst a wild party: “It seemed as though the entire crowd was going to converge on us. They were so much more vocal than the people I danced for at the Platinum Club, and they looked as though they wanted to provoke a confrontation . . . we were confronted by a group of angry guys. It seemed as though they were yelling and screaming at the tops of their lungs . . . The crowd was extremely agitated . . . I could hear yelling in the other room. It sounded like the way people scream and cheer at a football game.”

And here are some of the actual photos of these “angry guys” at this “agitated” party.

Wild, indeed.

As AG Cooper noted in his remarks, perhaps Mangum—due to her myriad psychological problems—actually believes some, or all, or the myriad, mutually contradictory, stories she has told. But the photos don’t exactly corroborate her wild claims.

Those who desire a minute-by-minute recapitulation of the party can find it in the AG’s report. The document directly contradicts virtually everything Mangum claimed in her “invent-all” memoir.