Duke lacrosse: After the rape scandal

Tony McDevitt already has a Wall Street job waiting for him. But the 23-year-old graduate of both Duke University and Philadelphia's William Penn Charter School has some unfinished business to tend to first.

He wants to win an NCAA men's lacrosse championship.

A preseason all-American defenseman, McDevitt was granted a fifth year of eligibility by the NCAA in May in compensation for losing the 2006 season after false charges that three teammates had raped an exotic dancer.

While chasing his championship dream, McDevitt, the first in his family to graduate from college, is also pursuing his master's of business adminstration at the university's prestigous Fuqua Business School.

It's been almost two years since Duke lacrosse was at the center of a lurid story, the since-debunked claim of a dancer that she was sexually assaulted by members of the team that had hired her and another dancer for an off-campus party. Three players from that team were charged with rape, but the charges were ultimately dismissed.

McDevitt is among more than 30 players from that 2006 team who are seeking one more chance at a national championship after losing last year's title game to Johns Hopkins, 12-11.

"It was fair and just," McDevitt said of the extended eligibility. "We deserved it. At the same time, and we've been saying it to each other, the fifth-year guys have been saying that we're playing with house money."

The players, however, haven't forgotten. Thirty-eight members of the 2006 team, including McDevitt, filed a civil lawsuit seeking unspecified damages in U.S. District Court in North Carolina late last month against, among others, Duke, Duke president Richard Brodhead and other school officials, employees at Duke University Hospital who treated the woman, the City of Durham, and members of the city Police Department and state District Attorney's Office.

On the field, the 6-foot, 210-pound McDevitt is healthy again after playing through knee problems last season, when the Blue Devils were top 10 both in scoring defense and man-down defense. This season, Duke is 3-0 and preparing for tomorrow's game against visiting Lehigh.

"He's a role model to younger players who see him and say, 'You can get it done,' " Duke coach John Danowski said. "You can get it done in the weight room and on the field."

"One thing with Tony," said his mother, Michelle, "and it's always been the case with him - he's resilient."

McDevitt and his teammates passed their ultimate test after the rape accusations tore the Duke campus and the city of Durham apart. The dancer who made the accusation is black; all but one of the 47 lacrosse players on that team are white.

The city's district attorney at the time, Mike Nifong, insisted that a rape had taken place. Faculty members at Duke, members of the community, and more than a few national media pundits took Nifong's assertions and ran with them, convinced that the players were covering up for their own. The university canceled the remainder of the 2006 season and forced the former coach, Mike Pressler, to resign.

Waiting for the next shoe to drop - and the next indictment to come - was the hardest part.

"I keep it close to my heart and in my mind, because I still use it as a motivation in the sense that you have to cherish everything," McDevitt said. "Everything was in chaos. We didn't know if we were going to play, if we were going to have a coach. It was a really scary time. . . . You sign up to play and go to school, and half of that was taken away from us."

McDevitt became one of the team's spokesmen, pushing his teammates and the university's attorneys to be proactive in proclaiming their innocence.

"He was always a leader," said Rob Hitschler, a close friend of McDevitt's who now captains Penn's wrestling team. Hitschler and McDevitt met at Penn Charter, where they played football, For McDevitt, a linebacker, football was his first love. Also on that team was Matt Ryan, now a Boston College star who may be the first quarterback taken in next month's NFL draft, and Sean Singletary, an NBA point-guard prospect at Virginia.

"If there's a problem or pressure or anything, he doesn't mind putting it on his shoulders and taking one for the group," Hitschler said.

Michelle McDevitt, who is a supervisor in the advertising department at The Inquirer, said: "We went through it up here in Philadelphia. I could shut the TV off and not listen to the Nancy Graces of the world. I could put the paper down if I didn't like the article. It was in his face."

Danowski, hired in July 2006 when the program was reinstated, immediately sought out McDevitt.

"I saw from him somebody I could trust right away, someone I could ask questions and get an honest answer," Danowski said. "I knew there was no agendas to him and that he would tell me what he thought. In the beginning, there was so many things going on from so many different angles, you needed to be able to hunker down and have people that you could trust."

The rape claim famously unraveled. The accuser had told different investigators different versions. Nifong's certainty dissolved, along with his credibility. It became clear that he had gone public with accusations that were supported by no physical evidence and that he had refused to hear evidence that supported the players' assertions of innocence.

The rape charges against the three players were dropped on Dec. 22, 2006, and all additional charges were dropped in April 2007. Nifong was ultimately disbarred, cited for criminal contempt of court, and sentenced to a day in prison with a $500 fine.

McDevitt said he did not harbor ill will toward anyone who thought he and his teammates were guilty of something - even the "Group of 88," Duke professors who signed a full-page advertisement in the school paper in April 2006 entitled, "What Does a Social Disaster Sound Like?" and detailing sexism and racism suffered by minority and women students at the university.

Some who signed the ad have since claimed that it did not refer specifically to the rape accusations or pass judgment on the lacrosse team.

"People are entitled to their opinion," McDevitt said. "You'd like to think that people hold positions at schools, where parents and kids trust they're going to teach the right way . . . that they would withhold judgment and wait for the facts to come out. That was disappointing to me."

Many of the players are firing back now with the lawsuit, seeking damages for various alleged misconduct by all of the officials, though they did not file charges against either the woman who made the rape claim or Nifong, who has filed for bankruptcy and thus cannot be sued for damages.

Some parents have joined the lawsuit, but Michelle and Daniel McDevitt did not.

Tony McDevitt said he did not "have enough knowledge about it to talk at length about" the lawsuit.

But his future is bright. He already has his undergraduate degree in history, with the MBA to follow. He has ideas about new businesses.

And what will McDevitt recall when he thinks of his college days?

"We experienced something a little bit different," he said. "But I'm all right with that."