Yesterday a man who signed himself "dukeno1" and identified himself as a personal friend of William D. Cohan wrote a long 5-star review of THE PRICE OF SILENCE, that seriously dishonest book, so bad that Brian Lamb devoted most of an hour of an interview with Stuart Taylor, Jr., to correct what Cohan had said. Lamb twice mentioned the [then] 42 1-star reviews on Amazon, which I can tell you was not an organized flaming, though I know three, I think, of the reviewers because they, like me, keep informed on LieStoppers. Well, yesterday when I saw the new temperate but very ignorant review by dukeno1 I saw that Mr. Parrish had already responded, very calmly and rationally, and another person, in the same tone, but talking about what she would have felt if a child of hers set to a very expensive school had been abandoned to a rogue prosecutor.
Yesterday I added this on Amazon. It begins with a several line quotation from the start of dukeno1's review:
Hershel Parker says:
"We were told we [had] to go turn ourselves in for something we didn't do,' [Reade] Seligmann said."
Picture an intelligent, self-aware undergraduate, never in trouble before, and with a firm alibi against a rape charge having to proceed to court far outside his home district to respond to an indictment, encircled by a media, community and professorial frenzy. Athlete or not, he would be frightened to say the least."
Dukeno1, this is a promising start: you seem set to understand just how terrifying the accusations of rape were to the lacrosse players, or at least one of them, and perhaps set to understand that their families might also be horrified of what might happen to their sons immediately (what with the banner CASTRATE and other abominations, in some of which the Duke faculty participated) and what might happen if any of the sons were to be wrongfully convicted and jailed for three decades--perhaps until a wrongfully-convicted son would be of the age the parents were in 2006. But you don't seem to have imagined the terror under which the lacrosse team and their families lived, and also the terror under which the coach and his family lived. Look at Janet Pressler's letter to Brodhead, if you think the false accusations and the manipulations of the rogue prosecutor were not compounded by the rush to judgment by almost everyone at Duke from Steel and Brodhead on down. The lives of these people were altered forever, and now your good friend Cohan has poured heaps of burning coals on their heads, all over again.
Now, this morning, dukeno1's 5-star review has disappeared and with it our comments. I of course kept a copy of mine but not dukeno1's. I think this friend of Cohan's had no idea of the heartlessness of his friend's book until we pointed it out.
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