As always you want to believe women while also holding true to the mantra innocent until proven guilty for men. You can do both, regardless of how hard it seems for others.
Obviously for Maggette if this is true, it doesn’t matter when it happened it would make him a horrific person, but it is hard to defend yourself against an 20-year-old accusation.
Here is what we know.
The woman who has accused Virginia’s lieutenant governor, Justin E. Fairfax, of raping her said that a former N.B.A. player, Corey Maggette, raped her at Duke University 20 years ago and that school officials did not pursue the claim, according to a childhood friend of the woman and Facebook messages the woman exchanged with another friend.
Nancy Erika Smith, the lawyer for the woman who accused Mr. Maggette and Mr. Fairfax, Meredith Watson, said in a statement Friday that Ms. Watson had been raped by a Duke basketball player during her sophomore year but did not name the player. Ms. Smith also said that Ms. Watson had reported her rape to an unspecified dean at the university, but that the dean had “discouraged her from pursuing the claim further.”
Years before Ms. Watson came forward as the second woman to publicly accuse Mr. Fairfax of sexual assault, inflaming a political crisis in Virginia, she told multiple friends that she had been raped by Mr. Maggette, according to one of those friends and Facebook messages exchanged with another.
R. Stanton Jones, a partner at the law firm Arnold & Porter in Washington who grew up with Ms. Watson in Baltimore, said she told him that she had been raped by Mr. Maggette. She told Mr. Jones about it while he and Ms. Watson were both home for the summer in 2001, he said.
“Meredith told me she had been raped twice at Duke,” Mr. Jones said. “And she told me that one of the men who raped her was the Duke basketball player Corey Maggette. That was a name I knew because I’m a basketball fan.”
Ms. Kessler said that after being discouraged by the dean, Ms. Watson decided not to report her accusation to the police.
Once again, you to believe her but also give Maggette who has never been in any trouble the presumption of innocence. I highly doubt there will be any way to know who is telling the truth.