The alleged rape of a young black woman by a party of rich white sports students lays bare America's attitudes to race and masculinity

I wrote here not long ago about Duke University, a campus in North Carolina that I had just visited and which must be the only academic institution in the world to feature a huge statue of its founder with a cigar in his hand: it was originally started in 1838 with huge amounts of tobacco money, at a time when slavery reigned supreme in the tobacco fields of the Deep South. Although Duke is not technically one of the eight Ivy League colleges, most rankings place it among the top half-dozen or so in the country: like the Ivy Leaguers, it reeks of wealth and privilege. The college has 217 buildings sprawled around 8,709 leafy acres, and its endowment is no less than $3.8 billion.

That said, I have been surprised to see a news story about Duke take on a life of its own in the past two months - featuring on coast-to-coast television news, front pages everywhere, and in scores of papers including the Washington Post and the New York Times. To me, at first, the story merely centred around a tawdry but familiar kind of episode: one or two of a bunch of student athletes, or "jocks", stood accused of raping a woman at a drunken student party.

I was wrong, though. If this had happened at the University of New Hampshire, say, I suspect it would rate a couple of lines at most. But because it concerns Duke, it brings to the surface subliminal fault lines of the nation, which are historical in origin but still have present-day ramifications, and which Americans today prefer to forget: rampant class and privilege, poverty, master-servant racism and resentment, the forcing of sex by white men on black women, problem drinking, and the destructive jock culture that is so peculiarly unique to America.

It is proving ever harder to establish what actually happened, and for many the truth will never be satisfactorily proven. But the basic facts are clear: using a false name, a co-captain of the Duke lacrosse team booked two "exotic dancers" (as the prim American media insist on calling strippers) from a local escort agency to entertain his team at a party on 13 March. The party took place at a house, across the road from the campus, rented by three of the players. The team consists of 47 men, all but one of them white; both women were black and students at the nearby, traditionally black, North Carolina Central University. The women were to be paid $400 each for a two-hour performance.

Drinking at the house at 610 North Buchanan Boulevard started as early as 2pm, and by the time the women arrived at about 11.30 that evening 41 of the team were in full jock-party mode. The "performance" started at around midnight but within a minute or two got out of hand: according to the women, they were called "niggers" and one of them was told, "Hey, bitch, thank your grandpa for my nice cotton shirt" (an allusion to cotton-picking slaves). A drunken young man picked up a broom handle, one said, and threatened: "I'm going to shove this up you."

The women retreated and at least one locked herself into a bathroom. Over the next few minutes, according to the district attorney and one or both of the women (their statements have been conflicting), members of the team then forced their way in. In the clinical, yet lip-smacking, words of the male prosecutor, one of the women - a 27-year-old, single mother-of-two - was then targeted and three or more members of the team "forcefully held her legs and sexually assaulted her anally, vaginally and orally".

In a country in which there are as many as 2.1 million rapes every year, according to figures from the US department of health and human services, why is there so much interest in this one? First, there is that unavoidable ghost of racism: in the US, most white people perceive rape as a crime perpetrated by blacks on whites, but historically the reverse has been true. A recent survey found white DNA in 30 per cent of the nation's blacks, much of it resulting from centuries of white men taking sexual advantage of black women (as did even the supposedly enlightened Thomas Jefferson, for example). Annual fees for Duke's 6,107 undergraduate students amount to more than $44,000 per year; in the nearby town of Durham, which is 45 per cent black but has affluent white pockets, the median family income is $43,337. NCCU is just three miles across the tracks from Duke but is otherwise worlds away.

Second, class. Lacrosse is a sport almost entirely confined to private schools in the north-east, and very few white American kids, let alone blacks, ever get the chance to play it; the sport is a phenomenon of America's white elite, one with an aura almost like that of polo. The three young men so far charged all went to expensive, private, all-boy schools and are members of wealthy families. The father of the reputed ringleader, 20-year-old Reade Seligmann, is a Wall Street financier and the whole family summers at the $4.3m Seligmann home in the Hamptons. The mother of the latest man to be charged, 23-year-old David Evans, is a DC lobbyist who interned for Richard Nixon; Evans, like four other players in the Duke team, went to a notoriously jockish Washington-area boys' school called Landon.

To say the young men hail from backgrounds in which entitlement is taken for granted, therefore, is to put it mildly. But then the peculiarly American cult of jockishness compounds that sense of entitlement. Despite appearances to the contrary, lacrosse is a violent game that attracts the most oafish jocks. Absurdly indulged, they are hugely sought after by colleges, as well as by many young female students ("lacrosstitutes", as they are known at Duke), in a way that is unimaginably odd to the rest of the world; Duke alone spends $39.8m annually on sports.

This jock culture, exemplified by these pathetic young men who apparently still had to pay for their sexual gratification, is captured well by Tom Wolfe in his novel I Am Charlotte Simmons. Wolfe - I am not a fan, but make an exception in this case - actually based his novel on Duke, but on its basketball rather than lacrosse team. The culture is a self-sustaining one that requires a subconscious collusion between students, parents and colleges agreeing that US student sport is actually of supreme importance. In reality, however, the culture stunts emotional growth and perpetuates generations of immature men. American college students take longer than their European counterparts to grow up, but the elite jocks lead even more artificial and pretentious lifestyles, acting out adolescent fantasies of what tough masculinity is all about but, in reality, merely postponing their entry into real life. Peeing out of windows, for example, is considered a wonderfully abusive, carefree and masculine prank. A tiny handful will go on to make huge sums in professional sports; the rest will almost certainly follow their fathers into boring, drudge jobs in the world of finance; then, in generational turn, they themselves will live vicariously through their own sons' jockish exploits. Thus the problem endlessly recycles itself, and tragedies such as that of 13-14 March keep happening.

In the meantime, lives have been ruined and reputations trashed. Predictably, the young men's families have hired expensive and sophisticated lawyers who stay one step ahead of the prosecutor. Truth is always the first thing to vanish in such heavily publicised cases. Defence lawyers have already leaked that vaginal swabs taken from the 27-year-old woman show that she did have sex that night, but willingly with a known partner - and that there was no DNA link with any of the lacrosse team members. They have let it be known that she had a criminal record, too - like the other woman, who was convicted in 2001 for embezzling $25,000 from her employers. And that the second woman is trying to sell her story through a New York PR agency.

In a determined and methodical media campaign to change minds before the case goes before a jury, the defence has also released photos from digital cameras with times imprinted on them, plus detailed mobile-phone records, which seem to indicate - quite convincingly, I must say - that Seligmann, at least, could not have been present when the rapes supposedly occurred. It's getting really dirty, too: the defence is trying to subpoena the 27-year-old woman's medical records on the grounds that "the complaining witness has suffered from mental and emotional problems" and "may have been committed, at least once, to a hospital or drug-treatment programme".

Probably the least harmful denouement for all concerned would be a civil settlement in which the accuser(s) would be paid millions in exchange for withdrawing their allegations, though such an outcome would require the co-operation of the now-rampant DA. In the meantime, the young men are out on $400,000 bail each, and the young women are hiding from the increasingly hungry and hostile media. It is a saga that says so much about America, and how its past can come back to haunt its present.

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