“Quisling,” for example, refers to the Norwegian leader who truckled to the Nazis, and has come to mean anyone who acts in a treasonous manner.
“Borking,” recalls Robert Bork, who was refused a Supreme Court appointment after some pointed inquiries. It signifies the process whereby an official is rejected by a committee of judges.
“Nixonian” means imperial, guarded, paranoid.
And now comes “Nifonging.” Anyone familiar with the so-called Duke Rape Case knows exactly what that word means — betrayal of public office, disgraceful conduct on the part of a district attorney, and a sense of cheapness akin to spraying graffiti on a windshield.
The man behind the eponym is the district attorney of Durham, North Carolina, and an official in deep trouble.
It didn’t start that way. A black stripper claimed to have been raped by several white players on the Duke lacrosse team. Nifong decided to go after them — and, perhaps not coincidentally, to placate his restive, largely African-American constituency.
The trouble was, Mike Nifong had no evidence that the youths were guilty. What to do? Why, obey the advice of Beaumarchais, author of The Marriage of Figaro: “Villify! Villify! Some of it will always stick.”
To make sure that it stuck, Nifong disregarded or suppressed exculpatory evidence, all the while suggesting to the press that the lacrosse players were as guilty as hell. In addition to suggesting how the rape might have occurred, he worried aloud that the accused were stonewalling, and that they had “daddies” who “could buy them expensive lawyers” and thus would be “treated differently by the court system.”
All this was too much for Nifong’s fellow Democrat, columnist Susan Estrich, who wrote “According to testimony given under oath, the head of a private DNA lab said that he and the District Attorney together agreed not to release evidence that there was DNA from other men, but not from any of the defendants, in the woman’s underwear and on her person the night of the alleged incident.” After commenting on this corruption of justice, Estrich concluded, “Enough is enough…. If ever a prosecutor had shown himself no longer capable of exercising the story of judgment required of him to be fair, it would be the prosecutor in this case.”
And now the North Carolina State Bar has accused Nifong of violating ethics rules during the numerous media interviews he self-servingly gave to various paparazzi. The Bar has charged Nifong with violating ethical rules, citing “dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation,” with conduct “prejudicial to the administration of justice,” and with making comments that could taint court proceedings and heighten “public condemnation of the accused.”
The saddest part of all this is that for decades — particularly in the south — innocent African-Americans were the ones railroaded, deprived of justice, given tainted reputations they never deserved. The DA has just produced a negative in which blacks become white, the whites, black.
The only positive thing to come out all this is a word that will now be used to indicate a parody of justice.
It will be a long time before players recover their reputations. And a longer time before some eighty-eight Duke profs, who lost no time in pointing their fingers at the accused without a scintilla of evidence beyond the fact that they were Caucasian, stop looking like biased fools. But eventually this, too, will pass.
Nifonging is forever.
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