The Price of Silence (book)

Summary

The Price of Silence is a new account of the 2006 Duke lacrosse case scandal that details the pressures faced by America's elite colleges and universities and pulls back the curtain on the larger issues of sexual misconduct, underage drinking, and bad-boy behavior—all too prevalent on campuses across the country.

The 2006 Duke lacrosse case was front-page news nationwide. Cohan feels that the true story of the alleged team rape case was never been told in its entirety and was more complex than all the reportage would indicate. The Price of Silence elaborated on what happened when the most combustible forces in American culture—unbridled ambition, intellectual elitism, athletic prowess, aggressive sexual behavior, racial bias, and absolute prosecutorial authority collided and then exploded on a powerful university campus, in the justice system, and in the media.

Controversy

There have been positive reviews of the book, as well as mixed reviews, and negative reviews, and negative blog posts highly critical of the book and Cohan's public appearances promoting it. This disparity in the tone of the reviews has been reflected in the online comment section for the book on Amazon.com. A "book swarming" theory has been proposed by Cohan in a blog post on The Huffington Post but refuted in many of the accompanying comments.

Cohan has also been criticized for not providing endnotes of definitively sourced material, or a list of interview subjects. Cohan has justified this omission in the "A note on sources" section of the book: "In an era when digital access to documents of all stripes is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, the idea of providing page after page of notes on the sources of my research—as I did in my previous three books—seems somewhat superfluous, especially when writing about events that started to unfold primarily in 2006 ... Throughout the narrative, my reliance on these articles and blogs is indicated clearly, and the vast majority of them are easily accessible to anyone online, often at little or no cost." (p. 619).

Two other issues that were discussed in detail by people who had a negative view of the book were Cohan's giving Mike Nifong long stretches to present rambling, factually-bereft defenses of his conduct and revisionist views of the case, and the fact that numerous allegations by Cohan were A) not supported with any hard facts and B) refuted by principals in the case who publicly stated that Cohan never spoke them and had fabricated his stories. In the most visible example of this, Cohan stated in his book that Governor Roy Cooper had acted against the wishes of North Carolina investigators when he dropped all charges against the Duke lacrosse players, but the investigators stated that Cooper's decision was completely correct and that Cohan's views were fiction.

Publication history

Explanation of the book's title

The "price" in the book's title refers to the alleged $60 million that Duke University paid to the three accused lacrosse players ($20 million each) with confidential terms and apparent silence provisions. The sum of money has been disputed to be actually about ⅓ that total ($18 million).

Cohan has said several times in public interviews: "That's a lot of money for a party. They bought a lot of silence with that 100 million dollars."