The woman who falsely accused Duke lacrosse players of raping her two decades ago walked free from a North Carolina prison on Friday after serving time for the slaying of her boyfriend.
Crystal Mangum, a 47-year-old former exotic dancer, wore a gray sweatshirt and khaki pants as she left the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women in Raleigh at about 9:49 a.m. ET.
She was led into a white North Carolina Department of Adult Correction car and a parole officer then drove her to Durham, where Mangum will be living with a friend, agency spokesperson Brad Deen said.
She’ll be living under terms of her parole for nine months, Deen added.
She’d been serving time on second-degree murder conviction for the 2011 slaying of boyfriend Reginald Daye.
Mangum was thrust into the national spotlight when she and another dancer performed at party thrown by Duke lacrosse players on March 13, 2006, and then accused three of the athletes of assaulting her.
The allegations against the three players touched off a national conversation on hot-button topics such as sex work, race, gender and class.
Mangum later admitted to making false allegations, but those lies had done their damage.
“I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t, and that was wrong,” she told podcaster Katerena DePasquale’s “Let’s Talk with Kat” in a December 2024 interview.
“I betrayed the trust of a lot of other people who believed in me and made up a story that wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God, and that was wrong when God already loved me for who I was,” she said.
Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong was found to have withheld evidence from defense lawyers that could have cleared the men much earlier. The prosecutor was disbarred in 2007.
Mangum was convicted in 2013 for second-degree murder in the stabbing of her boyfriend Daye to death in April 2011. She was sentenced to more than 14 years in prison.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
