In early April 2006, Eric Avram, a senior producer for ABC News, led a reporting team to Durham, North Carolina to cover a controversial, high-profile story. A 27-year-old woman, hired as an exotic dancer at a private party for the Duke University lacrosse team, alleged that she had been brutalized and gang-raped in a bathroom by several members of the team. The athletes adamantly denied the charge.

As the story heated up, reporters from across the country closed in on Durham, competing fiercely to unearth new details. Early news reports were, in general, sympathetic to the alleged victim. The case seemed to support claims of a disturbing new trend in competitive college sports—a growing sense of impunity among star athletes. Race and class tensions also featured prominently: The accuser was African American and a single mother of two; the accused, white athletes at an expensive, prestigious university.

In an effort to shift the tide, defense attorneys for the Duke athletes released several pieces of new information, including a set of time-stamped photographs, taken at the lacrosse team party, which appeared to contradict aspects of the accuser’s account, especially with respect to the timeline. Avram was angling to obtain copies of these photographs, and thought he had persuaded the lawyers to release them to ABC for an exclusive report before distributing them to other journalists. In fact, the lawyers emailed the photos to him just after NBC News aired them in an early morning broadcast on April 19. But if ABC moved fast, it could still include the photos in its own West Coast morning newscast, due to air in two hours.

Avram wanted to use the photographs and did not believe that to do so would breach the ABC News policies about rape coverage—but he had to admit, the photos fell in a gray area. Under ABC policy, news reports shielded the identity of any alleged rape victim unless he or she agreed to go public. ^[1] One of the lacrosse party photos showed the alleged victim performing an exotic dance, another showed her in a state of apparent intoxication, and a third showed her minutes after she said the rape had occurred, rifling through her purse, showing no obvious signs of distress. Avram thought that ABC could stay true to its policy by blurring the alleged victim’s face in the photos (as NBC had done)—but to his knowledge, the network had rarely, if ever, done so in a rape case.

It was also ABC’s policy to refrain from publishing details about the life of the accuser—to avoid putting the victim “on trial.” Did the photos cross that line? On the other hand, having freely reported the woman’s accusations, was it an act of bias against the accused to withhold the photos? Finally, in weighing the question, did it matter that NBC had already made the photos public? At 7 a.m., Avram called Kerry Smith, senior vice president of ABC News and head of its Editorial Quality Office, for guidance. He made a strong pitch for using the photos, but placed the final judgment in her hands. Smith had just one hour to make the immediate decision—whether ABC should air the photos in its West Coast morning newscast.