This week in Newsday, columnist Ellis Henican wrote about the Duke lacrosse team, and the accusation made by an exotic dancer that three of the team members raped her. Mr. Henican alluded to the Tom Wolfe bestseller "I Am Charlotte Simmons" which describes a culture of debauchery on college campuses, especially among the members of sports teams.

Clearly the lacrosse team had been behaving badly by holding parties at which there was underage drinking (a warning had been issued by the school about the team's behavior). No one denies that the hiring of young women "performers" for the party was sheer stupidity, for which the team should probably be sanctioned.

But a better Tom Wolfe literary allusion could be made about the indictment of the two players: their arrests are strikingly similar to the arrest of Sherman McCoy in "Bonfire of the Vanities."

In "Bonfire" the Bronx District Attorney, who is up for re-election, rejoices that he has at last found "The Great White Defendant." Here was a defendant who was white, wealthy, from another area and could bring national headlines at a time when the prosecutor was facing a challenging election. What's not to like?

In real life, Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong is up for re-election in a couple of weeks and Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann are white kids from wealthy out-of-state families. It doesn't seem to matter that there appears to be little evidence against them, and mounting evidence that they may not even have been present during the time of the alleged attack.

Last week, before the arrests, the New York Times opined, "How Mr. Nifong, a 55-year-old lifelong resident of North Carolina, conducts himself and what decisions he makes in the next few weeks could determine the future of his political career. For now, the Duke case and the election are intertwined."

In the end, a jury will weigh the evidence against the young men and determine guilt or innocence. But in the court of public opinion, damage to the defendants has already been done because the prosecutor was in a hurry to indict.

And nothing will ever repair that damage.

Meg Morgan Norris