DURHAM, N.C. – I don’t know where the truth lies in the rape allegations that have made this town the focus of panting media coverage. But I do know this: The woman who says she was assaulted and the Duke lacrosse players who were in the house where the alleged attack occurred are at the very least guilty of bad judgment.

I know saying this will make more than a few people cringe. Some will think I’m about to blame the alleged victim. Others will worry that I’ve prejudged the young men who have been caught up in this sex scandal – two of whom have been charged in this case. But that’s not where I’m headed.

Instead, I’m talking about what was on the minds of the people caught up in the ugly drama that brought them together the night of March 13.

The lawyers representing Duke’s lacrosse players say the young men did nothing wrong. They say no rape – and no consensual sex – took place between the 27-year-old black woman and the white Duke students she says raped her. Supporters of the woman counter that she’s a good person who has no reason to falsely accuse these young men.

All of this begs a question: How did these people cross paths that night?

The woman, a student at North Carolina Central University, a historically black higher education school in Durham, is a mother of two who moonlights as a strip dancer. She was hired by one of the students to perform at a party the lacrosse players had at an off-campus house. That’s a nice way of saying she agreed to take off her clothes for a group of rowdy, beer-swilling college jocks in return for money.

That was bad judgment.

Sure, I know she needed the money. And no amount of bad judgment by a woman should be used to blame her for the criminal behavior of an attacker. But any woman who agrees to strip for a group of testosterone-fired young men is rolling the dice.

The lacrosse players at Duke are largely young men from middle-class and well-to-do families. But they are, collectively, a group of men who have behaved badly.

In recent years, 41 of Duke’s lacrosse players have been charged by local police with misdemeanor offenses, ranging from illegal alcohol possession to public urination. Half of the current crop of Duke lacrosse players have been cited by university officials for misconduct on campus.

The 47 lacrosse players who attended the party – if that’s what you want to call a group of young men who came together for a night of hard drinking and ogling of a stripper – also used bad judgment. In doing so, they stopped being students of a prestigious school and slipped into the bog where the incorrigible dwell.

The irony of all of this is that while people argue about who’s right and who’s wrong in this case, virtually nothing is being said about the bad judgment that brought the woman and the lacrosse players together. And that’s a real problem.