Andrew Klavan - Empire of Lies

"Did you report this to the police?" Patrick Piersall asked her.

"There were two policemen standing right there!" Vanessa shot back. "I said to them, 'Aren't you going to do anything?' They told me, 'We don't want this to get out of hand.' That's what they said. Those were their exact words. But then they kind of looked at each other, and they sort of cleared a way for me. I just ran out of there as fast as I could."

Casey reported all this. He quoted the speeches word for word. He described the assault on the coed start to finish. The story ran on page three of the Clarion the next day. There was the issue now, flashed up on the screen with words circled in the text: MUSLIMS. SOCIALISTS. JEWS.

The reaction on campus was swift and violent. A montage:

Newspaper boxes smashed.

Newspapers burning in wastebaskets with angry students gathered around.

Protesters outside the Clarion's office. Raised fists, bared teeth, angry signs:

RACISM! ISLAMO-PHOBIA! FASCIST PIGS! WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED BY NAZI CLARION.

Professor Freedgood accused the Clarion of violating the university's code forbidding hate speech against minorities-Muslims, in this case. Multiculturalists throughout the various humanities departments accused the paper of misrepresenting the understandable rage of the oppressed Palestinian people. Leftists-who made up 85 percent of the faculty-simply called the story "reactionary."

So far, this was all contained within the university. It wasn't reported in the local media. There was nothing on TV about it. Nothing in the papers. But then…

Ah, then, Arthur Rashid issued a statement to the press.

Now Rashid, of course, was a star in the intellectual world. Among his fellow academics, he was considered a great man. A hugely popular professor of multicultural studies, he was credited with formulating the very concept of multiculturalism in his best-selling book, Eastern Mind, Western Eyes. He was also a frequent contributor to the Times's op-ed page. The Times Sunday Book Review loved everything he wrote.

Here was his photo: a handsome, elegant-looking fellow with a Middle Easterner's olive skin and an Englishman's classic, chiseled features. His statement appeared over his face and Patrick Piersall read the words: "It is the nature of culture that it directs our words and actions even when we are not aware of its influence. I fully trust and believe that Mr. Diggs and the Clarion editors did not intend their story as an offshoot of the West's imperialist project. But equally, from my perspective, from the perspective of anyone with roots in the Middle East, how else can it be read? When any protest against Israeli actions is deemed anti-Semitic, when any attempt to give voice to the West's former colonies is cast in an ugly light, what is it but an attempt to reconquer intellectually what has been lost militarily, to crush the fragile identities of these reemergent peoples under the so-called 'civilizing' worldview of the West? I invite Mr. Diggs and his collaborators to a dialogue in the hopes of raising their awareness of the sources of their Islamo-phobic assumptions."

Well, that did it. Now the Times weighed in, too.

"A story in a school newspaper that was deemed offensive by some students of Middle Eastern descent has been denounced by one of the university's most famous professors."

It was typical Times stuff, as I now have reason to know. There were no quotes from Diggs's article. Nothing about the anti-Jewish tirades at the demonstration. Nothing about the nineteen-year-old girl terrorized and insulted and threatened with rape. They just described the Clarion piece as "controversial," and ran a lot of patient, conciliatory, reasonable-sounding quotes from their man Rashid. The overall effect was to make the reader assume that Casey Diggs must be some kind of hothead white supremacist.

It was only a small piece on page 3 of the Metro section, but it was enough to move the university to action.

Casey Diggs and his editor, Miriam Bach, were both called before the dean. Ms. Bach, a frog-faced woman with a Prince Valiant haircut, apologized at once. "I ran the story without reading it carefully enough," she told Patrick Piersall. "I didn't see how insensitive it was, and I have to take responsibility for that." She escaped punishment by printing a front-page apology. She also agreed to have the Clarion run a series of stories "celebrating the diverse cultures that make up our university." The articles included "Chador-A Source of Pride for Muslim Women" and "The Faithful Find Commercialism, Materialism Mar a Secular World."

Casey Diggs, however, did not get off so easily.

"Casey refused to apologize for telling the truth and so he was put on six months' academic probation," Piersall explained, standing before the university's bronze gates. "He was also barred from working on the paper ever again. From that point on, his life went into a downward spiral that would end… in mystery."

I zipped through the next batch of commercials: lower-your-cholest erol-while-eating-Cheese-Spray-on-your-crackers-and-watching-back-to-b ack-reruns-of-Truth-and-Justice-every-week-night. Back to the show.

Interviews. The stick-insect roommate again. Casey's disapproving older sister. His tearful mother. His square-jawed dad. All said the same: Casey changed after he was barred from the newspaper. He began drinking heavily. He frequently missed classes.

And he became obsessed with taking vengeance on Arthur Rashid.

Danger Music. A Tragic Chord. Rapid shots of the headlines on a Web site Casey founded, The Diggs Memo:

RASHID'S BOOK: INSIDIOUS ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA. RASHID: FREEDOM, BEAUTY AND REASON A WESTERN PLOT AGAINST "THE OTHER" RASHID: PALESTINIAN ATROCITIES "JUSTIFIED."

Casey received hate mail calling him a racist. Hackers brought the Web site down more than once. Students for Justice called for his expulsion.

"The university warned Casey that his Web site violated campus speech codes," Piersall told us, "but for a time they took no other action. Soon, however, the nature of Casey's accusations against Rashid changed dramatically."

More shots of the Web site:

RASHID HAS LINKS TO TERRORIST GROUP GROUP CALLED "UNIVERSAL SHARIA LAW" PLANS ATTACK ON NEW YORK SOURCES: RASHID CONTROLS USL KILLERS

"In calling Rashid a terrorist," Piersall intoned, "Casey had gone too far."

The university asked Casey to leave. There was the dean's letter to his parents: "We strongly suggest that this troubled young man be convinced to seek psychiatric care."

Now here was Piersall, back on camera, his tubby torso and dissolute features filling the wall across from me. "With his dreams in ashes, Casey's descent into alcoholism and paranoia continued. He became a shadow of his former self, drifting from place to place, relationship to relationship, bar to bar until one day… he just wasn't there at all."

Final commercial break: beer-will-get-you-laid-pills-will-help-you -sleep-and-you-can-wake-up-to-some-really-scrumptious-potato-chips.

During which, I was thinking: This isn't right. I must be getting drunk and crazy here. This can't be the same guy-the guy Serena was talking about. It can't be. I mean, if he is-if he's the guy Serena danced with-if he really was murdered in the Great Swamp-then that might mean that all these paranoid things he said about Rashid might not've been paranoid at…

But then the show started again.

The rest of the story was quickly told.

Here was Brad Faulkner, a law student and party guy. Casey stayed with him for a month after he was expelled. "Dude was seriously putting it away. I'm talking martinis before lunch. Clubbing every night. Dumping major E. Some days, three in the morning, he'd be sitting here on the sofa going on and on at me about how this Rashid guy was running some massive conspiracy to blow up New York. After a while I was, like, 'Dude, let him blow it up already, I gotta get some sleep.'"