A woman who lied about being raped by three lacrosse players while attending Duke University has admitted for the first time that she made up the story.

Crystal Mangum’s claim that she was raped at a fraternity party in 2006 sparked a national media storm after Rolling Stone, the New York Times and other major US publications reported on the case.

On Friday, nearly 20 years after the claim was revealed to be false, she said in an interview with the Let’s Talk with Kat podcast that she had “made up a story that wasn’t true.”

Mangum, who is Black, originally said she was raped by three white lacrosse players at a party where she was hired as a stripper. The allegations sparked widespread debate about “frat boy” culture, racism and sexual violence on American college campuses.

“I testified falsely against them by saying that they had raped me even though they hadn’t, and that was wrong,” the 46-year-old said in the interview.

The interview was recorded last month at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women, where Mangum is incarcerated for fatally stabbing her boyfriend in 2011.

David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann were arrested after Mangum made allegations of sexual assault.

The allegations immediately made national headlines, forcing the university to cancel its lacrosse season and costing Mike Pressler, its coach, his job.

In addition to coverage in the New York Times, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated, the case also featured five segments of the widely watched “60 Minutes” program.

One of the most significant media articles published at the time of the allegations was “Sex & Scandal at Duke,” a nearly 6,000-word article published in Rolling Stone magazine.

In the article, a reporter visited the Duke University campus just a month after the allegations, joining hundreds of journalists camped in the city of Durham, North Carolina.

Duke University students were engrossed in the scandal at the time, according to the Rolling Stone report, which revealed how the drunken lacrosse parties continued during the players’ investigation.

The trio were declared innocent in 2007 after Mangum’s story collapsed due to legal scrutiny.

Roy Cooper, the attorney general at the time, concluded that there was no credible evidence that an attack ever took place. The investigation yielded no DNA, witnesses or other evidence to support Mangum’s story.

Mr. Cooper called Mike Nifong, the Durham County district attorney who led the prosecution, a “rogue prosecutor.”

Mr Nifong resigned in disgrace and was expelled and briefly jailed for lying about passing DNA tests to the defense team.

Prosecutors later declined to file charges against Mangum for fabricating the allegations.

Seligmann, Finnerty and Evan, who settled a lawsuit with the university, then pursued a separate lawsuit against the city of Durham and several city employees for seven years, but received no further compensation.

A multitude of inconsistencies

Although the case was dropped, Mangum wrote in her 2008 book “Last Dance for Grace: The Crystal Mangum Story” that she “will never say that nothing at all happened that night” after providing graphic details of the fabricated incident had.

Her story had a number of inconsistencies over the years, but her general claim was that she was raped and choked by three lacrosse players at the party.

Katerena DePasquale, who hosted Mangum on her podcast, said she didn’t realize she wanted to apologize when she first contacted her for an interview.

But Mangum later expressed her desire to apologize to the three lacrosse players after being contacted by Ms. DePasquale.

“It is important to me to publicly apologize for the Duke lacrosse case,” Mangum wrote to the podcast host, according to The Chronicle.

“I actually lied about the incident to the public, to my family, to my friends and to God about it and I’m not proud of it.”

Mangum said in the podcast interview recorded last month that she hoped the three men she falsely accused could forgive her.

“I testified falsely against them by saying that they had raped me when they hadn’t, and that was false, and I betrayed the trust of many other people who believed in me,” she said .

“I want them to know that I love them and that they don’t deserve this.”

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