Not so ruined

This morning, NPR's Morning Edition was reporting on the doping in baseball/Mitchell report brouhaha currently starring Roger Clemens and his former athletic trainer, Brian McNamee, and, of course, their respective lawyers. McNamee has produced needles and gauze that he says he used when injecting Clemens with steroids and HGH. He kept them in a Fed Ex box for three years. Ewwww. I thought it would be easy to discredit such evidence. Much easier, than say tennis players and cyclists who cry about sample tampering and improper testing methods during official drug testing. I mean this guy kept needles and bloody gauze in a cardboard box for three years. But apparently I am wrong because NPR called up a law professor at Stanford, presumably one who is an expert in the rules of evidence, and he said a judge would admit it.
And this leads now to a battle of reputations as evidenced by Clemens's defamation suit against McNamee where the needles and gauze could come to the defense of McNamee.
But Rusty Hardin, who is representing Clemens, has warned all those anti-Rogerites out there to beware of jumping to damaging conclusions about his client. Because this is another Duke lacrosse situation, he said.
Oh no, he didn't!
But, yes, he certainly did.
Because, of course, there are similarities. They just aren't the ones that Hardin sees. But we do have the rich, white male athlete thing going on. And the rich, white males are using all their class, race, and gender privilege to discredit their accusers. The Duke case is complicated by too many factors to even (re)open this discussion. But their reputations were hardly ruined, and it's not as if, no matter what did or did not happen at that party, they were as pure as the driven snow, anyway. Does anyone not associated with Duke even remember any of the names of the three who were initially charged?
And Clemens does not seem in danger of losing much either. Remember that he hasn't even been charged with anything.