I WAS AN ELF ONCE. At the campus dining hall where I worked, somebody thought it would be fun if the servers dressed as elves for the Christmas dinner, so we did.

I am hazy now on what our exact duties were. What counts in memory is that a diner in his cups — a large, athletic-looking guy — grabbed me, threw me over his shoulder, yelled “I got one of ’em!” amid a roar of male laughter and marched toward the door.

What counts is that I pounded on him with all I had and it did not matter. Suddenly, I was in a world I did not know.

When the sexual-assault case against three Duke lacrosse players fell apart for good this month, their supporters went on a tear. People who bought the alleged victim’s story, they said, had looked through the distorting lens of a stereotype. In this view, the players had to be spoiled jocks, white louts who viewed a young black woman as sub-human.

I was among those who initially credited the accuser. Perhaps the dining-hall experience was my lens. But I think it was more than that.

I was aware, for instance, of our nation’s long history of automatic doubt toward rape claims. Putting the accuser’s character on trial was standard, hence many victims never went to the police. Only with the patient efforts a few decades ago of “Second Wave” feminists (men and women) did this begin to change. And even then, in more recent times, skepticism greeted the first young men to claim abuse by priests.

More important was a prosecutor’s assertion that he had the evidence to bring charges. Americans understand the presumption of innocence. But as Georgetown law Prof. Randy Barnett pointed out in a recent Wall Street Journal essay, our criminal-justice system is generally so trusted that “while knowing that mistakes do happen, the accuracy of the system leads everyone, including defense lawyers, to assume that anyone who is charged is probably guilty.”

If the media and others unfairly heaped suspicion on the lacrosse players, a prosecutor’s involvement became the excuse to proceed.

Yet the case put forward last spring by Dist. Atty. Michael Nifong, who shortly faced an election, began to wobble almost instantly. Nifong won most of the black vote in his crucial primary race, and so remained in office. But meanwhile he had ignored alibi evidence and mishandled a lineup to identify the accused. DNA tests failed to connect any of the 46 team members to an assault.

Worse, the accuser’s account of what happened at the infamous lacrosse team party, where she had been hired to perform as an exotic dancer, kept changing. By the time the North Carolina attorney general took over, barely a shred of a case remained.

Fury over the unfairness of the players’ ordeal has been particularly intense in the Duke community. Many saw Richard Brodhead, the school’s president, as having sided against the school’s own when he canceled the lacrosse season and launched inquiries.

Dozens of Duke faculty members, the so-called Group of 88, are also out of favor. Last spring, in response to the alleged attack, they placed an ad in the school newspaper raising questions about the atmosphere on campus. That the ad assumed the players’ guilt became the next wobbly assumption.

It is hard to tell quite what the ad meant to say. More pastiche than statement, it offered a set of anonymous student complaints. “Regardless of the results of the police investigation,” it noted, “what is apparent every day now is the anger and fear of many students who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism . . .”

And: “These students are shouting and whispering about what happened to the young woman and to themselves.”

“What happened,” though, was not known then, and may never be, at least not to everyone’s satisfaction.

What is known of the accuser, now a 28-year-old mother of three, remains sketchy.

As a teenager, according to a profile in the Raleigh News & Observer, she told police that her much older boyfriend had shared her sexually with three friends. Her downward-spiraling history included a brief stint in the Navy, and efforts to get treatment for bipolar disorder, as well as help to control her drinking.

Discharged from the Navy, she found she could make better money stripping than in more menial jobs. She also worked for an escort service while attending North Carolina Central University. After the scandal erupted she dropped out. She is reportedly surviving on welfare.

The three lacrosse players may have been grievously wronged by this woman. But unlike her, they had strong families and skilled lawyers at their side.

As for my dining-hall abductor, he had me out the door and into the night before finally putting me down. What to him was a game was to me an education. I had found myself helpless against force, and never forgot the sensation.

Being falsely accused is another type of helplessness. But, though they paid a heavy cost, the players, too, were set down.

With DNA testing, we have seen a number of people freed after years of wrongful imprisonment. So often they are black; so often they astonish with their lack of bitterness.

So often, what you expect depends on where you stand in the world.

At a press conference after the dismissal of the charges, one of the players, Reade Seligmann, said this:

“This entire experience has opened my eyes up to a tragic world of injustice I never knew existed. If police officers and a district attorney can systematically railroad us with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, I can’t imagine what they’d do to people who do not have the resources to defend themselves.”

Reade Seligmann will not go forth with the Duke degree he deserved. But he will go forth as something rarer: a truly educated man.

M.J. Andersen is a member of the Journal editorial board.