FishbowlLA editor Tina Dupuy stumbled onto a report from a North Carolina news station that Crystal Mangum (right), the woman at the heart of the controversial prosecution of three Duke University student-athletes of rape and assault, is releasing her memoirs in October: The Last Dance for Grace: The Crystal Mangum Story. Her publisher? A new company called fire! Books, run by co-author Vincent Clark.
The publishing company, Clark explained by email over the weekend, is an offshoot of fire! Studios, a film production company he created two years ago. (Clark has been active in documentary filmmaking for more than two decades.) “I was introduced to [Mangum] by a friend who thought I might be able to help her,” he recalled. “At the time, she wasn’t looking to publish a book. She wasn’t exactly sure what to do. She was being approached by people who said they could help her make a lot of money and all of them seemed to be a little slick and shady. I just talked to her about what she wanted to do with her life. We developed a good working realtionship and we worked on her just getting back to a normal life. I filmed some of it but it seemed too intrusive. So, I just started having her write down what she thought and it turned into The Last Dance for Grace.”
Clark and Mangum thought about submitting that project to publishers, “but nothing seemed to make sense for this book,” he said. “It isn’t about making money. She really wants to set the record straight about some of the things that have been said about her personally. Any large publisher would have been looking to do book tours and all of that stuff. She really wasn’t interested in all of the extra stuff.” He emphasized that the book is not just about the Duke case, which ended with the charges against the athletes being dropped (and the disbarment of the prosecutor involved), but also covers the turbulent and difficult life that brought Mangum to that moment: “It is about a person who wants people to learn from her mistakes.” The press release notes that $1 from each sale will be donated to help battered women.
In addition to Mangum’s story, Clark also had access to Angel Heredia, the man who supplied Marion Jones and other elite-level athletes with performance enhancing drugs. “We were trying to figure out how to do documentaries on both stories and the prodcution cost would have been crazy,” Clark explained. “We had both of their stories in writting so it was a no brainer to turn both into books.” The strategy is for fire! to produce an electronic edition of The Last Dance for Grace to sell through their own website, which will include video footage and other supplementary materials; Clark is currently in the process of choosing a print-on-demand service for a print version. He had originally hoped for both books to come out sooner, he said, but Mangum preferred to finish work on her college degree before making her book publication-ready, while Heredia’s story took a while to play out—he has been a witness for the prosecution in trials against Jones and track coach Trevor Graham. Clark expects, though, that fire! will be able to publish that memoir by the end of the year.