[1] The Price of Silence is a new account of the 2006 Duke lacrosse case scandal that details the pressures faced by America's elite colleges and universities and addresses the issues of sexual misconduct, underage drinking, and bad-boy behavior.

Cohan feels that the true story of the alleged team rape case has never been told in its entirety and was more complex than all the reportage would indicate.

The Price of Silence elaborated on what happened when the most combustible forces in American culture—unbridled ambition, intellectual elitism, athletic prowess, aggressive sexual behavior, racial bias, and absolute prosecutorial authority collided and then exploded on a powerful university campus, in the justice system, and in the media.

[16][17] Cohan has justified this omission in the "A note on sources" section of the book: "In an era when digital access to documents of all stripes is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, the idea of providing page after page of notes on the sources of my research—as I did in my previous three books—seems somewhat superfluous, especially when writing about events that started to unfold primarily in 2006 ...

[20] In the most visible example of this, Cohan stated in his book that Governor Roy Cooper had acted against the wishes of North Carolina investigators when he dropped all charges against the Duke lacrosse players, but the investigators stated that Cooper's decision was completely correct and that Cohan's views were fiction.