Tracey Powers, a paralegal for defense attorney Bob Ekstrand, said Monday night that she would not release the names of the players charged in the sealed indictments or what charges they face.

“I haven’t seen the names, but we were told today, and I was given the OK to confirm,” Powers said. Ekstrand represents more than 30 members of the 47-member squad.

Superior Court Judge Ronald Stephens filed a manilla envelope containing the sealed indictments shortly after a grand jury finished its business Monday afternoon. The judge, in an order scrawled on the back of the envelope, cited a state law that allows him to keep the charges secret until a suspect is arrested or goes before a judge. The judge refused to say why he sealed the charges.

Lawyers representing team members and Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong also declined to speak about the case, which began March 14 when a woman hired to dance at a lacrosse team party told police that she was raped, sodomized, beaten and strangled in a bathroom by three men.

Defense lawyers say the team’s players say no assault, no rape and no sex occurred at the party.

Local and national reporters and photographers filled the sixth-floor halls of the Durham courthouse, waiting outside the grand jury courtroom and Nifong’s office. Just before 11:30 a.m. the two Durham police investigators working the rape investigation entered an office adjacent to the grand jury room. One carried a box of papers and envelopes. The investigators said nothing.

The sealing of the indictments protracted a story that has played out in a clamorous court of public opinion with race, class and sexual violence driving deliberations. The accuser is black and a student at N.C. Central University and she said she was raped by three white men.

Accounts of that night are at opposite poles. The players, through defense lawyers, said the accuser concocted the story, that she was drunk and already injured when she arrived at the three-bedroom house at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. late on March 13. A judge ordered DNA tests on the team’s 46 white players — he excluded the only black team member — that defense lawyers said showed none of the players’ genetic material on or in the woman, the lawyers said.

Nifong, bolstered by medical evidence, says he is confident that the accuser was sexually assaulted in the university-owned house. Nifong said last week at a NCCU forum about the case that the accuser might have identified at least one of her attackers.