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UVA Rape Story Collapses; Duke Lacrosse Redux
Topic Started: Dec 5 2014, 01:45 PM (60,484 Views)
cks
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Dec 10 2014, 05:58 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/394238/we-should-name-rape-accusers-kevin-d-williamson

December 8, 2014 6:46 PM
We Should Name Rape Accusers
It is time to lift the veil of anonymity.
By Kevin D. Williamson

We tend to know infamous criminals by three names: John Wilkes Booth, John Wayne Gacy, Lee Harvey Oswald. This has led to some fun conspiracy-theory speculation — “Why do serial killers usually have only two names while ‘lone gunmen’ have three?” — but it is mostly the result of newspaper convention, e.g. “Police arrested Charles Francis Xavier of the 1400 block of Graymalkin Lane in North Salem, N.Y., on charges of operating an unlicensed daycare.” Sometimes the middle name doesn’t seem necessary — Leon Czolgosz doesn’t usually get the “Frank,” and Sirhan Sirhan is still just Sirhan Sirhan — but there are a lot of guys named “John Booth” out there, and police blotters traditionally have used full names and addresses to cut down on mistaken identity. One has to sympathize with people who have common names (I imagine the poor fellow who writes Stalker gets tired of people on Twitter wondering why he’s such a right-wing monster) but it’s worse for people with uncommon names: A Texas newspaper once identified a man with an unusual foreign name as a convicted sex criminal, noting that his job brought him into a girls’ dormitory at the college that employed him — both of those things were true, but the sex criminal with the unusual name and the college worker with the same unusual name were not the same man.

Never mind the large check that probably was written by the newspaper’s publisher — imagine being the man wrongly identified as a convicted sex offender, seeing that in the newspaper as you’re eating your morning Froot Loops. Imagine what that felt like. Imagine going into work that morning, and the looks you’d get.

Naming names is a serious business, so I do not write this lightly: We should publicly name the accusers in rape cases.

Put another way: We should treat rape and sexual-assault cases like every other crime. Criminal complaints are public records, and their contents are matters of public interest. That generally includes the names of crime victims, though there are exceptions, e.g. when information is withheld to maintain the integrity of an ongoing criminal investigation. Those exceptions are generally temporary and organized to a particular end. But in two cases, there are common blanket exceptions: The first is in the case of minors, and the second is in the case of rape victims.

In cases of rape, some states have statutory exceptions to the usual practice of releasing complainants’ names; and, even where that is not the case, it is the usual practice of media organizations to suppress those names. That is largely a formality in contemporary practice, inasmuch as it is practically impossible to suppress names in the modern social-media environment. If you’d like to know, for instance, the full name of the University of Virginia student generally believed to be the “Jackie” at the center of the fake Rolling Stone article, Twitter is just a click away.

Suppressing the names of rape victims — to say nothing of protecting the identities of those who make false accusations of this horrible crime — is intended to liberate victims from the stigma associated with such victimization, but it also contributes to it. By insisting on anonymity, we cultivate the false belief that rape victims have something of which to be ashamed in a way that victims of other crimes do not. This goes beyond mere embarrassment: Men who have been mugged may very well feel ashamed of their inability to protect themselves and their property, and may feel that their victimization reveals them as being somehow unmanly, inadequately virile. (That this is a less intense and less intimate violation than rape should go without saying.) The victims of Bernard Madoff, many of whom considered themselves financial sophisticates, may very well have felt ashamed of having been victimized. But we do not suppress the names of people who make accusations of fraud or file armed-robbery complaints. Nor is there a political faction in the United States insisting that we “always believe the victim” in securities-fraud cases.

And, for good reason, we do not offer anonymity to those accused of rape and other crimes. In the case of rape, this and other deviations from normal legal process creates a poisonous asymmetry and a powerful temptation: One can ruin a life while remaining comfortably cocooned in anonymity. Consider the case of Oliver Jovanovic, who was wrongly convicted of rape, and whose prosecution was enabled in part by so-called shield laws that excluded from evidence e-mails between the accused and his accuser in which she expressed her consent to, and her enjoyment of, the sexual acts that transpired between the two. In that case the accuser, a 20-year-old college student, was described by her grandmother as having a long history of having made similar false accusations. Jovanovic served two years of a 15-year prison term before his conviction was overturned.

Fortunately, Rolling Stone is not the last word in these cases.

The distasteful but undeniable fact is that organized feminism is not very much interested in rape as a crime; organized feminism is interested in rape as a metaphor, which is why the concrete problem of rape has been displaced in our public discourse by the metaphysical proposition of “rape culture.” If feminists were interested in actually preventing real cases of sexual assault, they would not abominate those who prescribe commonsense measures to avoid victimization, and they would not dismiss the teaching of self-defense as an accommodation to “rape culture.” If you want to help someone prevent rape in fact rather than tilt at abstractions, then the three-letter organization beginning with “N” that you want isn’t NOW — it’s the NRA.

For feminists, rape is not as much a discrete crime as it is a dramatic instantiation of what they believe to be the larger and more insidious project of men’s domination of women in all spheres — sexual, economic, social, political, etc. The reality of rape — and it is a horrific reality — is for them a political tool: If you refuse to prostrate yourself in front of the designated totem of the day, then you are an apologist for rape. It is not coincidental that false accusations relating to rape are used as political tools by the Left, or that the targets of these false accusations are either explicitly conservative groups and individuals or such traditional bugaboos of the campus Left as fraternities, the military, and sports teams.

During the clerical sex-abuse scandals, the Catholic Church was roundly — and rightly — criticized for its repeated failures to bring these cases to the proper criminal-justice authorities so that they could be prosecuted and for instead trying to handle the cases in-house according to its own rules. If we take the feminists at their word (we shouldn’t) then in terms of sheer numbers of victims the purported college rape epidemic dwarfs that scandal, and yet feminists are curiously resistant to the argument that these cases should be handled by police and prosecutors rather than by deans of students and campus kangaroo courts. If your interest is in preventing and punishing rape, then things like teaching self-defense and insisting on prosecution are the first items on your to-do list. If your interest is in using rape allegations as a political cudgel, then you ignore rape and focus on “rape culture,” an evocative phrase that can mean anything you need it to mean at the moment.

Rape is a vicious crime. So is murder. It is time that we began demystifying the former by treating it more like the latter. Lifting the veil of anonymity is the first step.

— Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent at National Review.
Absolutely correct!
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Bill Anderson
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I had a couple of pieces on this in LRC:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/12/william-l-anderson/rape-hoax-exposed/

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/12/william-l-anderson/campuses-create-their-own-reality/

:bill:
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Mason
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Parts unknown
MikeZPU
Dec 9 2014, 11:36 PM
Mason
Dec 9 2014, 11:07 PM
.
Teresa Sullivan:

"Today is the first day of final exams, and in a few weeks we will end a tumultuous fall semester. Three members of the Class of 2017 have died this semester, and the sense of grief and loss is palpable. In addition, many members of our community are grieving over the deaths of young black men in Staten Island and Ferguson."


Funny, why doesn't she name the race of her dead students, one defiled and murdered by a serial killer of another race?

Why doesn't she say we're grieving over the deaths of young white women?

One of her "young black men" is 42 years old with 31 arrests and is a convicted felon.


.
Mason: I was thinking exactly the same thing!!!!

What relevance is the deaths of young black men in Staten Island and
Ferguson to the purpose of her letter??!!??!!

And how the hell can she overlook the death of a young white women
at the hands of serial rapist and murderer of a different race?!?!

I could not believe it when I heard about the contents of her letter!
.

We had two Deaths in the U.S. from EBOLA.

Did ANY Universitery anywhere tell students they could forgo testing due to Ebola?

Why didn't Sullivan cite the two EBOLA deaths? Her Students didn't grieve them? Why didn't she cite house fires before Christmas right there in Virginia that killed a family? And why didn't she cite their race?

The Universities don't want to play up Ebola, the young (42 year old) black men, now that's something they want to play up.

.
Edited by Mason, Dec 10 2014, 02:24 PM.
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cks
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This is all part and parcel of this idea that students are hot house flowers that need special cultivation - really and truly, how are these people going to function in the real world?

This sort of thinking permeates the high schools - parents demand and students are given all sorts of special exemptions because of things that happen (believe it or not I had several years ago a student who got a delay on tests because the family dog had died).
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sceptical

Just catching up, but this whole fiasco is another situation where "the narrative was right but the facts were wrong."
Edited by sceptical, Dec 10 2014, 03:20 PM.
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abb
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sceptical
Dec 10 2014, 03:19 PM
Just catching up, but this whole fiasco is another situation where "the narrative was right but the facts were wrong."
So many Witches to Burn... So little time...
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abb
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http://www.mindingthecampus.com/2014/12/how-the-times-handled-the-rape-report/

How the Times Handled the Rape Report
KC Johnson December 10, 2014 Leave a comment

In the last couple of days, two items have appeared at the New York Times in which the paper—whose coverage of campus sexual assault issues has learned no lessons from its propagandistic performance in the Duke lacrosse case—purports to lecture other journalists on how they should cover the issue.

The first came from a blog post by Times public editor Margaret Sullivan. Commenting on what Rolling Stone now needs to do, she wrote, “Self-examination and transparency were the keys . . . I hope that the magazine will thoroughly investigate what happened, publish that investigation and tell its readers how, precisely, editors will make sure it never happens again.” I must have missed the Times’ thorough investigation of its botched lacrosse coverage—which prompted acknowledgements of error on three separate occasions by high-ranking figures at the paper, but no explanation of why the paper failed, apart from a Rolling Stone-like decision to shift blame to its sources (Mike Nifong and the Duke administration).

Sullivan also cites the paper’s own sexual assault reporting—chiefly its alleged exposé at Hobart & William Smith—as a model that other journalists should follow. Leave aside the fact that the Finger Lakes Times uncovered significant holes in the Times portrayal. How can Sullivan praise the Times for its HWS piece, in which the accuser’s “identity was far from hidden; her photograph was a part of the article, and she was identified in many other ways as well,” when the paper had published (without any retraction, as a Times reporter recently affirmed) the Yale/Patrick Witt story in which reporter Richard Pérez-Peñaacknowledged that he had no idea who the accuser was, much less what specifically she had alleged Witt had done.

Keep in mind, moreover, that this is the same paper whose news pages desperately tried to prop up Rolling Stone‘s crumbling storyline, through a faux-balanced “news” article that found two journalism professors willing to excuse the Rolling Stone decision not to seek comment from the person the magazine had portrayed as an organizer of a monstrous gang rape.

Tuesday’s paper, meanwhile, featured a bizarre editorial citing to the collapse of the UVA story as justification for Congress passing the deeply flawed McCaskill bill. More remarkable, the Times used the editorial to admit, in an almost offhanded fashion, that the administration’s claim that 20 percent of women will be raped while in college is based on a “flawed” statistic.

Nothing in the Times’ one-sided coverage would have prepared readers for this admission. Perhaps the Times was shamed by Emily Yoffe’s extraordinary longform piece in Slate, which conclusively debunked the 1-in-5 claim through both statistics and logic. (Among other things, Yoffe pointed out that the claim presumes that women on campus are raped at about the same rate as women in the war-torn Congo.) The paper stood by the assertion that false reports of campus rape are “rare,” alleging figures ranging from 2 to 8 percent—but as Megan McArdle has pointed out, on this question “what we know is that we don’t know.”

And then, of course, is the Times’ own reporting on the case. As numerous blogs (plus correspondents at Reason) joined the Washington Post in asking hard questions about the Rolling Stone story, the Times’ initial coverage (“University officials vow to combat campus rape problem”) accepted the Sabrina Erdely piece as gospel. Pérez-Peñareturned to the story as the Erdely narrative collapsed, informing readers that Rolling Stone had admitted to problems with the article—but that “victim advocates here say that even if aspects of Jackie’s account do not hold up under scrutiny [by this point, Jackie has told two, mutually contradictory version of the alleged attack], they still tend to believe that she was assaulted, and they note that survivors of trauma often have murky or inconsistent recollections of the event.” In any case, the university “still has a hard-drinking, fraternity-dominated social culture.”
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Joan Foster

Here's the Bombshell article...OMG!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/u-va-students-challenge-rolling-stone-account-of-attack/2014/12/10/ef345e42-7fcb-11e4-81fd-8c4814dfa9d7_story.html?Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost
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Joan Foster

And photographs that were texted to one of the friends showing her date that night actually were pictures depicting one of Jackie’s high school classmates in Northern Virginia. That man, now a junior at a university in another state, confirmed that the photographs are of him and said he barely knew Jackie and hasn’t been to Charlottesville for at least six years.
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Joan Foster

Randall said that he met Jackie shortly after arriving at U-Va. in fall 2012, and the two struck up a quick friendship. He said Jackie was interested in pursuing a romantic relationship with him; he valued her friendship but wasn’t interested in more.

The three friends said that Jackie soon began talking about a handsome junior from chemistry class who had a crush on her and had been asking her out on dates.

Intrigued, Jackie’s friends got his phone number from her and began exchanging text messages with the mysterious upperclassman. He then raved to them about “this super smart hot,” freshman who shared his love of the band Coheed and Cambria, according to the texts, which were provided to The Post.

“I really like this girl,” the chemistry student wrote in one message. Some of the messages included photographs of a man with a sculpted jawline and ocean-blue eyes.

In the text messages, the student wrote that he was jealous that another student had apparently won Jackie’s attention.

“Get this she said she likes some other 1st year guy who dosnt like her and turned her down but she wont date me cause she likes him,” the chemistry student wrote. “She cant turn my down fro some nerd 1st yr. she said this kid is smart and funny and worth it.”

Jackie told her three friends that she accepted the upperclassman’s invitation for a dinner date on Friday Sept. 28, 2012.

Curious about Jackie’s date, the friends said that they failed to locate the student on a U-Va. database and social media. Andy, Cindy and Randall all said they never met the student in person. Before Jackie’s date, the friends said that they became suspicious that perhaps they hadn’t really been in contact with the chemistry student at all.

U-Va. officials told The Post that no student by the name Jackie provided to her friends as her date and attacker in 2012 had ever enrolled at the university. Randall provided The Post with pictures that Jackie’s purported date had sent of himself by text message in 2012.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/u-va-students-challenge-rolling-stone-account-of-attack/2014/12/10/ef345e42-7fcb-11e4-81fd-8c4814dfa9d7_story.html?Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost

U-Va. students challenge Rolling Stone account of attack

By T. Rees Shapiro December 10 at 5:12 PM

It was 1 a.m. on a Saturday when the call came. A friend, a University of Virginia freshman who earlier said she had a date that evening with a handsome junior from her chemistry class, was in hysterics. Something bad had happened.

Arriving at her side, three students —“Randall,” “Andy” and “Cindy” as they were identified in an explosive Rolling Stone account — told The Washington Post that they found their friend in tears. Jackie appeared traumatized, saying her date ended horrifically, with the older student parking his car at his fraternity, asking her to come inside, and then forcing her to perform oral sex on a group of five men.

In their first interviews about the events of that September 2012 night, the three friends separately told The Post that their recollections of the encounter diverge from how Rolling Stone portrayed the incident in a story about Jackie’s alleged gang rape at a U-Va. fraternity. The interviews also provide a richer account of Jackie’s interactions immediately after the alleged attack, and suggest that the friends are skeptical of her account.

The scene with her friends was pivotal in the article, as it alleged that the friends were callously apathetic about a beaten, bloodied, injured classmate reporting a brutal gang rape at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. The account alleged that the students worried about the effect it might have on their social status, how it might reflect on Jackie during the rest of her collegiate career, and how they suggested not reporting it. It set up the article’s theme: That U-Va. has a culture that is indifferent to rape.

“It didn’t happen that way at all,” Andy said.
Students held a candlelight vigil to raise awareness on sexual assault Friday night as Rolling Stone cited “discrepancies” in an article that reported a gang rape in a campus fraternity. (Reuters)

Instead, the friends remember being shocked. Though they did not notice any blood or visible injuries, they said they immediately urged Jackie to speak to police and insisted that they find her help. Instead, they said, Jackie declined and asked to be taken back to her dorm room. They went with her — two of them said they spent the night — seeking to comfort Jackie in what appeared to be a moment of extreme turmoil.

“I mean obviously we were very concerned for her,” Andy said. “We tried to be as supportive as we could be.”

The three students agreed to be interviewed on the condition that The Post use the same aliases as appeared in Rolling Stone because of the sensitivity of the subject.

They said there are mounting inconsistencies with the original narrative in the magazine. The students also expressed suspicions about Jackie’s allegations from that night. They said the name she provided as that of her date did not match anyone at the university, and U-Va. officials confirmed to The Post that no one by that name has attended the school.

And photographs that were texted to one of the friends showing her date that night actually were pictures depicting one of Jackie’s high school classmates in Northern Virginia. That man, now a junior at a university in another state, confirmed that the photographs are of him and said he barely knew Jackie and hasn’t been to Charlottesville for at least six years.

The friends said they never were contacted or interviewed by the pop culture magazine’s reporters or editors. Though vilified in the article as coldly indifferent to Jackie’s ordeal, the students said they cared deeply about their friend’s well-being and safety. Randall said that they made every effort to help Jackie that night.

“She had very clearly just experienced a horrific trauma,” Randall said. “I had never seen anybody acting like she was on that night before and I really hope I never have to again. ... If she was acting on the night of Sept. 28, 2012, then she deserves an Oscar.”
U-Va. timeline

They also said Jackie’s description of what happened to her that night differs from what she told Rolling Stone. In addition, information that Jackie gave the three friends about one of her attackers, called “Drew” in Rolling Stone, differed significantly from details she later told The Post, Rolling Stone and friends from sexual assault awareness groups on campus. The three said Jackie did not specifically identify a fraternity that night.

The Rolling Stone article also said that Randall declined to be interviewed, “citing his loyalty to his own frat.” He told The Post that he never was contacted by Rolling Stone and would have agreed to an interview. The article’s writer, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, did not respond to requests for comment this week.

Rolling Stone also declined to comment, citing an internal review of the story. The magazine has apologized for inaccuracies and discrepancies in the published report.

The 9,000-word Rolling Stone article appeared online in late November and led with the brutal account of Jackie’s alleged sexual assault. In the article, Jackie said she attended a date function at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity in the fall of 2012 with a lifeguard she said she met at the university pool. During the party, Jackie said her date “Drew” lured her into a dark room where seven men gang-raped her in an attack that left her bloodied and injured. In earlier interviews with The Post, Jackie stood by the account she provided to Rolling Stone.

Palma Pustilnik, a lawyer representing Jackie, issued a statement Wednesday morning asking that journalists refrain from contacting Jackie or her family. The Post generally does not identify victims of sexual assaults and has used Jackie’s real nickname at her request.

“As I am sure you all can understand, all of this has been very stressful, overwhelming and retraumatizing for Jackie and her family,” Pustilnik said. She declined to answer specific questions or to elaborate in a brief interview Wednesday.

*****

Randall said that he met Jackie shortly after arriving at U-Va. in fall 2012, and the two struck up a quick friendship. He said Jackie was interested in pursuing a romantic relationship with him; he valued her friendship but wasn’t interested in more.

The three friends said that Jackie soon began talking about a handsome junior from chemistry class who had a crush on her and had been asking her out on dates.

Intrigued, Jackie’s friends got his phone number from her and began exchanging text messages with the mysterious upperclassman. He then raved to them about “this super smart hot,” freshman who shared his love of the band Coheed and Cambria, according to the texts, which were provided to The Post.

“I really like this girl,” the chemistry student wrote in one message. Some of the messages included photographs of a man with a sculpted jawline and ocean-blue eyes.

In the text messages, the student wrote that he was jealous that another student had apparently won Jackie’s attention.

“Get this she said she likes some other 1st year guy who dosnt like her and turned her down but she wont date me cause she likes him,” the chemistry student wrote. “She cant turn my down fro some nerd 1st yr. she said this kid is smart and funny and worth it.”

Jackie told her three friends that she accepted the upperclassman’s invitation for a dinner date on Friday Sept. 28, 2012.

Curious about Jackie’s date, the friends said that they failed to locate the student on a U-Va. database and social media. Andy, Cindy and Randall all said they never met the student in person. Before Jackie’s date, the friends said that they became suspicious that perhaps they hadn’t really been in contact with the chemistry student at all.

U-Va. officials told The Post that no student by the name Jackie provided to her friends as her date and attacker in 2012 had ever enrolled at the university. Randall provided The Post with pictures that Jackie’s purported date had sent of himself by text message in 2012.

The Post identified the person in the pictures and learned that his name does not match the one Jackie provided to friends in 2012. In an interview, the man said that he was Jackie’s high school classmate but that he “never really spoke to her.”

The man said that he was never a U-Va. student and is not a member of any fraternity. Additionally, the man said that he had not visited Charlottesville in at least six years and that he was in another state participating in an athletic event during the weekend of Sept. 28, 2012.

“I have nothing to do with it,” he said. He said it appears the photos that were circulated were pulled from social media Web sites.

After the alleged attack, the man who Jackie said had taken her on the date wrote an e-mail to Randall, passing along praise that Jackie apparently had for him.

Randall said that it is apparent to him that he is the “first year,” the chemistry student described in text messages, since he had rebuffed Jackie’s advances.

******

Jackie ultimately told her harrowing account to sexual assault prevention groups on campus and spoke to university officials about it, though she said in interviews that she was always reluctant to identify an attacker and never felt ready to report it to police. In interviews she acknowledged that a police investigation now would be unlikely to yield criminal charges because of a lack of forensic evidence.

Emily Renda, a 2014 U-Va. graduate who survived a rape during her freshman year and now works for the university as a sexual violence specialist, has told The Post that she met Jackie in the fall of 2013. Renda said that, at the time, Jackie told her that she had been attacked by five students at Phi Kappa Psi. Renda said she learned months later that the number of perpetrators had changed to seven.

The Rolling Stone article, which appeared on the magazine’s Web site last month, roiled campus and set off protests, vandalism and self-reflection. U-Va. officials responded to the article by suspending the university’s Greek system until early January and promoting a broader discussion on campus about sexual assault and campus safety. University officials have declined to comment on the specifics of the allegations and the article.

In an interview Tuesday, university president Teresa A. Sullivan said that her administration will continue to cooperate with authorities to investigate the case; she wants the university community to focus on prevention of sexual assault.

Charlottesville City police Capt. Gary Pleasants said that detectives are looking into the allegations at the request of the university. Andy and Randall said they both have spoken to police about the case since the Rolling Stone article published.

“The investigation is continuing,” Pleasants said.

Last week, Jackie for the first time revealed a name of her alleged attacker to other friends who had known her more recently, those recent friends said. That name was different from the name she gave Andy, Cindy and Randall that first night. All three said that they had never heard the second name before it was given to them by a reporter.

On Friday, The Post interviewed a man whose name is similar to the second one Jackie used for her attacker. He said that while he did work as a lifeguard at the same time as Jackie, he had never met her in person and had never taken her out on a date. He also said that he was not a member of Phi Kappa Psi.

The fraternity at the center of the Rolling Stone allegations has said that it did not host any registered social event on the weekend of Sept. 28, 2012, and it said in a statement that no members of Phi Kappa Psi at the time worked at the campus Aquatic and Fitness Center. A lawyer who has represented the fraternity said that no member of the fraternity at the time matched a description of “Drew” given by Jackie to The Post and to Rolling Stone.

In interviews, some of Jackie’s closest friends said they believe she suffered a horrific trauma during her freshman year, but others have expressed doubts about the account.

“I definitely believe she was sexually assaulted,” said U-Va. junior Alex Pinkleton, a sexual violence peer advocate who survived a rape and an attempted rape her first two years on campus and is a close friend of Jackie’s. “The main message we want to come out of all this is that sexual assault is a problem nationwide that we need to act in preventing. It has never been about one story. This is about the thousands of women and men who have been victims of sexual assault and have felt silenced not only by their perpetrators, but by society’s misunderstanding and stigmatization of rape.”

Rachel Soltis, who lived with Jackie during their freshman year, said that her suite mate appeared depressed and stopped going to classes. Andy, Cindy and Randall all said that Jackie’s behavior clearly changed that semester.

Jackie said in interviews last week that she wants to use her ordeal to help focus more resources on survivors to augment existing prevention efforts. She said that she wants to pursue a career in social work, helping others recover from sexual assaults.

“I didn’t think it could ever happen to me and then it did and I had to deal with it,” Jackie said. “I didn’t think things like this happened in the real world. Maybe now another freshman girl will decide not to go into a room with someone they don’t know very well.”

Nick Anderson in Charlottesville, Jennifer Jenkins and Julie Tate contributed to this report.

This story has been updated.
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Joan Foster

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire. And she's white and somewhat privileged...so good luck.
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abb
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http://gotnews.com/breaking-video-rollingstone-uvahoax-author-sabrinarubinerdely-absolutely-shop-victims/

BREAKING VIDEO: #RollingStone #UVAHoax Author #SabrinaRubinErdely: ‘I Absolutely Shop For Victims’

December 10, 2014 by Charles C. Johnson

Journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdley admitted on camera that she “shopped around” for victims on “women’s rights,” Gotnews.com has learned.

“Do you ever kind of really want to expose a situation or topic and then kind of like shop around for a more concrete story that would be better for you to write?” a student asked.

“Yes, I absolutely do. I’m working on one right now where that’s the case,” Erdley replied. “That’s something I’ve done a lot when I’ve written for women’s magazines where I’ve written a lot about women’s health and women’s rights.”

The speech took place on her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, in October 2012.

We don’t know if she was talking about University of Virginia student Jackie Coakley who claimed she was gang raped in 2012 but Erdely may have been looking for her.
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http://time.com/3628409/uva-rape-rolling-stone-jackie/

Don’t Threaten UVA Rape Accuser, Lawyer Warns

1:37 PM ET
UVa Fraternity The Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va. on Nov. 24, 2014. Steve Helber—AP
Amid online intimidation of the woman known as "Jackie"

A lawyer for the University of Virginia student who was quoted in a Rolling Stone story describing a gang rape at a fraternity party issued a warning Wednesday against threats and extortion attempts.

The magazine apologized last week for “discrepancies” in the account given by the woman, who was identified as Jackie. The Washington Post and other news outlets also raised questions about details of the story.

The lawyer, Palma Pustilnik of the Central Virginia Legal Aid Society, issued a statement thanking members of the news media who have treated the story with “tact and sensitivity.”
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http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/12/10/uva_response_to_the_rolling_stone_fiasco_teresa_sullivan_and_tommy_reid.html

Dec. 10 2014 12:04 PM
UVA’s Heartening Response to the Rolling Stone Fiasco
By Amanda Marcotte

The discovery of discrepancies in the Rolling Stone exposé of the sexual assault problem at the University of Virginia has prompted a wide range of responses, from the ugly to the thoughtful. Conservatives who are already hostile to the entire discussion about campus rape eagerly pounced, trying to use this controversy to discredit the larger argument about UVA's response to rape claims and to squash discourse about campus rape. Feminists rushed to the defense of rape victims, castigating Rolling Stone for its initial attempt to blame the woman at the center of Sabrina Rubin Erdely's story, Jackie, for the magazine's reporting mistakes.* Social scientists and science journalists tried gallantly to explain the way that memory, particularly in trauma victims, works, and why missed details are not evidence of lying. But the real issue here in the wake of the story and its unraveling is what will happen outside of the media chatter: How are the people with power at UVA responding?

For once, there's actually some good news to report. While it would have been plenty easy for leaders at UVA to use questions about Jackie's story as an excuse to punt responsibility, the New York Times reports that instead they're staying the course, saying they will not waver from grappling with how to deal with campus rape generally and sexual assault within the Greek system in particular. University President Teresa A. Sullivan is not backing down from the temporary suspension of fraternities on campus, despite some calls for her to do so. And the president of the university’s Inter-Fraternity Council, Tommy Reid, is supporting her in this decision.

Not everyone is on the same page. The Fraternity and Sorority Political Action Committee, the National Panhellenic Conference, and the North American Intrafraternity Conference released a statement demanding the reinstatement of fraternity activity on campus. "We are saddened at the lack of journalistic integrity Rolling Stone demonstrated in publishing its article on campus rape at the University of Virginia," the letter reads. They also called on "the University of Virginia to immediately reinstate operations for all fraternity and sorority organizations on campus," claiming that "fundamental rights to due process" were violated by this temporary suspension.

Opportunistic behavior like this from this coalition suggests that, despite the stated "intent to be leaders in solving the problem of sexual assault," these groups are far more interested in sweeping the issue under the rug. After all, the article was not just about Jackie's claims, but about calling for a better institutional response to campus rape overall—which is why there were many victims' stories in it, not just Jackie's.

These groups should take note of how on-campus fraternity leadership is responding. Instead of using the Rolling Stone fiasco as a chance to evade responsibility, Intra-Fraternity leader Tommy Reid is showing real spine. "The temporary suspension has provided the fraternity community with time to step back and think critically about its role in the elimination of rape at UVA, and allowed us to sort of review our priorities as students first and fraternity members second," Reid told the New York Times. "It’s allowed us to take a breath."

To the Washington Post, Reid said, "My biggest fear is that students and the rest of the community will struggle over the minutiae of the specific Rolling Stone article and discontinue the momentum toward addressing the issue of rape on college campuses." That's showing the kind of maturity and understanding of responsibility that many people who are much older than Reid could stand to learn a lot from.

Correction, Dec. 10, 2014: This post originally misspelled journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely's last name.
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