| UVA Rape Story Collapses; Duke Lacrosse Redux | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Dec 5 2014, 01:45 PM (60,482 Views) | |
| Mason | Dec 10 2014, 08:51 PM Post #316 |
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What a difference a Color makes! FOCUS ON THE REPORTING BY ESPN. From today: . http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/12012335/lawyer-tennessee-titans-tackle-sammie-hill-says-sexual-assault-investigation-unfounded They don't say he's 6'5", 310 lbs or mention helmeted crimes by other Football players. He has a SOFT voice (Crystal was petite and shy). He didn't talk about it, did any of his teammates admit to it? Sounds like we got us A WALL OF SILENCE to me. I'm sure the charges are bull, but ESPN isn't interested. If it was a real crime, NOT inteterested. . Edited by Mason, Dec 10 2014, 08:56 PM.
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| abb | Dec 10 2014, 08:54 PM Post #317 |
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Online term for what may have happened. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=catfish catfish A catfish is someone who pretends to be someone they're not using Facebook or other social media to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances. Did you hear how Dave got totally catfished last month?! The fox he thought he was talking to turned out to be a pervy guy from San Diego! or I was really falling for that gorgeous gal on Facebook, but she turned out to be a catfish. by sbacker July 22, 2010 |
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| abb | Dec 10 2014, 09:11 PM Post #318 |
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http://www.cbsnews.com/news/rolling-stone-uva-alleged-gang-rape-story-still-raises-questions/ Alleged UVA rape victim's friend: Reporter wanted sensational story Last Updated Dec 10, 2014 7:37 AM EST There are new questions over the story of an alleged gang-rape at the University of Virginia. The father of the alleged victim called "Jackie" is angry that Rolling Stone admitted mistakes in that article. He told Britain's Mail Online that his daughter is "crushed" that some people think she is lying. Now, one of Jackie's friends is also criticizing Rolling Stone and standing by her friend's story, CBS News' Julianna Goldman reports. Alex Pinkleton, one of the students featured in the article, said she is a friend of Jackie's as well as a survivor of an on-campus sexual assault. She said the reporter asked her about her own assault but chose Jackie's story because it was the most extreme. "She was looking for a piece that would have easily been sensationalized," Pinkleton said. Pinkleton, a U.Va. junior, said Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Erdely had an agenda for her story: find a very innocent victim and a monstrous perpetrator. "It's not hard to find a lot of survivors here, and it's also not hard to find a lot of survivors that have stories that are more verifiable," she said. Pinkleton said the trauma Jackie suffered and the pressure put on her from the reporter are responsible for the inconsistencies in Jackie's story. "I definitely believe Jackie was sexually assaulted," she said. "Since day one, anyone that was there the night of- the friends in the story - Andy, Cindy, Randall - they've all said she looked distraught. She said to them that she had been sexually assaulted and that part has been consistent." In the article, Jackie said her three friends, identified as "Andy," "Cindy" and "Randall," found her on a "street corner, shaking," "in her bloody dress." "The Phi Kappa Psi house," where the alleged incident occurred, "loomed behind them." CBS News reached out by phone to the individual identified as "Andy." He said he does not remember seeing visible injuries on Jackie on the night in question. And when he met Jackie, it was nowhere near the Phi Kappa Psi house but in front of the first-year dorm. He said he was never contacted by the Rolling Stone reporter to corroborate Jackie's account. "I think more than anything, I just want to know what happened that night before she came to us," he said. The University of Virginia said it's pressing ahead with reform. In an interview with The Washington Post, university president Teresa Sullivan said U.Va. has been working on the much larger problems that have plagued so many schools. "I want to make the point that we have been concerned about these issues of sexual assault and alcohol use for a long time," she said. "It's not just all about the Rolling Stone story." "CBS This Morning" reached out to Rolling Stone about this interview, but they have yet to provide a comment. An attorney Jackie has retained at the Central Virginia Legal Aid Society released a statement. She wrote: "As I'm sure you all can understand all of this has been very stressful, overwhelming and retraumatizing for Jackie and her family. At this time, our position is still 'no comment.'" |
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| comelately | Dec 10 2014, 09:16 PM Post #319 |
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Still, something does not add up here. What outcome did this Sabrina Erdely expect? She could not possibly believe the story she (more or less) fabricated. In the unlikely event that she did not participate in the fabrication, how could she (or anyone else with an IQ above room temperature) believe such nonsense? And what was the chance that the people they were slandering would cooperate? After all, this Sabrina thing was supposed to have been a (somewhat) successful journalist! My wife's theory is that some people find the subject extremely exciting - to the point that they can not resist the temptation to talk about it. In other words, the whole thing was an exercise in perverted pornography. After a while, neither of the two (or more) perverts could stop the farce without losing face - and the nonsense got published. I am not a shrink, but this seems convincing to me. Indeed, this Jackie girl is (clearly) not running on all cylinders. At the very least, she is some sort of exhibitionist. And what is the distance between an exhibitionist (which is a relatively mild perversion) and a public pornographer? |
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| abb | Dec 10 2014, 09:20 PM Post #320 |
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We said the same thing eight years ago about Nifong. Why did he think he would get away with what he did? But he thought so, didn't he? I guess the best answer is that some folks are just plain crazy. |
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| foxglove | Dec 10 2014, 09:25 PM Post #321 |
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Excellent articles! |
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| Baldo | Dec 10 2014, 09:51 PM Post #322 |
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| Payback | Dec 10 2014, 11:26 PM Post #323 |
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| abb | Dec 11 2014, 04:57 AM Post #324 |
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http://thefederalist.com/2014/12/09/rolling-stones-rape-article-fiasco-will-happen-again/ Rolling Stone’s Rape Article Fiasco Will Happen Again The way we discuss rape these days is deeply flawed and will inevitably lead to disasters like the Rolling Stone somewhat-retraction. By Daniel Payne December 9, 2014 With Rolling Stone’s bombshell addendum to its rape story, in which the magazine confessed its “misplaced” trust in alleged rape victim Jackie, a University of Virginia student, many commentators pronounced the story as “unraveling.” I do not know if the word “unraveling” is correct; at the time of this writing all that anyone knows is that the case is less certain than it’s ever been, and that everyone involved appears to have lawyered up. The story might be unraveling or it might not, but at the very least it is confusing, upsetting, and bizarre. It is also a prime example of the great flaw in our modern discourse on rape. This discourse, taken over as it has been by radical feminists with plenty of axes to grind, demands that we accept rape victims’ stories uncritically and unreservedly, with little to no eye to determining the true facts of the matter. We have become so swept up in this post-evidential methodology that the article’s author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, felt no need to speak directly with the alleged rapists or even learn any of their names; because of the “sensitive nature” of the story, everyone involved believed they could leave out half of the story altogether. This is why they’ve ended up in the mess they are in, and inarguably they deserve every bit of the fallout that is to come. Truth Is Important, Remember? Yet their sloppy journalistic vanity is only evidence of the problem; the way we discuss rape these days is deeply flawed and will inevitably lead to these kind of disasters. Indeed, perhaps some good will come out of Rolling Stone’s comically inept handling of these explosive rape chargers, at least insofar as it may change our national discourse on rape to something more intelligent and, frankly, sane. Criticizing Rolling Stone for its “slipshod job” at vetting the facts of Jackie’s rape story, Emily Renda, UVA’s “project coordinator for sexual misconduct, policy and prevention, and a member of the governor’s Task Force on Combating Campus Sexual Violence,” said, according to the Associated Press: “she didn’t question Jackie’s credibility because that wasn’t her role.” Got that? The “project coordinator” for the University of Virginia’s anti-rape apparatus, and an employee of a governor’s “task force” on the matter to boot, felt that it “wasn’t her role” to figure out if an alleged rape victim’s story was credible. If determining whether or not a rape happened isn’t the job of someone with Renda’s credentials, whose job was it? Apparently it was Rolling Stone’s—but they didn’t feel that it was their business, either, convinced as they were that the matter was too “sensitive” to check out themselves. Up and down the ladder, every step of the way, everyone involved blew off his or her responsibility to determine the truth in favor of feel-good rhetoric and journalistic cowardice. Nobody cared whether Jackie was trustworthy. It was nobody’s role to figure it out. So nobody did. Crimes Should Be Proven, then Denounced Rolling Stone’s partial retraction sent many in the media scrambling to point out: even if Jackie’s story is untrue, it doesn’t detract from the persistent problem of widespread campus rape. Some took it further: Zerlina Maxwell declared in the Washington Post: “No matter what Jackie said, we should automatically believe rape claims.” The headline was quickly edited to read: “…generally believe rape claims,” but in any event Maxwell herself still maintains the point: “We should believe,” she writes, “as a matter of default, what an accuser says.” Maybe we should and maybe we shouldn’t. But then again, that’s what Emily Renda did. And Sabrina Rubin Erdely. And Rolling Stone. And Jezebel. And thousands if not hundreds of thousands of other people. Everyone believed Jackie automatically. If a woman claims she’s been raped, we should offer her our support, our trust, and our tireless advocacy. We should not, however, throw ourselves headlong into full-fledged and unequivocal belief. When someone finally started asking a few simple questions, and found out the story wasn’t as simple as it was presented to us, pundits like Maxwell pronounced: it doesn’t matter. Suspend any and all judgment. Believe automatically. “The time we spend picking apart a traumatized survivor’s narration on the hunt for discrepancies,” Maxwell says, “is time that should be spent punishing serial rapists.” Yet that’s what everyone did in this case: nobody picked apart, everyone wanted to punish. Then when it came to light that everyone involved took the most boneheaded approach to this matter, Maxwell pronounced: “That was fun. Let’s do it again.” We are going about this wrong. Rape is a terrible, brutal, inhuman crime. It is not a supernatural event that demands we toss out our standards of evidence, rationality, and level-headed inquiry. It remains to be seen just what will happen with this case: it may be that Jackie will be vindicated in the end, that she’ll be exposed as a total liar, or that she was partly lying and partly telling the truth. But we would not be here, scrambling for evidence after the verdict had already been announced, with countless people humiliated and embarrassed and perhaps a few professionally ruined, if the concerned parties had taken the proper steps to sort through the facts and the testimony before going to press. If a woman claims she’s been raped, we should offer her our support, our trust, and our tireless advocacy. We should not, however, suspend all of our doubts and throw ourselves headlong into full-fledged and unequivocal belief—any more than we would for any other reported crime. The genuinely responsible thing to do is to discover the truth; it’s not to accept one person’s testimony with no reservations whatsoever. Nothing is that certain, as Rolling Stone and Erdely are now painfully discovering. Daniel Payne is a senior contributor at The Federalist. He blogs at Trial of the Century. You can follow Daniel on Twitter. |
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| abb | Dec 11 2014, 05:08 AM Post #325 |
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http://spectator.org/articles/61215/rolling-stones-journalism-synecdoche Rolling Stone’s Journalism by Synecdoche Erdely didn't break j-school rules, she followed them. By Jon Cassidy – 12.11.14 The moral of Rolling Stone’s unraveling story about gang rape at the University of Virginia should be simple: reporters ought to stop treating rape stories as a unique genre of journalism, exempt from scrutiny. Modern guidelines for reporting on sexual violence from the Columbia Journalism School, for example, instruct reporters: “Don’t be surprised if accounts only make partial sense.” Sabrina Rubin Erdely was so unsurprised by a nonsensical story about seven fraternity brothers ambushing and raping a UVA student that she made it the centerpiece of her 9,000-word article about campus sexual assault. Because she did, she will now have a glorious opportunity to seek out a new career in technical writing or public relations. Critics on the right and left both blame Erdely for not following the rules of journalism. In fact, Erdely follows those rules closely, especially the fashionable ones. Her stories on trans women, for example, use all the right pronouns. And that’s the problem. These rules and restrictions are part of an ideological project, and should hold no authority over reporters. Many on the right blame Erdely for writing what they call “narrative journalism,” where facts are arranged to tell a pre-conceived story independent of truth. The Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, Hot Air, and others blamed this straw man. It’s a poor choice of phrase, given that “narrative journalism” has, in this Internet age, come to mean any long-form reporting. A better term might be journalism by synecdoche, where a particular anecdote is made to stand for some broad societal truth. As the Wall Street Journal put it, the problem “is that Ms. Erdely was, by her own admission, looking for a story to fit a pre-existing narrative—in this case, the supposed epidemic of sexual assault at elite universities, along with the presumed indifference of those schools to the problem…. In other words, Ms. Erdely did not construct a story based on facts, but went looking for facts to fit her theory.” Constructing narratives isn’t some novelty. It’s the essential artifice of journalism. You can fit a day in court or a city council meeting into an 800-word story, but large truths never fit in tiny news holes. The ideal is a reporter who understands the big picture, and who then selects some facts and anecdotes that represent it fairly and bring it to life for readers. Sometimes, as in the question of the prevalence of unreported rapes and false reports, the truth is essentially unknowable. Erdely’s sin isn’t that she “went looking for facts.” As the novelist Jonathan Lethem writes, “All writing, no matter how avowedly naturalistic or pellucid, consists of artifice, of conjuration, of the manipulation of symbols rather than the ‘opening of a window onto life.’” Her sin is that she ran with a highly implausible story by a single source, Jackie, about getting ambush gang-raped over shards of glass for three hours. It’s possible Erdely was too biased, too enthralled with the “rape culture” mentality, to notice the implausible elements of Jackie’s story. She may even have believed that the factual truth of Jackie’s story was unimportant next to the societal “truth” it represented. But the only reason she got this made-up story into print was that editorial standards were relaxed out of deference to Jackie’s feelings, as counseled by the bien-pensants. As Rolling Stone’s managing editor, Will Dana, explains, the magazine honored “Jackie’s request to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. In trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault, we made a judgment—the kind of judgment reporters and editors make every day. We should have not made this agreement with Jackie and we should have worked harder to convince her that the truth would have been better served by getting the other side of the story.” The result is that a story meant to demonstrate the seriousness of the campus rape problem has become an accidental narrative about lying feminists. The fact that Breitbart News published an investigation casting serious doubt on Lena Dunham’s tale of sexual assault in her memoir the same week just drives the message home. On the left, some blame Erdely not for the deal she cut with Jackie, but because she didn’t follow enough feminist guidelines on how to cover rape. Others insist Jackie ought to be believed, lies notwithstanding, because she “is still a person,” that is, she’s a female person. If you need proof that modern feminism is basically racism refracted through a personality disorder, there you go. Sarah Kliff, a former Washington Post reporter best known for dismissing the Kermit Gosnell infanticide scandal as a “local crime” story beneath her notice, attacked Erdely in Vox for not allowing Jackie, who began to feel uneasy about the Rolling Stone story as it neared publication, to take everything back: Publishing a story about a rape victim against her will is dangerous, and arguably unethical, journalism. It goes completely against the DART Center for Journalism and Trauma, a respected advisory group at Columbia University's Journalism School, guidelines for how to report on sexual assault. There is an entire section that directs reporters to “respect a potential interviewee’s right to say no.” “Be fair and realistic. Don’t coerce, cajole, trick or offer remuneration,” the guidelines instruct. For an ex-Post reporter to endorse ex post facto forgetfulness shows how staggeringly ill-informed she is about the basic rules of journalism; she also misinterprets guidelines written in plain English. There is no principle in journalism that requires anybody to unlearn anything. If you’ve got something on the record, it’s yours to use. The DART Center guidelines, for what they’re worth, counsel reporters not to coerce “a potential interviewee.” Jackie had already sat for interviews. Further, there are plenty of good reasons not to invent some new right of sources to take back whatever they want; one is to prevent manipulation. That Erdely felt compelled to negotiate with Jackie to use material she already had might explain why she made an agreement not to try to contact the accused. After the fact, when the story begin to unwind, that agreement struck many reporters as insane, but Erdely did not actually violate a principle here, despite what you’ve heard about always seeking comment from the other side. Newspapers routinely publish criminal accusations without getting comment from the accused. In every paper, every day, there will be stories based solely on information from the district attorney or the police. The accused is unreachable in jail, usually without a lawyer, and reporters feel no great responsibility to get his side. Sometimes, the prosecutors’ account of events turns out to be as fanciful as Jackie’s, but nobody minds. This brings us to the self-imposed ban on naming the accusers in these kinds of stories. The Society of Professional Journalists counsels reporters to “Use heightened sensitivity when dealing with… victims of sex crimes,” and over the years, this has hardened into something like a blanket prohibition on identifying women who allege they’ve been raped. This is taken for an absolute principle by many in the profession, but of course it’s no such thing. If a rape case goes to trial, the accuser will have to face the accused in public. Reporters covering the trial will certainly report her name then. If officials determine that the accuser made up allegations—perhaps even charge the woman with filing a false report—reporters will use her name. (Sometimes, as in the case of Crystal Gail Mangum, the stripper in the Duke lacrosse case, her name won’t show up in the papers until years later, when she’s accused and convicted of murder.) So it’s a conditional rule at best, and the condition is usually that officials haven’t made the name public. The de facto rule reporters follow is, “Don’t identify the victim until somebody important does.” That’s no moral principle. The media has heaped all of the blame for this story on Rolling Stone, sparing Jackie, despite the fact that the Washington Post demolished many key details of her story, and quoted her friends flatly contradicting her version. Since nobody has proven a negative—that Jackie was never raped—reporters continue to afford her the same confidentiality they grant others. This is unserious. Nobody can prove that Jackie has never been raped; we can only disprove the story she told Erdely. If she wants to tell another, very different story, it might be the truth. But no one is obligated to respect her anonymity on the basis of a story so filled with lies it took journalist T. Rees Shapiro thousands of words to catalogue them all. That doesn't mean we should rush out and name accusers; it's still a matter for judgment and discretion. But if the truth matters, we can't declare certain truths to be off-limits. Feminism does exactly that. Until recently, men and women were understood to have a certain ambiguity to their sexual desires. Men were supposed to be eager for sex, yet exercise some chivalric restraint. Women had their desires, too, of course, but modesty required they not be acknowledged. Feminists take modesty to be mere convention, and their whole project is predicated on its denial. Diminished as it may be, there are still times when modesty asserts its existence. At Hofstra, there was a case a few years back where a freshman who had sex with five young men in a dorm bathroom maintained she was raped until she was confronted with a cell phone video of the whole consensual incident. The reaction at Jezebel was outrage at the commentary, particularly the “all too common… assumption that a woman ‘cheapens’ herself by having group sex…” If all consensual sex, even group sex, is so unproblematic, then why does the memory of certain acts still cause shivers of shame years later? The problem must be one of consent. This is the only explanation allowed to the modern woman, the only ambiguity that feminism hasn’t yet resolved. This is why conservatives are troubled by all the campus rape activism, why they think this gospel is bound to cause a multiplication of false reports, and why the case for anonymity and other journalistic restrictions has grown so weak. The problem, philosopher Allan Bloom once wrote, is that modern students are simply unequipped to trace their problems “back to any moral ambiguity in man’s sexual nature. That was, of course, what was erroneously done in the past.” |
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| abb | Dec 11 2014, 05:27 AM Post #326 |
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/12/everything-we-know-uva-rape-case.html Everything We Know About the UVA Rape Case By Margaret Hartmann Follow @marghartmann Last month Rolling Stone published a 9,000-word article that described the horrific 2012 gang rape of a University of Virginia freshman, and how the school mishandled the incident. For a few days, it seemed to be serving its purpose: the article sparked a conversation about sexual assault on campus, and how schools nationwide often respond to brutal crimes with indifference. Then as questions were raised about why the author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, either failed to contact the alleged rapists or never even tried, the story morphed into a flashpoint in various other debates, from how we treat rape victims to journalism ethics to the nature of memory. With many apparent contradictions from Rolling Stone, Erdely, and the accuser – the latest twist involves possible catfishing – the story can be hard to follow. Here's a guide to what we know so far. November 19, 2014: Rolling Stone publishes "A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA" Rolling Stone contributing editor Sabrina Rubin Erdely begins her piece on the UVA's ineffective handling of rape cases by introducing Jackie, a woman who says she was gang raped in a UVA frat house on September 28, 2012, a few weeks after she arrived on campus. Jackie, who was 18 at the time, says she was asked out by "Drew" (a pseudonym used in the article), an attractive junior she met while they were both working as lifeguards at the university pool. Drew invited her to dinner and a "date function" at his fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi. During the party, Drew asks Jackie if she wants to go upstairs. She follows him into a pitch-black room, and screams when she suddenly realizes they're not alone: "Shut up," [Jackie] heard a man's voice say as a body barreled into her, tripping her backward and sending them both crashing through a low glass table. There was a heavy person on top of her, spreading open her thighs, and another person kneeling on her hair, hands pinning down her arms, sharp shards digging into her back, and excited male voices rising all around her. When yet another hand clamped over her mouth, Jackie bit it, and the hand became a fist that punched her in the face. The men surrounding her began to laugh. For a hopeful moment Jackie wondered if this wasn't some collegiate prank. Perhaps at any second someone would flick on the lights and they'd return to the party. "Grab its motherf*cking leg," she heard a voice say. And that's when Jackie knew she was going to be raped. Jackie says that for the next three hours, seven men took turns raping her as Drew and another man looked on. She says one of the men, who she recognized from her anthropology discussion group, was encouraged by the others to penetrate her with a beer bottle. "Don't you want to be a brother?" the others tell him. "We all had to do it, so you do, too." She comes to after 3 a.m. and runs from the house shoeless, with her "face beaten" and her dress "spattered with blood." Realizing that she's lost, she calls a friend, screaming, "Something bad happened. I need you to come and find me!" Her three friends, two boys and girl, find her outside the Phi Kappa Psi house shaking and crying. (All of their names are changed in the article.) Randall suggests going to the hospital, but the others shoot down the idea, and weigh the social implications of their next move: "Is that such a good idea?" [Jackie] recalls Cindy asking. "Her reputation will be shot for the next four years." Andy seconded the opinion, adding that since he and Randall both planned to rush fraternities, they ought to think this through. The three friends launched into a heated discussion about the social price of reporting Jackie's rape, while Jackie stood beside them, mute in her bloody dress, wishing only to go back to her dorm room and fall into a deep, forgetful sleep. Detached, Jackie listened as Cindy prevailed over the group: "She's gonna be the girl who cried 'rape,' and we'll never be allowed into any frat party again." Ultimately, they decide not to seek help. Two weeks later, Jackie sees Drew at the pool. "I wanted to thank you for the other night," he says. "I had a great time." After withdrawing from her school work and social life and buying rope to hang herself, at the end of the semester Jackie calls her mother and asks to go home. She returns to school, and toward the end of her freshman year she reports the rape to Dean Nicole Eramo, head of UVA's Sexual Misconduct Board. She is given three options: file a criminal complaint with the police, file a complaint with the school, or face her attackers with Eramo present to tell them how she feels. (There's more information here about the federal investigation into UVA's handling of sexual violence, which began in June 2011.) Jackie is now a junior, and she's become active in UVA's sexual-assault education organization. In May 2014, with Drew about to graduate, she still didn't feel ready to file a complaint, but "she badly wants to muster the courage to file criminal charges or even a civil case." The article notes that Jackie is no longer friends with Randall, who "citing his loyalty to his own frat, declined to be interviewed" by Rolling Stone. November 22, 2014: The initial response People were outraged by the events described in the article, particularly at UVA. Facing pressure from the campus community, UVA president Teresa Sullivan suspended all campus fraternities, sororities and Greek organizations until January 9. She also asked the Charlottesville Police Department to investigate Jackie's rape, and urged students, faculty, and alumni to weigh in as the school reforms how it handles sexual assault. Phi Kappa Psi suspended the activities of its UVA chapter the day after the article was published, and its national leadership said they would cooperate in the police investigation and launch their own internal investigation. November 24, 2014: Questions emerge Richard Bradley, a former George magazine editor who was duped by Stephen Glass, writes an essay questioning the story. He says the Glass incident taught him that you should be "critical, in the best sense of that word," about stories that just confirm your own biases. He says that as a former editor, "something about this story doesn’t feel right," noting that it relies entirely on one unnamed source. The friends who came to Jackie's aid weren't interviewed, and Erdely apparently made no effort to contact the alleged rapists. Others begin to question Jackie's account, and how it was reported. Reason's Robby Soave wonders if the story could be a "gigantic hoax." L.A. Times columnist Jonah Goldberg compares it to two notorious rape accusations that were proven false, saying "the media also uncritically reported Tawana Brawley's stories and those of the accusers of the Duke lacrosse team — until the rest of the media started doing their jobs." November 28, 2014: Erdely describes her reporting methods In an interview with the Washington Post, Erdely says that after deciding to write about sexual assault on campus, she spent six weeks talking to students across the country, and eventually settled on UVA. She says she was introduced to Jackie by Emily Renda, a leader in UVA's sexual assault group. "She was absolutely bursting to tell this story," Erdely says. "I could not believe how it poured out of her in one long narrative. She spoke so fast, I hardly had a chance to ask her a question. She was dying to share it." Erdely says she spent weeks corroborating Jackie's account and finds her "completely credible," but the Post presses her on why she didn't speak to other sources: Some elements of the story, however, are apparently too delicate for Erdely to talk about now. She won’t say, for example, whether she knows the names of Jackie’s alleged attackers or whether in her reporting she approached “Drew,” the alleged ringleader, for comment. She is bound to silence about those details, she said, by an agreement with Jackie, who “is very fearful of these men, in particular Drew. . . . She now considers herself an empty shell. So when it comes down to identifying them, she has a very hard time with that.” Erdely is similarly evasive when asked on Slate's Double X podcast if she knows the alleged attackers identities or tried to contact them: I reached out to them in multiple ways. They were kind of hard to get in touch with because [the fraternity’s] contact page was pretty outdated. But I wound up speaking … I wound up getting in touch with their local president, who sent me an email, and then I talked with their sort of, their national guy, who’s kind of their national crisis manager. They were both helpful in their own way, I guess. December 1, 2014: Rolling Stone confirms that it did not speak to the men When asked about the alleged assailants, Sean Woods, who edited the Rolling Stone piece, tells the Washington Post, "We did not talk to them. We could not reach them." However, he says they "verified their existence" by talking to Jackie's friends. "I’m satisfied that these guys exist and are real. We knew who they were." December 2, 2014: The magazine stands by Jackie, and its own reporting In a follow-up to their podcast, Slate's Allison Benedikt and Hanna Rosin explore why Erdely didn't include a response from Jackie's alleged attackers. Woods tells them he's "done talking about the story" and adds this statement from the magazine: "Through our extensive reporting and fact-checking, we found Jackie to be entirely credible and courageous and we are proud to have given her disturbing story the attention it deserves." Benedikt and Rosin say they also reached out to Jackie's friends. They report that she got upset when Erdely wanted to know more about her attackers, and reconsidered going public. December 5, 2014: The story begins to unravel A Washington Post report raises major questions about the narrative presented in Rolling Stone. Phi Kappa Psi says in a statement that it "did not have a date function or a social event during the weekend of September 28th, 2012," and none of its members worked at the pool during that time. While the article suggests the gang rape was part of an initiation ritual, the fraternity does not have pledges in the fall. Jackie's friends tell the Post that they're beginning to doubt her account. They say in the past week, she identified one of her alleged attackers for the first time. They discovered the student belongs to a different fraternity, and no one by that name was ever in Phi Kappa Psi. A man with that name tells the Post he worked at the pool and knew Jackie's name, but had never met her in person. He was never a member of Phi Kappa Psi. The student identified as "Andy" in the Rolling Stone article confirms that Jackie called and said "something bad happened" in the fall of 2012. He and two other friends ran to meet her about a mile from the fraternity houses. He says she was "really upset, really shaken up" but did not appear to be physically injured. He claims Jackie told them she had been forced to have oral sex with a group of men. He says they offered to get her help, but she said she just wanted to go back to the dorm. She asked them to spend the night with her, and they did. Andy denies that Jackie's dress was bloody, that she named a specific frat, or that they debated the social price of her next move. Emily Renda says she met Jackie in fall of 2013 and they instantly bonded because they had both been raped at a fraternity party. She claims Jackie initially told her she was attacked by five men, then changed the number to seven months later. Rachel Soltis, Jackie's former roommate, says she notice emotional and physical changes in her during the fall of 2012. "She was withdrawn, depressed and couldn’t wake up in the mornings," says Soltis, adding that she's convinced Jackie was sexually assaulted. Jackie says she asked Erdely to be taken out of the article at one point, but she refused, and said the article was going forward. She says she agreed to participate as long as she could fact-check her parts in the story. Jackie tells the Post she doesn't know if her attacker was a member of Phi Kappa Psi, but she knows the attack took place in that house because a year later, "my friend pointed out the building to me and said that’s where it happened." "I never asked for this" attention, she adds. "What bothers me is that so many people act like it didn’t happen. It’s my life. I have had to live with the fact that it happened — every day for the last two years." December 5, 2014: Rolling Stone's releases a statement, gets in even more trouble Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana releases a lengthy statement which concludes, "In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced." Following claims that the magazine was blaming a rape victim for its own shoddy reporting, the final paragraph is revised to say: We published the article with the firm belief that it was accurate. Given all of these reports, however, we have come to the conclusion that we were mistaken in honoring Jackie's request to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. In trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault, we made a judgment – the kind of judgment reporters and editors make every day. We should have not made this agreement with Jackie and we should have worked harder to convince her that the truth would have been better served by getting the other side of the story. These mistakes are on Rolling Stone, not on Jackie. We apologize to anyone who was affected by the story and we will continue to investigate the events of that evening. December 7, 2014: Jackie's former suitemate comes to her defense Emily Clark, who shared a suite with Jackie during her freshman year, writes an op-ed in the UVA newspaper describing how she became increasingly depressed during fall of 2012, eventually going home right before finals. "Sometime that year I remember her letting it slip to me that she had had a terrible experience at a party," Clark writes. "I remember her telling me that multiple men had assaulted her at this party. She didn’t say anything more." She continues: However, the articles released in the past few days have been troubling to me, and the responses to them even more so. While I cannot say what happened that night, and I cannot prove the validity of every tiny aspect of her story to you, I can tell you that this story is not a hoax, a lie or a scheme. Something terrible happened to Jackie at the hands of several men who have yet to receive any repercussions. December 10, 2014: Jackie's friends suggest "Drew" is a fabrication The Washington Post unveils another shocking twist: Randall, Andy, and Cindy, the three students who rushed to help Jackie on September 28, 2012, say details she gave them about Drew, her date that night, led them to question whether he was real. Randall says he befriended Jackie soon after they arrived on campus. She was interested in a romantic relationship, but he said he wanted to remain friends. A short time later, Jackie began telling her three friends about Drew, a handsome junior from chemistry class who had a crush on her. They asked for the upperclassmen's number, and started exchanging text messages with him. In texts provided to the Post, he raves about "this super smart hot" freshman who shares his love of the band Coheed and Cambria. Drew laments that he really likes Jackie, but she's interested in someone else. "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," he writes. "She cant turn my down fro some nerd 1st yr. she said this kid is smart and funny and worth it." Randall is now convinced that he's is the first year. Jackie's friends were never able to locate Drew on social media, or UVA's database. The Post confirmed no student by that name has ever been enrolled in the university. The texts also included photos of Drew, which Randall provided to the paper. While his name does not match the one Jackie provided, the Post managed to track him down. He says he's a high school classmate of Jackie's but he "never really spoke to her." He has not visited UVA in at least six years, he is not in a fraternity, and his was in another state at an athletic event on the night of the alleged rape. Randall says that after the alleged gang rape, Drew wrote him an email, "passing along praise that Jackie apparently had for him." While Rolling Stone says Randall declined to be interviewed "citing his loyalty to his own frat," he says he was never contacted and would have talked to the magazine. Andy and Cindy say Erdely didn't contact them either. Last week Jackie revealed the name of her attacker to a different group of friends for the first time. Andy, Cindy, and Randall say they've never heard the name. While the three friends are portrayed as shockingly callous in the original article, they say they did everything they could 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." The Post notes, "The article’s writer, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, did not respond to requests for comment this week." The newest revelations mean that someone is lying about Erdely's attempts to reach out to Randall. Slate's Hanna Rosin explains: That could mean one of two things: Jackie could have given Erdely fake contact information for Randall and then posed as Randall herself, sending the reporter that email in which he supposedly declined to participate in the story. Erdely also could have lied about trying to contact Randall. Rolling Stone might have hinted at this possibility in its “Note to Our Readers” when it referred to a “friend of Jackie’s (who we were told would not speak to Rolling Stone)" but later spoke to the Washington Post. That would take Erdely a big step beyond just being gullible and failing to check her facts, moving this piece in the direction of active wrongdoing. This post will be updated as more information becomes available. |
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| abb | Dec 11 2014, 05:30 AM Post #327 |
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/11/rolling-stone-uva-rape-story_n_6305832.html Rolling Stone Ducks Questions As UVA Rape Story Keeps Unraveling Posted: 12/11/2014 12:49 am EST Updated: 4 hours ago By Michael Calderone NEW YORK –- The Washington Post revealed additional inconsistencies Wednesday night in Rolling Stone's controversial story of an alleged 2012 gang rape at the University of Virginia. The Post’s T. Rees Shapiro, whose previous reporting prompted Rolling Stone to issue an editor’s note Friday acknowledging some discrepancies, has now interviewed three students mentioned in the story as friends of Jackie, the alleged victim. The three students -- identified by Rolling Stone and the Post as “Randall,” “Andy,” and “Cindy” –- gave an account to the Post for Wednesday's story that differed significantly from the one described by contributing editor Sabrina Rubin Erdely in her explosive 9,000-word article about Jackie's ordeal published online Nov. 19. The three students recall Jackie, in tears, telling them on the night of Sept. 28, 2012, that she had been forced to perform oral sex on five men. In the Rolling Stone article, Jackie recalled seven men brutally raping her on top of broken glass at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house that night. The students told the Post they urged Jackie to call the police. In the Rolling Stone story, they are depicted as advising her not to report the crime. All three students told the Post that Erdely never contacted them for her Rolling Stone article. Erdely wrote in the article that “Randall” declined an interview about the rape because of "loyalty to his own frat.” Rolling Stone acknowledged Friday that Erdely did not try contacting the alleged attackers for comment because of an agreement with Jackie, who had expressed fears of reprisal. Such an agreement is unusual because journalists are expected to approach the other side for comment, especially when preparing to publish allegations as damaging as a horrific gang rape. Both Erdely and Rolling Stone deputy managing editor Sean Woods, who edited the UVA story, had suggested in interviews before Friday that Erdely had actually tried, but failed, to reach the alleged perpetrators. Rolling Stone didn’t comment for the Post’s article on Wednesday evening. Earlier in the day, a spokeswoman told The Huffington Post that none of the magazine's editorial leadership was commenting while an internal review is underway. While news organizations routinely advocate for transparency in government or business, they too often go silent when faced with serious questions about their own work. Last year, CBS’s “60 Minutes” initially sidestepped questions about the newsmagazine's primary source for an investigation into the 2012 Benghazi attacks, only to later retract the story as it unraveled. Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana spoke Friday to The New York Times, but has not given any other interviews. He also hasn't tweeted since Friday. Erdely stopped giving interviews even before Friday's revelations in the Post, as her Nov. 19 article had already faced scrutiny from a number of outlets, including Slate, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Reason and Worth editor-at-large Richard Bradley's blog. Erdely hasn’t tweeted since Nov. 30. Neither Dana nor Erdely responded to requests from The Huffington Post. Woods, Erdely's editor, has given no interviews over the past week. He last tweeted Saturday that he was “obviously mistaken in a few comments” made about Erdely's reporting process. When The Huffington Post reached Woods by phone earlier this week, he declined to discuss the story -- or his tweet. Rolling Stone founder and publisher Jann Wenner has stayed quiet throughout the controversy. Wenner uttered two words -- "not true" -- in a New York Observer story Tuesday. He was rebutting sources who told the Observer that Woods offered his resignation, but it wasn't accepted. Wenner did not respond to a request from The Huffington Post. It’s unclear if the magazine's internal review will be made public as an article, similar to how The New York Times responded a decade ago in re-reporting the work of plagiarist staffer Jayson Blair. Times public editor Margaret Sullivan suggested in a column Monday that Rolling Stone “thoroughly investigate what happened, publish that investigation and tell its readers how, precisely, editors will make sure it never happens again.” On a Nov. 27 Slate podcast, Erdely said that she tried contacting the alleged perpetrators “in multiple ways,” but they “were kind of hard to get in touch with because [the fraternity’s] contact page was pretty outdated.” Erdely said she spoke with the fraternity’s local president and a national representative. The Washington Post reported on Nov. 28 that Erdely wouldn’t say “whether she knows the names of Jackie’s alleged attackers or whether in her reporting she approached ‘Drew,’ the alleged ringleader, for comment.” The Post’s Paul Farhi wrote that she’s “bound to silence about those details” because of an agreement with Jackie. On Dec. 1, Woods told Farhi that Erdely didn’t talk to the alleged attackers, but suggested she made an effort to do so. “We did not talk to them,” Woods said. “We could not reach them.” Woods also said that Rolling Stone “verified their existence” through interviews with Jackie’s friends, and he’s “satisfied that these guys exist and are real." In the same Post article, Erdely declined to say if she knew the names of the alleged rapists and ringleader “Drew.” Erdely also said she had “corroborated every aspect of the story that I could.” On Dec. 2, Slate’s Allison Benedikt and Hanna Rosin raised more questions about the Rolling Stone story based on their own reporting. However, Erdely, who appeared on Slate’s podcast the previous week, would no longer answer questions. And Woods told Slate he was “done talking about the story.” Three days later, Shapiro's article in The Washington Post blew open the story, revealing significant holes in the Rolling Stone account and prompting the magazine to publish an editor's note. Rolling Stone said the magazine’s trust in Jackie was “misplaced,” a response that was seen by many as blaming the alleged victim for a problematic article rather than the magazine for not adequately vetting the source's account. Dana clarified on Twitter that the “failure is on us -- not on her." Rolling Stone later quietly updated the editor's note to remove the offending line. In the editor's note, Dana wrote that "because of the sensitive nature of Jackie’s story, we decided to honor her request not to contact the man who she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men who she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her." Dana's statement seems to contradict the earlier claims of Erdely and Woods that the writer tried vainly to reach the alleged attackers. A Rolling Stone spokeswoman told Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple on Tuesday she believes Woods "misspoke on that specific point." The Post's Wednesday night report raised several new questions about Erdely's reporting process and how a magazine, renowned for strong editing and fact-checking failed to adequately vet key details in its primary source's account. It's unclear why Erdely didn't try contacting the three friends of Jackie who are depicted in the story, their quotes coming only through Jackie. Was Erdely abiding by an agreement with Jackie to not corroborate what happened after the alleged attack with the three students, or was she simply not doing her diligence as a reporter? And what steps, if any, did Rolling Stone take to identify the alleged attackers? The Post also reported Wednesday that the name of the man Jackie provided to her friends as the ringleader -- identified as "Drew" in the story -- does not match any records at the university. In addition, the Post reported that photographs Jackie had texted "to one of the friends showing her date that night were actually pictures depicting one of Jackie’s high school classmates in Northern Virginia," a man who said he hadn't been to Charlottesville, Virginia, where the university campus is located, in more than six years. |
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| abb | Dec 11 2014, 05:32 AM Post #328 |
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http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2014/12/10/Vox-com-Education-Reporter-Worries-Over-Endgame-Of-WaPost-Fact-Checking-of-Rolling-Stone-Rape-Article Education Reporter Worries Over 'Endgame' of WaPost Fact Checking of Rolling Stone Rape Article by Warner Todd Huston 10 Dec 2014 13 post a comment Apparently a search for truth isn't enough for Vox.com education reporter Libby Nelson, who worries over the Washington Post’s "endgame" as it tracks down more facts that contradict the blockbuster university rape story published last month by Rolling Stone. After the latest fact-finding article over November’s error-riddled Rolling Stone rape story, Nelson went to Twitter and wondered what the newspaper's "endgame" was for daring to look for the truth. Nelson is responding to the ever-growing evidence that Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely accepted at face value a horrifying story of a gang rape on the campus of the University of Virginia. However, after initial scrutiny called its claims into question, Rolling Stone apologized for the story and began an internal review of its reporting. Since its publication, the UVA rape story has come apart as multiple claims from Jackie have been denied by other witnesses or found to be unsubstantiated. The Washington Post has led the charge in uncovering the facts of this case. In fact, in the latest Post story—the same piece that brought Nelson's Twitter ire—the paper found the witnesses described in the offending article and discovered that the music magazine never interviewed them at all despite that it "reported" what they said about the rape case. But with the Post publishing all these fact-checking stories, each one of which seems to tear down the rape story farther, the Vox.com ed reporter has become worried that uncovering the truth is a bad thing. It seems that Nelson has decided that continuing to uncover the actual facts about the story is a form of "rape shaming" the woman known as "Jackie," the purported victim in the story. At one point on her own Twitter thread, Nelson says, "Not sure at what point pointing out RS's colossal screwups is worth the collateral damage to Jackie, who didn't ask for this." Of course, this makes the assumption that "Jackie" is sincere with her claims that she experienced a rape but that it was so traumatic that she has misremembered what happened, something experts say is possible. But we don't know this as a fact. We know nothing of "Jackie's" motivations. We can't say for sure if she is a monumental charlatan, but we can't say she isn't either. And the only way we'll get close to that answer is by the sort of fact-checking that the Post and others are belatedly doing. This claim that fact-checking the UVA rape story is a form of rape shaming the "victim" has been a common refrain among liberals and feminists. One feminist even tried to use the inconsistencies of stories by survivors of the sinking of the Titanic as "proof" that "Jackie" didn't lie. In another case, a writer for Bloomberg also took that line by insisting that the collapsing story is "failing victims" as if attacking the victims was the purpose of fact-checking a story that engulfed a university in controversy. The truth or falsehood of the story has real-world stakes for all of UVA's fraternities and sororities, which the school has suspended until January 9th—even after Rolling Stone's apology. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com. |
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| abb | Dec 11 2014, 05:36 AM Post #329 |
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/10/lena-dunham-uva-and-people-wrongly-accused-of-rape/ U.Va., Lena Dunham cases could swing pendulum in college-rape cases By Valerie Richardson - The Washington Times - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 As victims go, college men who contend they have been wrongly punished for sexual assault don't get a lot of sympathy. But the fallout from the debacles surrounding the University of Virginia and Lena Dunham rape allegations could change that. Sherry Warner Seefeld, president of Families Advocating for Campus Equality, says she's received a number of first-time calls in the last few days from parents whose sons are facing suspension or expulsion for sexual assaults they say they didn't commit. What's more, she said, some parents are looking at the option of suing not just the university but also the accuser. More than a dozen universities are facing lawsuits by men who say they were railroaded by campus tribunals under federal pressure to crack down on the so-called "rape culture" in higher education. "I think it's possible we could see more of that kind of thing happening," Ms. Seefeld said. "I've certainly been in contact with families who have at least discussed with attorneys suing the person who made the claim, as opposed to the university." She stressed that nobody wants to see rapists go unpunished, but that the problem on campus now is too many innocent men are having their lives upended based on sexual assault claims that are no more credible — and often less credible — than the Nov. 19 article in Rolling Stone about a U.Va. student or Ms. Dunham in her book, "Not That Kind of Girl." Both accounts have had details crumble under media scrutiny. Rolling Stone on Friday posted an apology for failing to check the story with other sources, while the U.Va. student, identified only as "Jackie," has reportedly retained a lawyer. Ms. Dunham's publisher, Random House, issued a statement Tuesday to the Wrap saying that the man identified as the rapist "Barry" in her book was not "Barry One," the former Oberlin College classmate who matched some of her description. "Barry One," who was found by Breitbart News, has hired an attorney and set up a legal defense fund. On Wednesday, "Barry One" released a statement through Breitbart in which he asked Ms. Dunham why she waited until Tuesday to clear his name, even though he broached the issue with Random House nine weeks ago. "The last nine weeks, spent both wrongfully accused and ignored, were frightening for me and my family," he said, adding that "because of the delay, my reputation has sustained irreparable harm." Right now too many universities essentially place the burden of proof on the accused, say critics, while victims' rights advocates argue that to question an accuser's account revictimizes the victim. "A lot of the activism is focused on a lynch-mob mentality, and that's truly unfortunate because when cases aren't put under scrutiny, even legitimate ones will breed doubters," said Joe Cohn, legislative and policy director for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. President Obama weighed in Wednesday on the issue by saying that it was important "to not to focus on one case, but to focus on the broader concerns that I have about how women, and sometimes men, are subjected to sexual assaults." "We're focused at the White House on making sure that we're raising awareness. Part of it is passing laws, but part of it is also changing minds and culture," Mr. Obama said. "Not only to make it safe for those who've been assaulted to come forward, but also to change the mindset of men, particularly our young men who are coming up, so that they understand that no means no, that respect for women and individuals is what makes you strong." |
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| abb | Dec 11 2014, 07:13 AM Post #330 |
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/11/teresa-sullivan-university-of-virginia-petition/ ‘Fire University of Virginia president Teresa Sullivan’ put to petition By Cheryl K. Chumley - The Washington Times - Thursday, December 11, 2014 Teresa Sullivan, the president of the University of Virginia — the campus at the heart of the Rolling Stone magazine debacle over its since-debunked rape claim piece — has become the target of a Change.org petition that calls for her immediate firing. The petition has only gathered a few signatures so far, but its text is blunt. It reads: "University of Virginia president Teresa Sullivan vandalized our legal system by immediately assuming the guilt of innocent men after an anonymous accuser without evidence cried, 'Rape!' Sullivan suspended activities of all fraternities (not just the one fraternity the accuser mentions), and no sororities — discrimination solely on the basis of sex." The petition then reminds how Rolling Stone has apologized for publishing the story and distanced itself from the accuser. "While the Board of Visitors immediately apologized to the anonymous accuser and her parents, now that 'Rolling Stone' has backed away from the story, the Board of Visitors' 'zero-tolerance' approach to sexual assault must including firing the woman who aided and abetted a false rape accusation as well as physical violence against the fraternity." The petition also referred to a few names of wrongly accused suspects whose lives were tarnished by erroneous prison sentences. Some of the signers said they added their signatures because "sexism is wrong, no matter who performs it," and "rape hysteria has to stop," the petition shows. |
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9:16 AM Jul 11