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UVA Rape Story Collapses; Duke Lacrosse Redux
Topic Started: Dec 5 2014, 01:45 PM (60,481 Views)
Quasimodo

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I'm an award-winning journalist, but sometimes I mix up narrative and dialogue and points of view, so forgive me. But I’m a really good judge of character, with a great "BS meter" so I’m sure this story is 100% true.


A male freshman from an Ivy League school recently confided in me that he had been raped by nine female staff in the faculty lounge. Raped with objects. Viciously. For three hours. He had been tricked into going there ostensibly to go over his Psychology 101 term paper, which was getting an “F” because it did not seem to support homosexual marriage and trans-gender rights sincerely enough.

When he arrived at the staff lounge, he was hit from behind with a softball bat. He crashed to the floor, breaking a glass table, and then he lost consciousness. But when he came-to, he found himself on the floor a midst the glass, being held face-down and raped by the nine Women’s Studies Department profs. Raped with objects imaginable and unimaginable. He remembered some of their voices, knew them from other courses, and this is what they said, while they did it to him. In the broken glass.

One of them named “Sandy” said, “Think gays don’t deserve equal rights? Try this one for size!”

One of them named Gretchen came at him with a ...



(How is my version any more or less credible than “Jackie's?")



Edited by Quasimodo, Dec 11 2014, 07:51 AM.
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Quasimodo

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Quasimodo

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Sullivan’s predicate was “she read it in the Rolling Stone.”

At least Brodhead had a prosecutor that lied to him.



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chatham
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Quasimodo
Dec 11 2014, 08:35 AM
POSTER COMMENT in another forum:

Quote:
 

Sullivan’s predicate was “she read it in the Rolling Stone.”

At least Brodhead had a prosecutor that lied to him.



Was brodhead lied to?

Just axkin!
Edited by chatham, Dec 11 2014, 08:40 AM.
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Joan Foster

Anyone think Jackie can go back to UVA next semester? She has a year and a half to graduate. Her lies are going to affect her life in powerful ways. Pathetic.
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Payback
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There are days when I get down here late and love you guys for saying it all so well.
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Duke parent 2004
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Payback
Dec 10 2014, 11:26 PM
foxglove
Dec 10 2014, 09:25 PM
Bill Anderson at his inspirational best!. If you fail to read these two essays, you shall be visited by the ghost of Nifong Past.
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LTC8K6
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Joan Foster
Dec 11 2014, 08:40 AM
Anyone think Jackie can go back to UVA next semester? She has a year and a half to graduate. Her lies are going to affect her life in powerful ways. Pathetic.
I wouldn't be surprised if she remains protected as a sexual assault survivor.
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cks
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Duke parent 2004
Dec 11 2014, 11:01 AM
Payback
Dec 10 2014, 11:26 PM
foxglove
Dec 10 2014, 09:25 PM
Bill Anderson at his inspirational best!. If you fail to read these two essays, you shall be visited by the ghost of Nifong Past.
Absolutely!
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Joan Foster

Our brilliant friend Bill...at his very best! Bravo!
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Rolling Stone Libel Lawyer Leaves Wenner Media
General Counsel Dana Rosen: 'My resignation had nothing to do with that story'

By Ken Kurson | 12/11/14 10:39am

As Rolling Stone‘s blockbuster campus rape story faces intensifying scrutiny, one question that has repeatedly been raised in the journalism community is “how did this get through legal?”

The Observer has exclusively learned that upheaval within Wenner Media’s legal department may have contributed to an environment in which a story sure to generate controversy did not face the magazine’s usual rigorous level of review.

In Spring of 2006, Rolling Stone publisher Jann S. Wenner decided to hire the company’s first in-house attorney. Dana Rosen, then 40, had an impressive resume.

A product of NYU law, Ms. Rosen had clerked for Federal Judge Shira Scheinlin and gone on to become an associate at Paul, Weiss and associate general counsel at the publisher Penguin. According to Timothy Welsh, an executive at Wenner Media, the company had tired of paying outside counsel for pre-publication review of its often-controversial stories.

As general counsel at Wenner, Ms. Rosen was soon overseeing not only all story review, but the various other legal matters any publisher will encounter. She told a legal trade magazine, “I’m handling almost all the contracts … if we get a [legal] letter, or a cease-and-desist that has to go out.” (In 2011, she sent a meanie lawyer letter telling the owner of a small-town Florida restaurant called The Rolling Stone Libation Co. that he’d have to change the name of his establishment.) In the interview with Corporate Counsel magazine, Ms. Rosen also got right to the point regarding something that is always a concern for a cost-conscious independent publisher that competes with better-capitalized rivals: “It would be fair to say that I have saved the company a significant amount of money.”

For eight years, Ms. Rosen seems to have gotten along swimmingly, citing the defeat of Britney Spears in the pop star’s defamation claim against US Weekly as a particularly satisfying win and sending around a funny memo about the need for employees to maintain their cool amid the excitement of filming of the MTV reality show I’m From Rolling Stone.

And then something curious happened. After the UVA story was published on November 19 but before things started to unravel in early December, Ms. Rosen, who had once professed to having “had nothing but good experiences with [Jann],” suddenly left the company. She took a job as general counsel at ALM, the respected publisher of legal trade properties including Corporate Counsel, The National Law Journal and The New York Law Journal. A fine collection of titles, to be sure, but one would imagine there’s far less chance that Bob Dylan saunters through the offices of The American Lawyer.

In a brief conversation with the Observer, Ms. Rosen could not recall exactly when she tendered her resignation.

“Really, the dates are irrelevant. My resignation had nothing to do with that story. I just had a great opportunity that came up at ALM, and I chose to take it. But it really unequivocally had nothing to do with that story.”

Asked if she participated with the reviewing of the UVA story, Ms. Rosen, replied, “I’m not going to comment on the process. That’s really all I want to say. Again, it really—unequivocally—had nothing to do with that story. Without a doubt.”

According to Ms. Rosen’s close friend, documentary filmmaker Pamela French, Ms. Rosen started at ALM this past Monday, December 8, and “had given her month’s notice right before the story hit.” That would put her date of resignation somewhere around Friday, November 7. The UVA story was certainly already going through legal channels by that point, but it’s unclear what degree of fact-checking and legal review had been completed.

Rolling Stone‘s legendarily tough fact-checking procedures have come under the gun, with some suggesting that the staff has been stretched too thin by cost-cutting to give complex, controversial stories the attention they need. The imbroglio over this story has already caused at least one Rolling Stone employee to offer his resignation. Now it appears that one of the systems designed specifically to question challenging material before it gets to print was at least in flux during the critical period when this story most needed engaged eyes on it.

Read more at http://observer.com/2014/12/rolling-stone-libel-lawyer-leaves-wenner-media/#ixzz3LcNAkUZw

Follow us: @newyorkobserver on Twitter | newyorkobserver on Facebook
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/12/11/the-full-demise-of-rolling-stones-rape-story/

The full demise of Rolling Stone’s rape story
By Erik Wemple December 11 at 2:03 PM

Even as Rolling Stone’s Nov. 19 story “A Rape on Campus” unraveled last week, the magazine claimed that writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely did her due diligence in investigating an alleged gang rape on Sept. 28, 2012, at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the University of Virginia that had victimized a then-freshman by the name of Jackie. “Dozens” of Jackie’s friends, Rolling Stone told this blog, had spoken with Erdely for the story — some off the record, some on the record.

“Dozens,” of course, means 24-plus.

As a second heavily reported story by Washington Post’s local staff has revealed, however, Erdely’s reportorial sweep didn’t net three rather critical friends. “Randall,” “Cindy” and “Andy” were identified in the Rolling Stone piece as three eager helpers who came to Jackie’s aid on the night of Sept. 28, 2012, when she allegedly experienced a traumatic situation. The three told The Post that the story reported by Rolling Stone doesn’t match what Jackie told them that night. Whereas the magazine claimed that Jackie had suffered a gang rape at the hands of seven men, the friends told The Post that she claimed to have been forced to perform oral sex on a group of five men.

And perhaps most critically, the latest revelation from The Post casts either account into doubt, as the man that Jackie cited as her date that night appears not to have been a student at the University of Virginia.

It all raises a mind-boggling possibility: that Erdely made an exhaustive effort to interview peripheral sources, leaving no time for the central ones. The Erik Wemple Blog has asked Rolling Stone for an inventory of the friends interviewed by Erdely, as well as other information about the reporting. That’s an extravagant request — but presumably Rolling Stone is already compiling such a file, if it’s serious about figuring out how it produced the shoddiest piece of journalism in recent memory. We haven’t heard back from the magazine.

The specifics of The Post’s latest story, titled “U-Va. students challenge Rolling Stone account of alleged sexual assault,” deliver bad news to Rolling Stone on two levels. For starters, the story upends the specifics of what Rolling Stone reported. Not only did the nature of the sexual assault alleged in “A Rape on Campus” not align with what Jackie told the three friends that night, but The Post reports that the man who was reportedly Jackie’s date that night “hasn’t been to Charlottesville for at least six years,” he says.

Publications can be excused for getting things wrong; that happens all the time. What’s inexcusable, however, is that in this case, Rolling Stone did nothing to stave off catastrophic error. As The Post reports, the friends were “never contacted or interviewed by the pop culture magazine’s reporters or editors,” meaning that neither Erdely nor the magazine’s fact-checkers lifted a finger to check with the story’s most obvious source of corroboration. In a “note to readers” following the collapse of the story, Rolling Stone acknowledged that it didn’t attempt to contact the alleged assailants in deference to the wishes of Jackie.

What’s the excuse for the failure to reach the friends? We’ve asked for an explanation on this front as well.

Behold the mammoth deception grilled into the Rolling Stone piece itself. In a paragraph outlining Jackie’s concerns about seeing the Rolling Stone article published, Erdely writes, “Greek life is huge at UVA, with nearly one-third of undergrads belonging to a fraternity or sorority, so Jackie fears the backlash could be big – a “s[---]show” predicted by her now-former friend Randall, who, citing his loyalty to his own frat, declined to be interviewed.”

Any consumer of journalism would conclude that Erdely had contacted “Randall” in an attempt to get his side of the story (just as any consumer of journalism would conclude that a reporter describing the attire, demeanor and statements of a man in a jail’s visitors hall was in the room with him). Yet “Randall” tells The Post that “he was never contacted by Rolling Stone and would have agreed to an interview.” So just how did this fellow “decline”?

Rolling Stone’s “note to our readers” — an apology for reportorial mistakes — makes this astonishing admission: “A friend of Jackie’s (who we were told would not speak to Rolling Stone) told the Washington Post that he found Jackie that night a mile from the school’s fraternities. She did not appear to be ‘physically injured at the time’ but was shaken.” Who was it that told this to Rolling Stone? We’re awaiting an answer from the magazine.

Mike Semel, the local editor of the Washington Post, says the Rolling Stone story gave his reporters a lot to follow up on. The paper’s Metro section, of course, doesn’t employ a bunch of media critics; it has long covered campus goings-on at U-Va., and that’s where the focus started out. “When the Rolling Stone story hit, it immediately became part of our coverage, to see what the campus response was going to be,” he says. As for investigating the specifics of the incident alleged in the Rolling Stone account, Semel says, “We wanted to find out what happened so we could gauge the university’s response…We didn’t set out to discredit anybody.”

The latest Post installment outlines a complicated set of interactions among the friends. Semel explains: “We all agreed that the people she reached out to that night would have the best perspective on the university’s response. They were an untapped source that would have most firsthand knowledge.” Bold text added for a reason: Semel avoided directly addressing Rolling Stone’s actions, deferring such questions to media critics. That said, his comment that these friends remained an “untapped source” days after Rolling Stone ran the story is a devastating piece of accidental media criticism.

Laziness would be the charitable explanation as to why these friends weren’t contacted by Rolling Stone. As we’ve written in this space, Erdely’s mission appears to have been to present as sensational and damaging an account of fraternity excesses as she could gather. To have interviewed these three pivotal sources would have meant inviting the story’s demise.

Awful journalism can either be exposed by editors before publication or by competitors after publication. Semel breaks it all down: “Jackie certainly exists and Jackie certainly had a story to tell and certainly Jackie’s friends believe that something happened to her that night. And again, I have nothing to say that nothing happened to her and I believe something did. And if that something is relevant to our inquiry holding the university accountable, then we’ll continue to report that out too.”

Erik Wemple writes the Erik Wemple blog, where he reports and opines on media organizations of all sorts.
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http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-12-11/lessons-from-the-rolling-stone-debacle

Lessons From the Rolling Stone Debacle
111 Dec 11, 2014 1:15 PM EST
By Megan McArdle

The saga of Rolling Stone's story about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia continues, with more fine reporting from the Washington Post. This is possibly the worst installment yet. As Hanna Rosin notes, it "strongly implies, without outright saying so, that the gang rape at the center of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s article might be fabricated." Washington Post got in touch with the friends who saw her the night of the alleged rape, and they tell a very different story from the one that Jackie does. I'm going to let Rosin narrate, rather than try to construct my own paraphrase:

Earlier, those friends told the Post that Jackie told them she’d been forced to have oral sex -- a much different story than what Jackie told Rolling Stone. This new Post article adds some details that make the entire account seem more suspicious. Jackie had told her friends -- referred to by the pseudonyms “Cindy,” “Andy,” and “Randall” in the original story and in the Post’s follow-ups -- that she had a date on Sept. 28, 2012, with a handsome junior in her chemistry class. (In the version she told to Rolling Stone, that date was with someone she'd met at her lifeguarding job.) But in the Post story, the friends imply that this junior might not exist and may have been invented by Jackie to make Randall jealous.

When the friends first heard about this junior, they were intrigued and asked Jackie for his number. They started exchanging text messages with him, and he described Jackie as a “super smart hot” freshman. He complained, though, that she liked a “nerd 1st yr” -- meaning Randall -- who is “smart and funny and worth it.” Jackie’s friends could never find this junior in the UVA database nor on social media. She provided her friends with a picture of him, but the Post has since learned that the guy in the picture is a high school classmate of Jackie’s who does not go to the University of Virginia and was in another state participating in an athletic tournament on the night of the alleged rape. (More recently, Jackie gave her friends the name of a different guy. The Post also contacted him, and he said he’d never met Jackie.)

The Post story doesn’t connect all the dots, but it’s not hard to do. Jackie has now given her friends two different names for the man she was with that night. Neither of them was in fact with her, ever dated her, or even knew her all that well. She appears to have invented a suitor, complete with fake text messages and a fake photo, which suggests a capacity for somewhat elaborate deception. Jackie, though, has not recanted her story. Her attorney would not answer questions for the Post's story on Wednesday and has told reporters to stop contacting Jackie.

A few things are worth noting here.

The first is that this was not a story that should have been investigated in the pages of the Washington Post. Jackie's story should have been checked, and quietly dropped from the article, by Sabrina Rubin Erdely. By choosing to say "I believe" rather than undertake the fraught process of questioning the story of a vulnerable and traumatized woman, Rolling Stone ensured that this girl's story would instead be litigated in a public way that is damaging to a girl who is already clearly very damaged.

The second is that this is the danger of starting out knowing the story you want to tell. Generally, when I write a feature, I have no idea what I'm going to find. Is the thing I think is a problem actually going to turn out to be a problem? Sometimes the answer is "no" or "not the way that you think," and sometimes the answer is "it's exactly as bad as you thought, maybe even worse." The point is that my view of the subject frequently changes in some significant way. Erdely, by contrast, seems to have started out knowing the story she wanted to tell, about a campus where rape is out of control and authorities are indifferent, and sifted through stories until she found a place that matched the narrative. This is incredibly dangerous. It is also not rare. Indeed, scientists have a name for it: confirmation bias.

The third is that this story should be keeping every good reporter awake at night. Not because the editing and reporting process is set up to allow these stories through, mind you; there were numerous breakdowns in the process here, including the fact that Rolling Stone's in-house lawyer seems to have been in the process of departing as the story went to press. But the fact that it broke down so badly reinforces the need for eternal vigilance about the possibility of problematic stories making it through the editorial gauntlet at a storied magazine that is supposed to have a fairly thorough fact-checking process.

It also highlights the need to be willing to reconsider stories in the light of new questions or evidence. When questions first emerged, a number of people treated quashing those questions as the moral equivalent of war, attacking the questioners as if being skeptical of a story was itself wrong -- rather than exactly the spirit of inquiry that makes science, and public debate, work. Others pointed out that trauma victims often have fragmentary or contradictory memories, which is generally true of all eyewitnesses, not just trauma victims, and not really sufficient to explain the gaping holes in this particular story. When we get wedded to our narratives, we become blind. That is true of everyone -- the people who were appropriately skeptical of this story as well as the people who weren't -- and we all need to be on guard against it all the time.

And the fourth is that this should demonstrate -- to everyone -- the problem of taking extraordinary stories as representative. Before the problems emerged with the Rolling Stone story, I saw a lot of people talking as if this story somehow represented a broad and pervasive problem on college campuses rather than a single incident. Even if the story had held up, this would have been a vast overstatement. All sorts of horrific crimes happen in America, and the legal system does not always get the justice we would like. They are not necessarily representative of American culture, or even flaws in our institutions; they are reflections of the fact that we live in a big country, and like any big country, we have some bad apples.

But people who are worried about the problem of false rape accusations are now in danger of making the same mistake. If Jackie's story is a hoax, it is no more representative than it would be if it were true. It is one story. Were reporters and editors excessively credulous because of the nature of the accusation? That seems likely. But that doesn't mean that most accusations of rape are false, or that feminists are happy to tell fake stories in order to advance the cause. It is evidence for greater caution in repeating rape stories; it is not evidence of a vast conspiracy to falsely accuse young men of rape. Whatever happened at UVA, it is singular and complicated, at best an example of a potential problem, not evidence that it happens a lot.

The people who called the skeptics "rape denialists" or "rape truthers" made the mistake of making the specific stand in for the whole. Disbelieving this particular story was taken as disbelieving in the existence of rape, which is absurd. But it would be equally absurd to insist that what happened in this particular case somehow stands in for every journalist, activist or editor who deals with rape. The country is large, its institutions are many, and its people are incredibly diverse. No one story can sum us all up in a neat package. We would all do well to remember that.

To contact the author on this story:
Megan McArdle at mmcardle3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor on this story:
Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.net
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Mason
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Parts unknown
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Anti-American, Anti-Traditional America, Anti-Religion (well, one for sure)...


http://bangordailynews.com/2014/12/11/news/bangor/email-discouraging-christmas-themed-decorations-at-umaine-causes-uproar-on-campus/


.
Edited by Mason, Dec 11 2014, 04:46 PM.
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http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/12/11/_istandwithjackie_and_the_feminist_response_to_the_unraveling_of_rolling.html

Feminism Can Stand Without Jackie
By Amanda Hess

I’m told that this has been a bad couple of weeks for the anti-rape movement. “Rolling Stone just wrecked an incredible year of progress for rape victims,” Arielle Duhaime-Ross wrote at the Verge last week. Since the magazine’s November story about a brutal gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity began to unravel early this month, feminists have raised alarms that the magazine’s whiff will have devastating effects for past and future victims. The story “could be read as a setback for an entire movement,” campus activist Annie Clark wrote in BuzzFeed. UVA is “on its way to becoming the next Duke Lacrosse—a highly publicized incident that misogynists will point to as a way to discredit all people, especially young women and students, who experience rape,” Audrey White wrote at Autostraddle. According to Duhaime-Ross, “the credibility of rape victims will be put into question for years to come,” as Rolling Stone has helped to “perpetuate the dangerous and damaging myth that women lie about rape.”
Amanda Hess Amanda Hess

Amanda Hess is a Slate staff writer.

I’m surprised that these activists and commentators are so quick to hand over the future of this movement to packs of roving social media misogynists. There are people on the fringe who believe that any rape story with any discrepancies is evidence of a vast feminist conspiracy aimed at inventing rapes and vilifying innocent men, but these rape truthers are not reasonable people, nor are they most people, and it is unwise to mold the conversation around their fantasies. I am, however, concerned with how some feminists and progressives have responded to the ever-expanding holes in Rolling Stone’s story.

At this point, it is clear that Rolling Stone failed to meet its basic journalistic requirements many times over. There is also compelling evidence that Jackie herself fabricated all or parts of her story. Neither of these scenarios serve to dismantle the anti-rape movement. Journalists have messed up reporting on rape since they began reporting on rape. In addition, there have been false rape allegations in the past, and there will be false allegations in the future. Any successful anti-rape activist or movement must be willing to accept that false accusations are not a “myth” and grapple with how to handle them appropriately. Whatever really happened at UVA one Saturday night in 2012 cannot possibly undermine a social justice movement because any understanding of justice must accommodate the truth.

Rolling Stone presented Jackie’s story as a powerful symbol for how rape victims are denied justice across America. When it was revealed that the magazine had torpedoed itself, Jackie, and UVA in its negligent reporting, it gave anti-rape activists the opportunity to disavow the false framework that Jackie is somehow emblematic of victims everywhere. Instead, many doubled down. Under the hashtags #IStandWithJackie and #IBelieveJackie, feminists lent their support for Jackie’s story, noting that certain aspects of her experience resonate with the way that other rape victims have been shamed and disbelieved. “We know institutions will bring their power to bear to obfuscate sexual violence. That's why we stand with survivors. #IBelieveJackie,” the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence tweeted. By using Jackie’s individual story, which was already coming under legitimate scrutiny, to reinforce the movement’s broader narrative about how sexual assault operates, and boosting the message with activist hashtags, they bet the big story on the strength of one anecdote. That’s a mistake.

On Monday, after a weekend of the Washington Post reporting on a number of inconsistencies in the story, the NAESV released a full statement, saying that it “believes ‘Jackie’ ” because the NAESV is made up of “very experienced survivor advocates” who “do not take minor discrepancies in certain details of ‘Jackie’s’ story as any reason to begin doubting that she experienced horrific sexual violence by a number of perpetrators. The research on traumatic memories is clear: those who survive trauma can often have difficulty consolidating the details of the experience and discrepancies are not uncommon.” There is never a wrong time to highlight the effects of traumatic crimes on their victims or how PTSD affects testimony, but it is misleading to suggest that Jackie’s experience is somehow normative of sexual assault victims in general. The NAESV’s own advocates have presumably never counseled Jackie directly. They do not know what happened to Jackie and do not understand all the various possible explanations for her behavior. Right now, none of us do.

Rolling Stone’s editors have pledged to reinvestigate the tale themselves, and after the magazine’s disastrous first round, I suspect that their project will be about as useful as O.J. Simpson’s search for the real killers. But it is likely that more reporting on this story from other sources, as well as an investigation currently being undertaken by the Charlottesville, Virginia, police, will further illuminate what happened at UVA and how Rolling Stone got it so wrong. So it is confusing to me that since the story broke, activists on both sides have attempted to fill in the blanks with rank speculation about what “really” happened, coming to conclusions that conveniently align with their worldviews. “I think it's pretty clear Jackie was assaulted, and that her memory of the trauma is inaccurate—which is far from uncommon,” feminist blogger Jeff Fecke tweeted after the Washington Post’s most recent story was published Wednesday night.

I’m not sure what would make Fecke so clear on that point, given the reporting that has come out. And there are many feminists who claim that the situation ought never be clarified because attempts to “pick apart” Jackie’s story are necessarily offensive to Jackie and by extension all rape victims. “The current frenzy to prove Jackie’s story false—whether because the horror of a violent gang rape is too much to face or because disbelief is the misogynist status quo—will do incredible damage to all rape victims, but it is this one young woman who will suffer most,” Jessica Valenti wrote in the Guardian on Monday. It is wrong to assume that seeking the truth—to the extent that it is discoverable—comes from a place of mistrust or outright derision of rape victims. Carefully examining the Rolling Stone debacle and taking rape seriously as a national problem are not incompatible goals; we are capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time.

And there are real reasons for reinvestigating the story. The students of UVA deserve to know whether their campus is being occupied by a pack of ritualistic gang rapists, and if so, who they are. It is also appropriate to re-examine whether UVA’s response in this case was, in fact, insufficient, as Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s story strongly argued. As for the other students who appeared in Erdely’s story, especially the three friends Jackie says she called on the night of the alleged incident, it is fair to provide them the opportunity to share their own recollections of the events. Erdely characterized “Cindy” as a “self-declared hookup queen” and attributed this direct quote to her: “Why didn't you have fun with it? … A bunch of hot Phi Psi guys?” It is not petty or mean for her to dispute this narrative. None of this means that Jackie ought to be hounded or harassed in the process. Declining to speak further to reporters is her right, and cruel, unsourced speculation about her personality or motives or history of victimization is unfair.

And yet there is something strange in the claim, from advocates at the NAESV, Valenti, and Autostraddle’s Audrey White, that they “believe” Jackie. I don’t challenge their right to believe in anything they choose, but I do question whether belief is a productive framework for this story, because it suggests faith in something that lies outside the bounds of human knowledge. To put claims of rape in this category is to buy the idea that rape reports are by nature ambiguous, and that feelings override facts. The Rolling Stone incident shows that is not the case—many aspects of many rape allegations are capable of being thoroughly investigated, and one of the greatest problems with the American justice system’s response to rape is that police so often refuse to do that work (or in this case, that a journalist declined to). The idea that fully investigating or truthfully reporting on rape claims boils down to a simple “belief” in a victim’s account is simplistic and offensive, as Rolling Stone itself realized after it claimed that its trust in Jackie was “misplaced,” and it was swiftly and rightfully shamed for saying so.
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Even journalists who aren’t staking out a position on Jackie’s story have turned to questionable tactics in order to shift the focus. Many have attempted to contextualize the fallout of the Rolling Stone article by pointing to statistics that show that false rape reports are an extremely rare phenomenon. In a representative piece, the Marshall Project’s Dana Goldstein wrote: “Rape-prevention groups on campus and elsewhere have already expressed concerns that even the suggestion of a false allegation could perpetuate misconceptions about the crime and hurt efforts to persuade women to come forward when they have been assaulted. In fact, research on rape allegations suggests that only a small percentage of the rape claims presented to the authorities—not only in the United States but also abroad—are false.” Goldstein relied heavily on a 2010 study published by the psychologist David Lisak and a team of researchers that found that just 6 percent of rape claims reported to one American university’s campus police department were investigated by authorities and determined to be false; the team’s review of similar international research on the subject found that between 2 percent and 10 percent of rape claims in those studies were determined to be false. But these studies refer to claims made to campus and local police departments; Jackie did not bring her story to them. I am not aware of any research investigating the veracity of rape claims told among friends, at campus consciousness-raising groups, or to the media. Perhaps these stories are more likely or less likely to be true. Why pretend that we know?

A common refrain in this fallout is that by even asking questions like these, we risk suppressing victims’ stories or making abused women feel distrusted and alone. “I worry about how many people won’t come forward about past or future attacks because they’ve been told once again that assault victims shouldn’t be trusted,” Audrey White wrote at Autostraddle as the story began to self-destruct. But that’s not true. The lesson of the Rolling Stone story is not that victims shouldn’t be trusted, but that unreliable storytelling shouldn’t be trusted; at the Post, Erik Wemple has rightfully used the incident to question Rolling Stone’s deployment of vivid, cinematic narratives in its treatment of other subjects. And many journalists are using the Rolling Stone example as an opportunity to re-examine their own responsibilities as reporters on all kinds of stories, not as evidence to distrust rape victims. Officials at UVA have also reaffirmed their commitment to taking sexual assault reports on the campus seriously, even as Jackie’s story has come undone. This makes sense, as UVA’s responsibility to its students in this regard is not predicated on coverage in Rolling Stone but is mandated by the federal government, which is keeping a watchful eye on the administration and has for years.

Perhaps the sort of self-examination that journalists and UVA administrators are going through now could also serve activists and feminists. Big ideological narratives about sexism and rape culture don’t need to fit neatly with every incident in order to remain compelling. In fact, they are strengthened when they are accepting of nuances and aware of their own limitations.
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