| UVA Rape Story Collapses; Duke Lacrosse Redux | |
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| abb | Dec 11 2014, 07:23 PM Post #346 |
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http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/rolling-stone-cindy-uva-rape-story Today 4:35 pm What Rolling Stone Did to “Cindy” By Amy Davidson There has been much talk about how the Rolling Stone debacle is a result of a tendency to believe accusations of sexual assault too quickly. But, really, the opposite may be true. There has been much talk about how the Rolling Stone debacle is a result of a tendency to believe accusations of sexual assault too quickly. But, really, the opposite may be true. “Andy,” “Cindy,” and “Randall” were the names given to three of the characters in Rolling Stone’s “A Rape on Campus,” by Sabrina Rubin Erdely. The three represented, at a minimum, the failure of collegiate bystanders to support a woman (their friend “Jackie”) who had just been sexually assaulted. The story is now deeply and irretrievably compromised: Rolling Stone has acknowledged “discrepancies” in Jackie’s account of the attack, and, in a note appended to the story, the magazine has said it was “mistaken in honoring Jackie’s request to not contact the alleged assaulters.” There is, indeed, no sign in the piece of an attempt to contact the men who Jackie said raped her, but Erdely does write that Jackie’s “now-former friend Randall . . . citing his loyalty to his own frat, declined to be interviewed.” On Wednesday, though, Andy, Cindy, and Randall (using those pseudonyms) told the Washington Post that Rolling Stone did not contact them at all. They also said that, while something seemed to have happened to Jackie that night, as Andy put it, “It didn’t happen that way at all.” In the Rolling Stone account, Andy, Cindy, and Randall found Jackie outside of the Phi Kappa Psi house on the night of September 28, 2012. She was, according to the magazine, beaten and bruised, stumbling away from a gang rape in which seven men took turns with her, one using a beer bottle. Andy, Cindy, and Randall are “her three best friends.” At first, they are taken aback, but they quickly turn cold—awful, really. When Randall briefly wonders about going to the hospital, the others dissuade him: “ ‘Is that such a good idea?’ [Jackie] recalls Cindy asking. ‘Her reputation will be shot for the next four years.’ ” Jackie listens, “mute in her bloody dress,” as Cindy, now playing the mean girl, “prevailed over the group: ‘She’s gonna be the girl who cried “rape,” and we’ll never be allowed into any frat party again.’ ” Not only is Cindy is portrayed as the instigator of Jackie’s abandonment; her cruelty is given a particular social and sexual character. One traumatic aspect of the aftermath of the rape, according to Rolling Stone, was that “her pals were now impatient for Jackie to rejoin the merriment.” And here is Cindy again, in what would be one of the worst passages in the article even if everything Jackie said were true: Cindy, a self-declared hookup queen, said she didn’t see why Jackie was so bent out of shape. “Why didn’t you have fun with it?” Cindy asked. “A bunch of hot Phi Psi guys?” Cindy’s supposed tolerance for rape, in other words, is attributed to her own supposed promiscuity. She thought that being gang-raped could be “fun”—she was that kind of girl. Deliberately or not, the passage plays to the notion that a young woman like Cindy couldn’t really be raped if the perpetrators were “hot Phi Psi guys.” But of course she could be. So did Rolling Stone contact Cindy at all? (I e-mailed the magazine to ask, but haven’t heard back. The Post said that Rolling Stone wouldn’t comment, because of an internal inquiry.) If the magazine did get in touch with her, did it make it clear that it was interested not only in checking her account of what happened that night but also in presenting her sexual history to a national audience in a certain way? The piece calls Cindy a “self-declared hookup queen”—declared to whom? Did the magazine rely on Jackie’s word, or on someone else’s? (The magazine’s note refers to “a friend of Jackie’s who we were told would not speak to Rolling Stone.”) Cindy is not her real name, but she was surely identifiable, not only to herself but to an entire circle of people at UVA. At the time of the alleged rape, she was a first-year student—presumably an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old. She’d be only about twenty or twenty-one now. She and Andy and Randall might have given Rolling Stone an account of what they remember seeing and doing that night. They told the Post that “they found their friend in tears. Jackie appeared traumatized, saying her date ended horrifically, with the older student parking his car at his fraternity, asking her to come inside and then forcing her to perform oral sex on five men.” The Post account goes on: Although they did not notice any blood or visible injuries, they said they immediately urged Jackie to speak to police and insisted that they find her help. Instead, they said, Jackie declined and asked to be taken back to her dorm room. They went with her—two said they spent the night—seeking to comfort Jackie in what appeared to be a moment of extreme turmoil. The three friends stand by their belief that something happened to her: “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.” But they also introduce more troubling discrepancies, to borrow Rolling Stone’s phrase—Jackie offered different names for the person who was supposedly her date that evening and contradictory details about him. And photos that were supposedly of the date turned out to be of a high-school acquaintance of Jackie’s who wasn’t even in the state at the time. The three friends seem to have supplied the Post with texts and other communications that back up their story. Given the impact the Rolling Stone article has had, this needs to be sorted out. The magazine’s clumsiness has left women who have been sexually assaulted on campus—and there are many of them—more vulnerable and isolated. There has been much talk about how the Rolling Stone debacle is a result of a tendency to believe accusations of sexual assault too quickly. But, really, the opposite may be true. Hanna Rosin—who, along with the Post’s T. Rees Shapiro, with the team of Nick Anderson, Paul Farhi, Jennifer Jenkins, and Julie Tate, has been doing truly thoughtful work on this story—notes that, when she asked Erderly, on a podcast, why she chose to report on UVA, “Erdely said she called several universities but kept hearing typical stories about sexual violence. Then she called some activists and heard this sensational story about Jackie and gang rape.” Maybe the typical stories were boring, or judged to be too ambiguous—open to doubt. In the podcast, Erderly doesn’t use the word typical, but says that she first heard about Jackie when talking to an activist about how story after story had an element of “self-blame.” She found this especially remarkable in the case of Jackie, who said that she was violently attacked by a group of men, at least some of whom were strangers, on a night when she said she was wearing “a tasteful red dress with a high neckline” and “discreetly spilled her spiked punch onto the sludgy fraternity-house floor,” not being a drinker herself. Somehow, and for whatever reason, the other women’s stories (which could be found in great numbers) weren’t what Rolling Stone was looking for. Maybe the magazine worried that those women would be seen as just a bunch of Cindys. |
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| abb | Dec 11 2014, 07:51 PM Post #347 |
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/394464/does-truth-matter-feminist-left-charles-c-w-cooke December 11, 2014 4:49 PM Does Truth Matter to the Feminist Left? The reactions to the unraveling of the Rolling Stone story suggest not. By Charles C. W. Cooke If the champions of modern feminism are possessed of even the slightest modicum of self-awareness, T. Rees Shapiro’s explosive investigation into Rolling Stone’s now infamous claims of ignominy at UVA will have provided them with a much-needed wake-up call. For those who had stood unwaveringly behind its author as her tale came crashing down around her, last night should have been an education of sorts. The lessons that Shapiro’s work conveys: That the truth matters, wherever it may lead; that “skeptic” is not a synonym for “hater”; and that our liberal inheritance is most emphatically not for sale — especially to those would offer only a mess of pottage in return. The rest of us, meanwhile, should have been rudely reminded that at the heart of the so-called social-justice movement is the conscious rejection of prized Anglo-American norms. Where most readers accepted with alacrity the possibility that Sabrina Erdely could have got it wrong, the tireless archaeologists of our supposedly ubiquitous “rape culture” took to remolding their position every six-and-a-half minutes and to carrying on in public like a bunch of frothy peanut-gallery-voyeurs at a backwoods 17th-century witch trial. Just a few short weeks ago, when Rolling Stone’s story was almost universally believed to be true, we were urged to read each and every sordid detail of the case so that we might better acquaint ourselves with the broader problems that are presented by “rape culture.” Today, as the story continues to collapse, the opposite view is regnant, and the very same people who pointed excitedly to Erdely’s work now contend that we should not be focusing on an individual case such as this in the first place. Thus are we being asked to accept two contradictory positions. The first: that Erdely’s gang-rape story was important enough not only to justify months of research but to serve as the hook on which her piece was hung. The second: that it didn’t matter at all. “Not sure,” Vox’s Libby Nelson asked last night in a tweet that summed up the volte-face, what the Washington Post’s “endgame is in continuing to pursue” the facts. Such self-serving inquiries illustrate something crucial — namely, that many of those who describe themselves as “journalists” these days are more interested in moral positioning and the advancement of their agendas than in the attainment of objective truth. Where most of us are primarily concerned with whether a given claim is correct, others seem more attentive to how we react to that claim in the first place. Did you ask questions about Jackie’s story as it was reported? If so, you must hate women, work for the patriarchy, or hope to prove that nobody is ever raped. Did you believe Jackie uncritically and with a full-throated roar? Excellent, then you must be a good person who wants to help women, move the country forward, and do something concrete about the issue of sexual assault. It’s really that simple, my dear. Amazingly, these presumptions tend to remain intact through thick and thin. In consequence, a person who incorrectly judged the veracity of Rolling Stone’s story can remain on the side of the angels, while a person who was correct to doubt the account is dismissed as a devil who just got lucky. Sure, the zetetics might have been right in a technical, factual, reality-based sense. But that they tried to investigate the matter in the first instance tells us something terrible about their character. And yes, the story may have been completely and utterly wrong. But at least its advocates took a stand for something nice. Did you? Wait, you’re not a rapist, are you? This is an area in which we hear a great deal about empathy and kindness. But there is nothing that is nice or kind or empathetic about the subordination of truth to narrative. It would indeed have been abominable if Jackie had been transformed by hyper-dubiety into Cassandra’s cousin — into a woman, that is, who knew the terrible truths of the past but who could not convince anybody to believe her. And yet — and this, I think, is the part that the Maxwells, Kohns, and Dunhams of the world seem to struggle with — it would also have been wretched if Rolling Stone had been permitted to report as fact a devastating crime that never actually occurred. (Or, at least, that did not occur in anything like the manner in which Rolling Stone claimed it occurred.) Which is to say that there are always two sides to justice’s ledger, and that those who fight blindly and stupidly for a particular outcome are not so much seeking justice as trying to corrupt it for their own ends. As Slate’s Hanna Rosin noted last night, we are now at a tipping point of sorts. The Washington Post’s latest deep-dive, Rosin writes, “strongly implies, without outright saying so, that the gang rape at the center of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s article might be fabricated.” Indeed so. And should we subsequently learn that the Post’s implication was warranted, this will mean that Sabrina Erdely and her source have conspired a) to mislead millions of people on a matter of basic fact; b) to potentially damage the reputations of the men they accused; c) to cast a trio of Jackie’s friends as amoral, vain, criminally negligible monsters; and d) to libel the fraternity that is implicated, as well as the University of Virginia writ large. If she is revealed to be a fabulist, Jackie’s life will get worse, not better. If Sabrina Erdely’s reporting is as shoddy as it now seems to be, her career will be over and her name will live in disgrace. And, fair or not, the very notion that there is a pervasive “rape culture” will inevitably be dinged by the discovery that a major national magazine was willing to bend the truth in pursuit of its exposition. What a tangled web we weave . . . — Charles C. W. Cooke is a staff writer at National Review. |
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| abb | Dec 11 2014, 08:03 PM Post #348 |
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http://abcnews.go.com/US/questions-raised-rolling-stones-uva-rape-story/story?id=27537952 New Questions Raised About Rolling Stone's UVA Rape Story By RYAN SMITH, JOSH MARGOLIN, NIKKI BATTISTE, KATHERINE FAULDERS and RHEANA MURRAY Dec 11, 2014, 7:30 PM ET — The college students described as friends of the alleged rape victim Jackie in an explosive Rolling Stone article revealed their identities to ABC News today, and said that some of the magazine's story is false. "The text was so divergent from what we said that evening," said Alex Stone, who said he's identified as "Andy" in the article. The magazine article describes a violent, three-hour gang rape that left a University of Virginia student identified as Jackie bruised and bloody when she escaped a house on fraternity row, right near the university president's office. When her friends, identified by Rolling Stone as "Randall," "Andy" and "Cindy," arrived that night, the article says they urged Jackie to keep quiet to keep their social lives intact. That is not the scene described by Jackie's friends to ABC News. They said at the time they believed a "traumatic" sex assault had occurred. But the two males friends said they were told that night -- Sept. 28, 2012 -- that Jackie was forced to perform oral sex on five men while a sixth stood by. The friends pointed out another inconsistency in the Rolling Stone article, saying that the three of them were not standing right next to each other when Jackie revealed what she said happened on the night of the attack, as author Sabrina Erdely writes in the magazine. Ryan, who asked ABC News to withhold his last name and is identified as "Randall" in the Rolling Stone article, said he got the call from Jackie first and rushed to meet her outside a dorm building. She was "crying and shaking" when she told him what happened, and he then called Alex, but relayed Jackie's wishes that Cindy not come. Kathryn Hendley, who said she is the "Cindy" described in the magazine, said she accompanied Alex when he went to see Jackie. But she said that she hung back Jackie spoke to the two men. Hendley told ABC News the later that night, Stone told her what Jackie said, and then Jackie later described the incident herself. Hendley also denied one cruel comment the Rolling Stone article alleges she made: "She's gonna be the girl who cried 'rape' and we'll never be allowed into any frat party again." Hendley told ABC News she definitely did not say that. The three friends spoke to ABC News this afternoonat the U.Va. campus in Charlottesville, for the first time revealing their identities in relation to this story. In the wake of the report, U.Va. has announced dramatic new measures to keep students safe and suspended most fraternity and sorority events until the start of the next semester. Local police and an independent counsel named by the Virginia attorney general are also conducting investigations. Since the story was first released, the friends said they have been able to find key inaccuracies in the story. "I didn't know any Greek letters outside of what I'd learned in physics class," Ryan said. The article describes Jackie sinking into depression after the alleged rape, and holing up in her dorm room. Not so, say her friends, who told ABC News she seemed fine after the alleged assault. Today, the trio said they're still not sure what parts of Jackie's story are true. But they said they want to tell their story in case it is, and to prevent any future sexual assaults on campus. "The bigger issue should be on preventing sexual assault and being able to help survivors of sexual assault," Ryan said. Jackie's lawyer and the University of Virginia declined comment when reached by ABC News. Neither Rolling Stone nor the author of the article responded to the comments from Jackie???s three friends. Edited by abb, Dec 11 2014, 08:04 PM.
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| abb | Dec 11 2014, 08:35 PM Post #349 |
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http://www.nationallawjournal.com/id=1202678737288/In-the-Rolling-Stone-Controversy-Key-Figures-Lawyer-Up?mcode=1202615705846&slreturn=20141111203424 In the Rolling Stone Controversy, Key Figures Lawyer Up Zoe Tillman , The National Law Journal December 11, 2014 As criticism of Rolling Stone mounts over the magazine’s sensational story of sexual assault at the University of Virginia, a UVA associate dean, a student featured in the article and others associated with the controversy are lawyering up. Associate Dean of Students Nicole Eramo, who heads UVA’s Sexual Misconduct Board, has hired Thomas Clare of Clare Locke in Alexandria, Va. Clare, whose practice includes representing high-profile plaintiffs in defamation cases, said the article painted a false portrait of how Eramo responded to students who came to her with sexual assault complaints. “The story casts her performance and her compassion and her response to the allegations [of sexual assault] in a very negative light and in a way that is damaging to her reputation,” Clare (left) said. Litigation could be an option, he added. No lawsuits have been filed against Rolling Stone for its Nov. 19 article “A Rape on Campus,” which presented a harrowing story from a UVA student identified as “Jackie” who said she was gang-raped at a fraternity. In the weeks since the article was published, the magazine issued statements about apparent “discrepancies” in Jackie’s story. The Washington Post’s latest examination of Jackie’s claims, published Wednesday, cast further doubt on the article. Jackie has hired a lawyer and members of the fraternity—Phi Kappa Psi—have sought legal advice from the chapter adviser, who is a lawyer. Rolling Stone won’t say if it’s turned to outside counsel, but lawyers familiar with libel cases say the magazine is almost certainly seeking legal advice as it investigates new information that challenges parts of the article. The controversy has some of the trappings of a defamation case—a media outlet admitting flaws in its reporting, for one—but that doesn’t mean litigation is imminent, said Charles Tobin, a Holland & Knight partner who has defended news organizations against libel lawsuits. “We know there are questions about details but we still don’t know where the truth lies in all of this,” Tobin told The National Law Journal. “It’s really hard to point an accusatory finger and say that Rolling Stone committed a materially false story when we really don’t know what the actual truth is yet.” If “Drew,” the male student Jackie accused of leading her into the attack, or the fraternity were considering a lawsuit, Tobin said, they’d have to weigh several variables. “Drew,” whose real name wasn’t published in the article, would not only have to prove the information was false, but also that he could reasonably be identified, Tobin said. The fraternity would have to consider that a lawsuit opens the door to additional public scrutiny, he said. “Does any college fraternity on a campus that was once voted the nation’s No. 1 party school really want to test the truth about underage drinking and sexual activities?” Tobin said. (Playboy magazine ranked UVA the top “party school” in the country in 2012.) Rolling Stone’s statements about the article could provide useful fodder for potential plaintiffs, however, said Rodney Smolla, a visiting professor at the University of Georgia School of Law who has represented plaintiffs in libel cases. Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana said in a note published online earlier this month that the magazine made a mistake in honoring Jackie’s request not to contact her alleged attackers. Dana said the magazine took responsibility and did not want to blame Jackie. “Normally you’re very, very concerned about whether you can establish the requisite fault. This is the rare case where it’s being handed to you on a silver platter,” Smolla said. “That makes it more appealing from the plaintiffs’ perspective—that normally harder issue is not hard in this case.” Still, Smolla said the lawyer for any individual or organization thinking about bringing defamation claims should advise the client to make sure there are no “skeletons in the closet.” “This could backfire on you, even though it may be technically false,” Smolla said. “If you’ve got things you’re not proud of that are there, then do not bring the case because all of that will come out and it will cause you more damage than good.” Tobin said the Rolling Stone controversy highlighted what he saw as a gap in libel law—a lack of protection against lawsuits for media outlets that report information relayed directly from victims, as opposed to information cited from police or court documents. He said he hoped the fallout from the story didn’t chill victims from bringing their stories to reporters in the future. SEEKING COUNSEL Members of the UVA chapter of Phi Kappa Psi have sought legal advice from Virginia solo practitioner Ben Warthen, who serves as the chapter adviser. Warthen said he hadn’t formally been hired as the chapter’s lawyer and didn’t know if it would hire counsel. If it did want to hire a lawyer, he said, it would do so in conjunction with the national organization. The executive director of the national organization did not return requests for comment. The fraternity said in a statement that its members “have no knowledge of these alleged acts being committed at our house or by our members.” The chapter said it was cooperating with an investigation by the Charlottesville Police Department. A former member of the fraternity hired Andrew Miltenberg of Nesenoff & Miltenberg in New York to write a cease-and-desist letter to an online forum that published his name and other personal information in connection with the article. That representation ended once the letter was sent, according to a spokeswoman for Miltenberg. According to his firm website, Miltenberg has represented “a significant number of male college students falsely accused of sexual assault.” Palma Pustilnik, an attorney at the Central Virginia Legal Aid Society, confirmed in a statement this week that she was hired by Jackie. Pustilnik declined to discuss the nature of her representation. In the statement, Pustilnik said “all of this has been very stressful, overwhelming and retraumatizing for Jackie and her family.” She added that “threats and attempts to extort and/or intimidate have been and will continue to be reported to the appropriate authorities.” “Rolling Stone has got to do a lot more for her than what they’ve done and if they are not willing to do it then a lawsuit would certainly be on the table,” he said. A spokeswoman for Rolling Stone publisher Wenner Media, Melissa Bruno, declined to comment on the magazine’s vetting process for the story and whether it had been consulting with outside counsel on issues related to the piece before or after it was published. Wenner Media’s general counsel at the time the story was published, Dana Rosen, left the company on Dec. 1 to become general counsel of ALM Media, the parent company of The National Law Journal. Rosen referred a request for comment to Wenner Media. ALM’s vice president of human resources, Felicia White, said in a statement Thursday that the company began “actively recruiting” Rosen in late September and was “delighted that someone with her extensive experience and credentials agreed to join our company.” Davis Wright Tremaine has been the magazine’s go-to firm for litigation in recent years, federal court records show. Of the seven cases filed by or against the magazine in federal court since 1999—not counting cases in which a lawyer did not enter an appearance—Davis Wright lawyers served as lead counsel. The firm has represented the magazine in state court as well. According to Davis Wright’s website, its attorneys also advise the magazine on trademark issues and do “pre-publication review.” Bruno said Davis Wright was hired in the past to work on issues related to Rolling Stone as well as Men’s Journal and Us Weekly, which Wenner Media also publishes. A spokesman for Davis Wright declined to comment. UVA hired a team from O’Melveny & Myers, including Walter Dellinger III, to investigate the university’s response to Jackie’s sexual assault claims. The school backed off its first pick for independent counsel, Mark Filip of Kirkland & Ellis, amid concern about his ties to Phi Kappa Psi. Filip was a member of the fraternity in the 1980s at the University of Illinois. Squire Patton Boggs has also jumped into the fray. The firm was hired this month by a coalition of fraternities and sororities to lobby Congress on issues related to how campuses respond to sexual assault complaints. Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, a senior counsel to the firm, said in a statement that “recent events demonstrate that the current system of handling collegiate sexual assault claims is failing.” |
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| sdsgo | Dec 11 2014, 09:29 PM Post #350 |
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Gratuitous post - abb posted some great articles above, and this post is simply a marker to help me find them this weekend. Please disregard. |
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| abb | Dec 12 2014, 05:08 AM Post #351 |
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http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/credulous-press-feeds-pc-mob_821206.html A Credulous Press Feeds the PC Mob Where was journalistic skepticism at Rolling Stone? Philip Terzian December 22, 2014, Vol. 20, No. 15 With nearly every passing day, yet another detail in last month’s sensational Rolling Stone article alleging gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house collapses under the weight of scrutiny. Its author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, has retreated into strategic silence; her editor, Will Dana, having publicly disavowed the “facts” of the story, is still issuing clarifications and apologies. At this rate, we are unlikely ever to know what (if anything) really happened to “Jackie,” the story’s protagonist and putative heroine, on the UVA campus in 2012, or what impelled her to tell her tale to Sabrina Rubin Erdely. The conventional wisdom of the moment, especially among those who deployed the Rolling Stone article for political purposes, is that this episode discredits future rape victims and will hamper efforts to raise awareness about sexual assault on college campuses. On the latter point, this may be a salutary development: The oft-cited claims that one in five American women are sexually assaulted in their lifetimes and that one in four female college students will be raped are almost certainly exaggerations. As for future rape victims, the opposite is likely true: There has never been greater public awareness about sexual assault in America than there is now, especially on campuses; and in any case, rape—which used to be a capital crime in some circumstances—remains a serious felony. How all this will be sorted out by the University of Virginia is an open question. Once the Rolling Stone article was published, all fraternity and sorority activities were suspended for the balance of the year; and despite revelations about the story’s manifold defects, the administration is sticking with its decision. In the meantime, certain segments of the faculty are determined to prevent this putative crisis from going to waste, and will persist in their efforts to abolish Greek life at UVA. There is another aspect to the story, however, beyond academic politics, fraternity behavior, or the national debate on sexual assault, the definition of rape, false accusations, and dubious statistics. This is a problem for the press. For just as Rolling Stone has discredited itself with its evident recklessness, the media generally—with a handful of honorable exceptions, notably the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple—have exhibited all the symptoms of political bias, mob mentality, and lazy practices that have done so much to earn the public’s disfavor in recent decades. There is, to begin with, the abrogation of the bare essentials of journalistic practice. Sabrina Rubin Erdely is entitled to her opinion, of course, and her disdain for fraternity boys and the University of Virginia (not necessarily in that order) is evident throughout her account. But by her own admission, she not only shopped around the country for a story that would support her presumptions about campus “rape culture,” but relied exclusively on the veracity of “Jackie,” making little or no effort to confirm the story’s most improbable details, or confront (much less identify) the seven undergraduates “Jackie” accused of violent rape. For its part, Rolling Stone seems to have disdained the very idea of due diligence, content to publish an accusation of rape without question. This is not, in itself, a shocking development: Rolling Stone was a hot book during the Nixon and Ford administrations, but its “serious” journalism is largely behind it. That does not explain, however, the willingness of the media, in general, to accept the truth of the allegations against UVA and its “culture”—unless the media are predisposed to do so. Which, of course, they are. Just as the press was quick to embrace the false premises of the 2006 accusation of rape against the Duke lacrosse team, it was equally eager to believe the worst of frat boys, Greek life, social practices, and campus customs at another prestigious Southern institution of higher learning. This conscious neglect of professional responsibility—indeed, suspension of the media’s natural, and well-advertised, skepticism—might well be explained by an old, and well-warmed, chestnut: political bias. Except that in this case, as in others, credulity and prejudice combine to do genuine harm. For whatever reasons, “Jackie,” Sabrina Rubin Erdely, and Rolling Stone were willing to generate a virtual lynch mob involving serious criminal accusations against (presumably) innocent people. And the press, which should be the first to ask questions, dig into records, and expose contradictions and inconsistencies, was the voice of unreason. This Rolling Stone/UVA debacle is bad enough, but it is not the first time that fraud, false rumors, and political mythology have gained credibility in the press. Some media legends—domestic violence during the Super Bowl, for example—are almost laughable in retrospect. But others—the “epidemic” of rural church burnings, racial “incidents” on campus, allegations of molestation at nursery schools—have spread discord, deepened crises, and sent innocent people to prison. Philip Terzian is literary editor of The Weekly Standard. |
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| abb | Dec 12 2014, 05:18 AM Post #352 |
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/12/09/the-blogger-who-wants-to-take-down-rolling-stone-jackie-and-the-university-of-virginia-president/?tid=gravity_1.0_strip_1 Meet the divisive blogger who says he outed Rolling Stone’s ‘Jackie’ By Terrence McCoy December 9 Updated 2:50 p.m. It’s 7:30 p.m. on Monday night, and the day’s most vilified blogger is driving somewhere in California, though he declines to specify where, and with whom. As he talks into the telephone, he confesses he feels targeted: He’s recording the conversation. Someone has already hacked him that day. He’s deluged with threats. His mom, he said, “is worried about me and worried about herself.” This is Charles C. Johnson, the one-time Daily Caller contributor who just outed a woman he claims is Rolling Stone’s “Jackie,” publicizing what he claims is the real full name of the alleged rape victim around whom the magazine built its flawed University of Virginia gang rape story. And Monday, Johnson sighed, has been quite a day. Jezebel called him “vile.” Slate called him a “vicious troll.” The Frisky called him a “complete piece of s–t.” Others, some of whom criticized Twitter for failing to censor his allegedly revelatory tweets, have been even less kind. What Johnson did – publish what he claimed was the full identity of an alleged rape victim – is what many found so troubling. “Her last name has no news value. She’s not pressing any charges,” said Jaclyn Friedman, executive director of Women Action and the Media, adding that when people who say they have been raped are named by the media, victims become less likely to come forward. “And when victims don’t come forward, rapists go free.” “So naming her was meant only to punish, and that’s not a journalistic principle … It’s meant to scare survivors and punish them for speaking out,” she said. Johnson also misidentified the photo he widely circulated of a woman he claimed was Jackie. “I apologize,” he wrote on his site in a correction. “I consulted with two photographic experts and I made a judgment call based on the evidence above. In the rush to publish, I screwed up and ask your forgiveness.” In his correction, he described the alleged attack as “the campus rape fraud perpetrated at the University of Virginia” by Jackie. “People are threatening to kill me. … People want to do me harm,” said the 26-year-old editor of the for-profit GotNews.com, which on Monday published not only what he claimed is her name but images from her Pinterest account. “They will try to take down my site and are threatening my family members.” Students held a candlelight vigil to raise awareness on sexual assault Friday night as Rolling Stone cited “discrepancies” in an article that reported a gang rape in a campus fraternity. (Reuters) Johnson then experienced what appeared to be a moment of sheer panic when informed his Twitter account still shows his city of residence: Fresno, Calif. “Oh my goodness,” he gasped. “That’s still up?” He paused for moment. He recovered. “Well, really, I travel around the state. I work all around California.” His base of operations may be in California, but this incendiary scribe, who recently lampooned Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice’s mother, primarily inhabits the digital realm. He represents a new breed of news hound: part troll, part provocateur, part bully for profit, and fully independent. In photographs, he adopts the glower of an anti-establishment rabble-rouser. His formula for news seems to work something like this: home in on the most emotionally-charged story of the moment — whether that’s Ferguson or Eric Garner or campus rape — and stake out the most divisive position possible, amassing allies and enemies in equal number. More often than not, those positions appear conservative, but he shies away from such designation. He isn’t driven by ideology, colleagues say. He’s driven by “scalps.” “He told me he likes to get scalps,” said Daily Caller alumnus Mark Judge, who had just authored a GotNews story that called into question Rolling Stone’s piece on campus rape at the University of Virginia. “Journalistically, he likes to get scalps. And Rolling Stone is a sloppy slow-moving target that’s had problems for years. … But I’m completely against him ruining this girl’s identity.” A lot of people are. But reservations over public perception has rarely deterred Johnson. So at 9:39 a.m. on Sunday, he posted an introductory warning: “I’m giving Jackie until later tonight to tell the truth and then I’m going to start revealing everything about her past.” This was a very unusual step — one that breached both societal and journalistic conventions that discourage the identification of alleged sexual assault victims. (The Post does not name rape victims.) His delivery was both menacing and pugnacious. “Because I am merciful,” he then tweeted, “I always give my opponents an opportunity to do the right thing. [She] has until midnight to tell the truth about making it up. #IStandWithJackie.” The message immediately split followers into two groups: those who hated it and those who loved it. “You’re a modern Joan of Arc,” one admirer told Johnson on Sunday. “Doing God’s work even when the big names say you’re the devil.” Another called him “a real American hero.” But to those who hated the message – and who saw it as far from heroic – Johnson seemed “hellbent on a pretty cruel path, trying to get attention,” said Zeynep Tufekci, assistant professor of sociology at UNC on what she thought when she saw what he had done. “He preys on vulnerable people by publicizing their information,” said Tufekci, who studies social impacts of technology and social media. “He’s basically a person who seeks attention online by doing awful things.” But even strong criticism seems to suit Johnson just fine. He seems to derive pleasure in violating cultural taboos — and appears to welcome the outrage such violations incur. (After the Islamic State’s beheading of journalist James Foley, he tweeted, “Kind of hard to like James Foley when he blames U.S. government for his killing. Just saying.”) The antics are in some ways a confusing departure from his past work, which sounded more traditional tones. After graduating from Milton Academy outside Boston, he got his degree at Claremont McKenna College in Los Angeles — and then snagged a Wall Street Journal fellowship. Afterward, he published a book on Calvin Coolidge. But, he said, “Two events changed my view on the media: [Andrew] Breitbart taking down [Rep. Anthony] Weiner and the other was Rupert Murdoch shutting down the News of the World. The new order was forming, and I wasn’t sure what it was, but I was excited by it.” He foresaw an arena of cut-throat journalism in which inhibitions are ignored, convention flouted and names named. This vision, he said, is already manifest in the United Kingdom’s media world, pervaded by tabloids that Johnson admires for their “gusto and flare.” So he started writing for the Daily Caller, contributing to a 2012 story that alleged Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) paid for sex in the Dominican Republic. That story got shredded in the months following its publication, as The Washington Post reported that the story about Menendez’s alleged sex romp may have been planted by Cuban intelligence officials seeking to discredit the anti-Castro lawmaker. Now he sticks to GotNews.com, where he exploits emotionally-charged narratives for clicks — and maybe some profit, too. “People want to give me money, and I have no problem accepting it,” he said. “I would take money from anyone” on the political spectrum. He has pinned a request for donations on his Twitter page and, though he declined to offer a specific tally, claims he has made “thousands” of dollars off the alleged Jackie revelations. Many of which are deeply unsubstantiated, if not downright cruel. “But I’m not an angry person,” he said from an undisclosed location Monday night. “Or a mean-spirited person. I go where the research leads. Some people do cross word puzzles. This is what I do.” What he does seems to go over well among people who run prominent anti-feminist web sites, says Matt Binder, writer who runs Public Shaming blog dedicated to tracking racism, misogyny and the like on social media. So what’s the end game? What does he hope to achieve from publicly shaming a young woman he claims to be Jackie? Who would that benefit? Johnson has an immediate answer. He wants revenge for what he perceives to be a rupture in the public trust, inflicted by writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s article. “I want [Rolling Stone Managing Editor] Will Dana to resign. I want the people who control Rolling Stone to go over all of Sabrina’s stories. And I want Jackie to get psychological help. I want all the fraternities, suspended under these dubious stories, to be reinstated.” Then, because why not: “I want the [University of Virginia] president to resign. I would like some truth.” And he intends to get it. |
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| abb | Dec 12 2014, 05:25 AM Post #353 |
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UVA Jackie's 'friends' who were blasted in Rolling Stone article for failing to report rape break cover to claim her story is riddled with lies and she was 'fine' after attack Friends identified as Randall, Cindy and Andy in the explosive article have revealed their real identities to refute key parts of 'Jackie's' story 'Randall' whose real name is Ryan, says he was the only one Jackie called the night of the alleged attack He says he then called friends Alex Stock (identified as Andy) and Kathryn Hendley (identified as Cindy) The two boys were the only ones to hear the account of the attack, and both say Jackie told them she was forced to perform oral sex on five men Rolling Stone article describes how she was brutally gang-raped by seven men at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity In the article, Jackie recounts who her three friends urged her not to report the crime to police, fearing the impact to their social lives But Ryan, Alex and Kathryn say they insisted she report assault to police, and mearly complied with Jackie's request to go back to her room By Ashley Collman for MailOnline Published: 02:30 EST, 12 December 2014 | Updated: 04:46 EST, 12 December 2014 Three students who featured prominently in a now under-question Rolling Stone article about rape at the University of Virginia, have revealed their identities to refute their cold portrayal in the sickening story. The article sent shockwaves through the university community, after the magazine published a female student's account of being gang-raped by seven men at a UVA fraternity two years ago, leading to the temporary shut down of all Greek life at the Charlottesville campus. Next to victim 'Jackie's' account of the horrifying assault, one of the most appalling aspects of the story are the apathetic reactions of her three friends 'Randall', 'Andy' and 'Cindy' who she called for help after escaping the frat that night in September 2012. The trio are now coming forward to refute key aspects of the Rolling Stone article, saying that while they believe Jackie was the victim of a 'traumatic' sexual assault they have found several inaccuracies in the article and are skeptical of the story. Furthermore, the students say they never discouraged her from reporting the assault, and that they only stopped insisting she contact police when she asked to be taken back to her dorm room. Misrepresented? These are the three friends who ran to alleged rape victim Jackie's aid, the night she told Rolling Stone she was gang raped by seven men at University of Virginia's Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house. Identified as Cindy, Andy and Randall in the article, they say their real names are Kathryn Hendley (left), Alex Stock (center) and Ryan (asked for his last name to be withheld, right) 'The text was so divergent from what we said that evening,' Alex Stock, who was identified as 'Andy in the article, told ABC News on Thursday. In the article Jackie describes meeting a junior boy identified as 'Drew' her first few weeks at UVA, and how the fellow lifeguard asked her out to dinner and a date night function at the Phi Kappa Psi House. Back at the house, she says she was lured to an upstairs bedroom, where she was thrown through a glass table and then raped one by one by seven men in what appeared to be an initiation ritual. When she came to in the early hours of the next morning, Jackie says she fled the house barefoot and then called Randall, Andy and Cindy for help. She says the trio tracked her down to find her bloody and in shock, but described how they were hesitant to report the crime, fearing how it would impact their social lives, the boys' intentions to rush a fraternity and Jackie's college reputation. That's not how the three friends remember the incident. The friend identified as 'Randall' in the story, says he was the only one Jackie called that night, contrary to the description of all three responding in unison. He says his real name is Ryan, but asked ABC to withhold his last name. Ryan says he found Jackie outside her dorm 'crying and shaking' and that she told him she was forced to perform oral sex on five men in the frat while a sixth watched. He says he then called Stock, but that Jackie asked the student identified as 'Cindy' not to come. That student has revealed her name to by Kathryn Hendley, and says she came along with Alex anyway, but stood back from the group while Jackie told her story to the two boys. Kathryn directly refutes a line in the article, which quotes her as saying 'She's gonna be the girl who cried "rape" and we'll never be allowed into a frat party again.' She says she only heard details of the rape later, first from Stock, then from Jackie herself. Horrified by the story, the friends say they urged Jackie to report the incident to police, but that she declined and asked to go back to her dorm where two of them spent the night comforting her. 'I mean obviously we were very concerned for her,' Stock told the Washington Post. 'We tried to be as supportive as we could be.' The friends also added that Jackie did not appear to be injured, despite her account that she was bleeding significantly from being thrown through a glass table. Further, they also had doubts about her attacker. Wrong: Jackie identified Phi Kappa Psi -known as Phi Psi for short - as the frat house where the attack took place but told the Washington Post she only did so because a friend pointed to it a year later and told her: 'That's where it happened.' Her father said she had got the detail wrong This past week, Jackie finally named the lifeguard who took her back to the frat to her new friends, but when a reporter gave Randall, Cindy and Andy that name, they said they had never heard of it before. University of Virginia officials also found the name suspect, saying that no one with that name has ever attended the school. The Post interviewed a man with a similar name, and he admitted to working at the pool with her, he says he never met her in person and was not a member of Phi Psi. The fraternity released a separate statement saying no Phi Psi brother was working at the aquatic center at that time and that they didn't hold an official social event on the weekend in question. At the time, Jackie's friends were under the impression that her date was a junior she met through her chemistry class that year. Jackie started talking about this mystery man when Randall rebuffed her romantic advances, wanting to stay friends. When she revealed that an older student in her chemistry class had been asking her out on dates, the three friends say they took his number from her phone out of curiosity and started texting the stranger. The person they talked to wrote about 'this super smart hot' freshman and how they both shared of a love of the band Coheed and Cambria, according to the two-year-old messages shown to the Post. 'I really like this girl,' the guy said in one message. He also sent pictures of himself, showing he had a distinct jawline and blue eyes. But the messages also hinted at Jackie's crush on Randall, since the student wrote that she was interested in someone else and refused to date her. 'Get this she said she likes some other 1st year guy who dosnt (sp) like her and turned her down but she wont date me cause she likes him. She cant turn my down fro some nerd 1st yr. she said this kid is smart and funny and worth it,' the older student wrote. Eventually, Jackie told her friends that she succumbed and accepted a date from the older student for Friday, September 28, 2012. Adding even more mystery to the already confusing story, the Post identified the man in the text messages from his pictures, and it turns out he went to high school with Jackie in northern Virginia. She had very clearly just experience a horrific trauma...If she was acting on the night of September 28, 2012, then she deserves an Oscar However, that man, now a junior at a school in a different state, says he 'never really spoke with her', did not attend UVA, was not a member of any fraternity and hadn't been to Charlottesville in at least six years. On the specific weekend when Jackie said she was raped, he was at an athletic event in a different state, and the pictures of him that were messaged to Jackie's friends appear to have been pulled from his social media accounts. Jackie's friends also had a hard time finding her crush on social media, adding that they never met him in person and now fear they had never been messaging with him in the first place. While they are skeptical of details of the night described in the Rolling Stone article, they all agree that something happened to leave Jackie terrified. '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. Both Randall and Andy say they've been interviewed by the Charlottesville Police, who were asked by the university to start an investigation into the alleged incident. Rolling Stone has issued an apology for the story, initially saying their trust in Jackie was 'misplaced'. They have stopped commenting on the article, while conducting an internal review. On Wednesday, the lawyer representing Jackie asked reporters to stop contacting her and her family. 'As I am sure you all can understand, all of this has been very stressful, overwhelming and retraumatizing for Jackie and her family,' Jackie's lawyer Palma Pustilnik said. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2871096/Friends-hell-misrepresented-UVA-Jackie-s-three-friends-featured-heavily-Rolling-Stone-article-criticized-failure-report-rape-tell-story.html#ixzz3Lg5IfPER |
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| abb | Dec 12 2014, 05:26 AM Post #354 |
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December 12, 2014 UVA Rape Story Update 2 By Ben Cohen This past Wednesday, Washington Post reporter T. Rees Shapiro published an article which significantly undermined the account of the UVA “rape” published in Rolling Stone magazine, casting serious doubt on the credibility of the accuser. In the original account, published in Rolling Stone on November 19th, a handsome upper classman invited Jackie to dinner and then a date function at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. After arriving at the fraternity house, Drew invited Jackie to go upstairs with him; she agreed, and he led her into a bedroom where a group of men violently raped her. However, accounts provided to the Post by the friends who rushed to Jackie’s aid that night in the fall of 2012 cast doubt on her story. Jackie had pursued a romantic relationship with one of the three friends, Randall. After he rejected her, she told him about a handsome upperclassman who was attempting to woo her. Her friends, including Randall, began exchanging text messages with the mystery upperclassman. The mystery upperclassman informed them of how attractive, and intelligent he thought Jackie was. He also raved about their shared interests, and complained that she was interested in “some freshman nerd” The Washington Post quoted one of these text messaged, “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…She cant turn my down fro some nerd 1st yr. she said this kid is smart and funny and worth it.” The photographs of the handsome upperclassman belong to a former high school classmate of Jackie’s and were taken from social media. The man in the photographs told the Post that he had never attended UVA, and barely knew Jackie. UVA has also confirmed that the name she gave her friends did not match the name of anyone who attended UVA at the time of the attack. The Washington Post article doesn’t specify whether the name she gave her friends matches the name of her former high school classmate. In the Rolling Stone story, Jackie’s date, “Drew,” leads Jackie into a bedroom in the frat house where a group of men throw her through a table and rape her as part of a fraternity initiation. Afterwards, her friends discourage her from reporting the rape, claiming it will ruin her reputation and they won’t get invited to any more parties. Jackie’s friends, who met her that night, recounted a rather different story. They arrived at one in the morning to find Jackie distraught and crying. She told them her handsome date, (whom she had told them about, earlier), took her into a room and forced her to perform oral sex on a group of men. Her friends urged her to go to the police, and she refused. They also do not remember her having injuries consistent with being thrown through a glass table. In other news, Rolling Stone writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely told a gathering that she has an excellent bull***t detector. Washington Post reporter T. Rees Shapiro has clearly demonstrated a preference for showing rather than telling. The mystery upperclassman, “Drew,” doesn’t exist. Rape accuser “Jackie” perpetrated a transparent hoax, in a desperate attempt to win the attention of one of her male friends; Jackie’s friends are too polite to call her a liar. Sabrina Rubin Erdely has perhaps the world’s worst b.s. detector, and the prestige press was too politically correct to question an obvious hoax. The emperor has no clothes. Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/12/uva_rape_story_update_2.html#ixzz3Lg6AopjA |
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| abb | Dec 12 2014, 05:29 AM Post #355 |
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http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/local/uva/uva-s-closed-response-to-rolling-stone-allegations-under-fire/article_dd540752-819e-11e4-bdf0-1ba74feebce5.html UVa's closed response to Rolling Stone allegations under fire Posted: Thursday, December 11, 2014 8:33 pm By K Burnell Evans Posted on Dec 11, 2014 Still reeling from shattered allegations of gang rape at a school fraternity, the University of Virginia has rejected several records requests related to the scandal and ignored questions about whether an independent counsel’s review will be made public. That, along with university President Teresa A. Sullivan’s response to the firestorm, is raising eyebrows among lawmakers and drawing criticism from faculty and communications and open government experts. “Folks want to know what the university may have known, when and what steps were taken,” said Del R. Steven Landes, R-Augusta. Rolling Stone thrust the university into scrutiny Nov. 19, when it posted online a 9,000-word story centered on the account of a woman named Jackie who claimed she’d been raped by seven men at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house off Madison Bowl. The magazine since has retreated from the story, citing “discrepancies” in Jackie’s account and acknowledging that reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely failed to corroborate the tale. The fraternity has said it has documents refuting key aspects of the story. The Daily Progress filed an open records request for those records shortly after the story’s release and is awaiting a final response from the university. Other records requests have been rejected, and the university repeatedly has failed to respond to questions about whether an independent review by O’Melveny & Myers, an international law firm, will be made public. Several days after the Rolling Stone story broke, state Attorney General Mark Herring announced the firm had been hired to conduct a review of the allegations and the school’s handling of sexual assault claims. That review should be public, unless the exposure would jeopardize a criminal case or violate a student’s privacy rights, said House Minority Leader David J. Toscano, D-Charlottesville. “It’s always in the public’s interest to have more information rather than less,” Toscano said. Nearly 200 faculty members recently signed a letter addressed to Sullivan and the school’s Board of Visitors asking that the report be published, said Susan Fraiman, a professor of English at UVa. “Sullivan’s initial response was that, since the investigation had not yet produced a ‘product,’ it would be premature to address the issue of whether or not it would be made public,” Fraiman said. “Subsequent to this, she observed to the chair of the English Department that, since she and UVa are the targets of the investigation, it will not be up to her whether or not the report is made public.” University officials have not responded to several requests to interview Sullivan. Herring spokesman Michael Kelly referred questions Thursday about the review to the Board of Visitors. Rector George Keith Martin has not responded to questions about the investigation. UVa has not released the terms of its agreement with the firm, which will be paid for with money from the state’s public flagship. “That’s another case of the fox appearing to guard the henhouse,” said Liz Seccuro, who was raped at a Phi Kappa Psi party in 1984, when she was a first-year student at UVa. Hiring a powerful law firm to conduct an independent review follows Penn State’s response to the child sex abuse scandal involving Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant football coach convicted in 2012 of molesting boys. Former FBI Director Louis Freeh’s law firm produced a scathing 267-page report saying, among other things, that “the most powerful leaders” at Penn State, including school President Graham Spanier and coaching legend Joe Paterno, failed to protect child victims “in order to avoid the consequences of bad publicity.” The review was made public. The NFL, a private entity, vowed earlier this year to make public former FBI Director Robert Mueller’s independent review of the league’s handling of the case of Ray Rice, the star running back caught on video beating his wife. UVa similarly should ensure the findings of O’Melveny & Myers are made public, for the sake of the parents of prospective students, if nothing else, Seccuro said. “They absolutely have a right to know how this is being dealt with,” she said. Sullivan also has declined to release any of her correspondence in the aftermath of the Rolling Stone story, citing a blanket exemption from open records laws that experts say was designed for use only in limited circumstances. “It’s a discretionary exemption, meaning it does not have to be invoked,” said Megan Rhyne, executive director of the nonprofit Virginia Coalition for Open Government. “So each time an individual invokes it, he or she is making a choice to shield records that would help the public understand what that individual is doing and why.” The working papers exemption Sullivan cited in her denial of the request applies to a broad swath of Virginia’s leadership — from the governor to city managers and school superintendents — Rhyne said, but the law is not ubiquitous. Neither Florida nor North Carolina, for example, employ such a broad exemption. “There is undoubtedly a balance where release could cause some sort of harm or interference, and others where it will not,” Rhyne said. “When all records are withheld, that makes people very uncomfortable because they are being told that the individual can do or say anything and not be accountable to the public.” Amid her refusal to answer questions from The Daily Progress about the O’Melveny & Myers review, Sullivan issued an 814-word letter to parents that included a defense of administrators targeted in the Rolling Stone story, which described UVa officials as more concerned about the school’s prestige than safeguarding women. “The Rolling Stone article, in my opinion, unfairly maligned a number of dedicated professionals who work for the University,” Sullivan wrote. “I have noted in particular that our students immediately reached out to our Student Affairs staff with expressions of support.” UVa is one of 86 schools nationwide under federal investigation over its handling of sexual assault claims. Associate Dean of Students Nicole Eramo, head of the school’s Sexual Misconduct Board, has said that no student has been expelled during her tenure for sexual assault. She was among the administrators cited in the Rolling Stone story. Sullivan’s letter struck the wrong chord, said communications expert Marijean Jaggers. “As both the parent of a college-bound student and a crisis communications professional, there are sections of this letter to UVa parents that give me a strong negative reaction,” said Jaggers, of the Charlottesville firm Jaggers Communications. Touching on the furor over the killings of unarmed black men by police in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, Sullivan offered “context” for the university’s response to the Rolling Stone piece. That included suspending Greek activities until Jan. 9 and overhauling contracts between Greek organizations and the university upon the resumption of activities next semester. The letter also alluded to the abduction and killing of second-year student Hannah Graham, 18, and two student suicides. Sullivan stopped short of saying UVa has a problem with sexual assault, instead referring to “sexual misconduct” as something that occurs and “has no place at our University.” “The use of ‘sexual misconduct’ as a blanket term for the far more serious and felonious sexual assault, a.k.a. rape, which is what has been alleged, has been broadly criticized as a tepid, overly cautious misrepresentation of the issue at hand,” Jaggers said. “Stronger language is appropriate when dealing with these matters. The university, among many other important pursuits, needs to refresh its crisis communications strategy.” Staff writer Nate Delesline III contributed to this story. K. Burnell Evans is the Albemarle County reporter for The Daily Progress. Contact her at (434) 978-7261, kevans@dailyprogress.com or @KBurnellEvans on Twitter. |
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| abb | Dec 12 2014, 05:31 AM Post #356 |
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/u-va-president-talks-with-the-post-about-universitys-actions-after-rape-allegation/2014/12/11/6b4ca4cc-806b-11e4-9f38-95a187e4c1f7_story.html U-Va. president talks with The Post about university’s actions after rape allegation By Nick Anderson December 11 at 1:12 PM CHARLOTTESVILLE — Among the charges leveled against the University of Virginia in a Rolling Stone article last month, this one sticks out: That U-Va. officials took no action to warn their campus of an allegation of a gang rape at a fraternity. The brutal account of gang rape that Rolling Stone published on Nov. 19 has fallen into doubt in recent days as the magazine has apologized for “discrepancies” in the article, the fraternity identified in the article has rebutted key elements of the narrative and friends of the woman at the center of the article have questioned its accuracy. The woman who alleged a September 2012 gang rape, now a U-Va. junior, has said that she went to the university with her story several months later but didn’t want to report what had happened to police or seek an internal proceeding against her attackers. On Tuesday, The Washington Post asked U-Va. President Teresa A. Sullivan for her response to the charge that the university failed to warn the community about the incident that allegedly occurred in September 2012. Sullivan declined to address that question and others related to the alleged incident, citing an investigation by Charlottesville police, an investigation the police department has said they initiated at the university’s request. Protests at U-Va. after sexual assault allegations “That really is in Tim Longo territory because it goes to the issue of what did we know and when did we know it,” Sullivan said. Timothy J. Longo Sr. is the chief of the city’s police force. Police have declined to comment on the investigation, saying only that it is ongoing. The Post reported on its one-hour interview with Sullivan in an article in Wednesday’s print editions. Here are some further takeaways from the conversation in her office in Madison Hall. Part of the interview addressed controversy over an action Sullivan took soon after the Rolling Stone article was published. On Nov. 22, she announced: “I am suspending all fraternal organizations and associated social activities until January 9th, ahead of the beginning of our spring semester.” The purpose, she said at the time, was to facilitate discussions among students, faculty, alumni and others about preventing sexual violence. Now some groups supporting fraternal organizations say the suspension should be lifted because they believe it has unfairly impugned innocent students in fraternities and sororities. They say their argument is especially salient now that the Rolling Stone article has unraveled. Addressing that question Tuesday, Sullivan said: “I’ve been very careful in all my public statements to say that it is not fair to characterize an entire group, that many members of the fraternities are horrified by the allegations.” She added that she believes fraternities and sororities “are committed to helping create a safer environment.” On what the suspension means in practical terms, Sullivan said it targets social activities: “They’re still free to have their chapter meetings, do their philanthropic activities.” Sullivan added: “I thought that it was appropriate to take a pause there. There were a lot of people urging me to press the delete button. And instead I pressed the pause button.” Now, she said, fraternity and sorority leaders and others are in collaborative discussions with the university about proposals to revise U-Va.’s written agreements with Greek organizations. Sullivan said fraternities and sororities made the first move by voluntarily suspending social activities on the weekend of Nov. 21-22. Asked whether the suspension impugns the reputation of innocent students, Sullivan told The Post she does not believe that is true — “any more than I think they impugned themselves by beginning the suspension themselves.” In late November, the governing Board of Visitors issued a statement pledging to restore trust in the university. Asked how much trust was lost, Sullivan told The Post: “If we do the right things, people will trust us. We’re seeking to do the right things.” The tone of Sullivan’s public statements after the Rolling Stone article appeared has evolved significantly. Her first statement on Nov. 19 opened with these words: “I am writing in response to a Rolling Stone magazine article that negatively depicts the University of Virginia and its handling of sexual misconduct cases.” What followed in that statement was a dispassionate defense of the university’s record. Since then she has spoken in much more personal and emotional terms. “I write you in great sorrow, great rage, but most importantly, with great determination,” Sullivan wrote on Nov. 22. “Meaningful change is necessary, and we can lead that change for all universities.” Asked about the shift in tone, Sullivan told The Post: “Well, I think our first reaction was really numbness. . . . The emotions that quickly swept through us did not come out there.” Then, she said: “I think the numbness wore off and the anger set in. . . . Anger that this happens. You know, that any young woman who comes here experiences a terrible life-altering event, a traumatizing event. That’s not something that should happen.” Sullivan repeatedly declined to answer questions related to the gang-rape allegation in the Rolling Stone article, citing a police investigation. Asked whether a fraternity is under investigation — which Rolling Stone quoted her as saying — Sullivan said the Charlottesville police department had asked her not to talk about details related to the case. Sullivan declined to endorse specific reforms related to fraternities, saying that she is relying on fraternity leaders to bring proposals forward because “we do believe in student self-governance.” She added: “I would say the emphasis on safety in the house and on better control of alcohol are probably important issues.” A former Post education editor, Nick writes about college from the perspective of a father of three who will soon be buried in tuition bills. |
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| abb | Dec 12 2014, 07:27 AM Post #357 |
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http://townhall.com/columnists/erickerickson/2014/12/12/the-man-hating-media-n1930577/page/full December 12, 2014 The Man Hating Media Erick Erickson 12/12/2014 12:01:00 AM - Erick Erickson Mayella Ewell accused Tom Robinson of raping her. She, a white woman with an aggressive family, made for a compelling victim against a black man in a segregated South. The state tried Robinson, white men tried to lynch him, and it became quite clear at the trial that there was no way Robinson could have raped Mayella Ewell. Notwithstanding the evidence, an all-white jury still found Robinson guilty. Robinson was eventually killed trying to escape jail. He was innocent of the crime. Zerlina Maxwell, an opinion writer in the Washington Post, would have stood with Mayella Ewell in "To Kill a Mockingbird." After Rolling Stone magazine retracted its story of rape at the University of Virginia, Zerlina Maxwell penned a column for the Post titled "No matter what Jackie said, we should automatically believe rape claims." Only after public outrage did Maxwell and the Post walk back her piece to "we should generally believe" rape claims. Maxwell was not alone. As the Rolling Stone story percolated in the press with a sensational tale of gang rape in a fraternity house at the University of Virginia, many members of the press not only responded breathlessly to the allegations but attacked anyone who suggested the story sounded too good to be true. A young woman named Jackie claimed she had gone to a fraternity party with a young man. That young man led her upstairs to a room where a half dozen young men gang raped Jackie. She went to three friends and two of her friends dissuaded her from going to the authorities lest their chances of getting into a fraternity be ruined. The fraternity in question came under attack -- both verbally and with physical damage to its property by an outraged mob. Faculty members protested. The University of Virginia president demanded a police investigation. When others called the too-good-to-be-true facts into question, the reporter who wrote the story, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, and others attacked those who raised questions. The doubters were accused of supporting rapists, denying the holocaust, and being "rape truthers." Turns out the story was a fabrication. Rolling Stone first tried to blame the victim. But students at the University of Virginia began coming forward. They said Rolling Stone never reached out to them. Sabrina Rubin Erdely had to admit she never contacted the alleged rapists for their comment. Jackie's friends say they were not contacted either. Rolling Stone finally had to retract the story. What is going unsaid, however, is how quickly the press was willing to believe all these things about young white men who were portrayed as conservative, privileged and in fraternities. The media, with the help of people like Sabrina Rubin Erdely, have bought into the idea of a phony "rape culture" complete with mostly fabricated statistics that 1 in 5 women on college campuses are victims of sexual assault. That is simply not true. But the media believes that statistic, and it shapes the media's reporting. They want it to be true because it confirms their biases against young white men, College Republicans, fraternities, etc. A media that denounces racial profiling and stereotyping routinely stereotypes others. The secular left, of which the media serves as priest and prophet, has developed their own religion with their own canon, sacraments and mythos. The cause is more important than truth and fact. "The nature of the evidence is irrelevant; it's the seriousness of the charge that matters," has become one of their commandments. These stories are going to keep happening because the left's mythology outweighs facts and evidence. The Rolling Stone article and its progeny are the left's version of Aesop's fables -- stories to relate their morals. It does not matter that the rape at the University of Virginia was not real. Because "rape culture" is supposedly real and fraternity boys are silver-spooned Satans, the story has power. The left must continue building the canon of their religion, of which Rolling Stone's bunk article plays a necessary role. Most of the media uncritically believed Sabrina Rubin Erdely because she fed their bigotry and the mythology that guides their life's work. It will happen again. |
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| abb | Dec 12 2014, 07:30 AM Post #358 |
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http://theweek.com/article/index/273514/what-progressives-dont-want-to-talk-about-in-the-rolling-stone-scandal What progressives don't want to talk about in the Rolling Stone scandal A presumption of truth in every rape accusation is an impossible standard. And it's doing real damage to the cause of fighting sexual assaults. By Freddie deBoer | 6:05am ET 6 0 Rolling Stone's piece on a UVA fraternity gang rape is being questioned, but that does not mean every sexual assault accusation is false. Rolling Stone's piece on a UVA fraternity gang rape is being questioned, but that does not mean every sexual assault accusation is false. (Jay Paul/Getty Images) In a news cycle seemingly incapable of producing anything but sadness, few recent stories have been quite as awful as Rolling Stone's investigation into an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia. Taken at face value, the story told is of a brutal and unconscionable crime, a coordinated and premeditated sexual assault on a defenseless woman used as a kind of initiation ceremony into a fraternity. Now the magazine has distanced itself from the story, the fraternity in question has rebutted some of its claims, and anti-rape activists at UVA have expressed skepticism in the accuser, known as Jackie. Day after day, new doubts emerge. If the story turns out to be significantly fabricated (and the doubts expressed do not yet amount to proof that it was), then the costs could be considerable. With a committed group of rape denialists active in our culture, typically made up of "men's rights activists" and conservative anti-feminists, the danger of this type of scandal lies in the potential for a false accusation to crowd out attention to rape writ large. "Rape stories," The Atlantic's Olga Khazan recently wrote, "are a genre that's uniquely unforgiving of inaccuracies." The question is, why? Why would revelations that a particular high-profile accusation was false be so potentially damaging to efforts to oppose that crime in general? This logic does not extend to other crimes; no one believes that a false claim of robbery means that robbery doesn't happen or only happens rarely. Why would sexual assault be any different? Why is our understanding of rape seen as so vulnerable to the corrosive power of false accusations? The first and most important reason is the previously-mentioned denialism, that committed group of vocal opponents of anti-sexual assault measures. But I fear that another reason for this danger stems from the very people in media who are most passionately committed to denouncing rape. By creating the expectation that all rape accusations must be presumed true regardless of circumstance, anti-rape activists have tied the credibility of their efforts to every individual accusation, and in so doing perversely undermined our efforts to end sexual assault. From both supporters of the original reporting and doubters alike, a central question has emerged: Why did Sabrina Erdely, the story's author, fail to interview any of the accused? This question was initially pressed by The Washington Post's Erik Wemple and Slate's Hanna Rosin and Allison Benedikt. It would seem to be a glaring and obvious omission; as much as her story concerned campus rape in general, its central, most powerful passage concerned the fraternity gang rape. A story of that prominence and emotional power was inevitably going to take on the lion's share of attention. So how could Erdely have failed to do proper diligence, especially with a story so certain to generate attention and controversy? More generally, why did Erdely not do more to vet Jackie's story, which could have potentially saved Erdely, Rolling Stone, and Jackie a great deal of embarrassment and trouble? In fact, in the context of today's elite media culture, the failure makes sense. In progressive online circles, particularly Twitter, a powerful social norm has emerged: Decent people have a moral obligation to believe all rape accusations, and failure to do so amounts to anti-feminism or worse. Recently, the writer and lawyer Zerlina Maxwell advocated for exactly that at The Washington Post. Others, such as Jessica Valenti, have suggested the same. Spend any time in the progressive corners of the internet and you'll see the power of this norm. Indeed, both Wemple's and Rosin and Benedikt's initial pieces questioning Erdely's reporting earned complaints of rape denial on Twitter. The social risks of being seen to express skepticism towards any given accusation of rape are now so powerful that many people avoid even the suggestion of doubt. Those who are willing to question individual accusations, like Cathy Young, are subject to repeated and vociferous criticism. In such an environment, it's no wonder Erdely felt little urge to interview the alleged assailants. To do so in our media culture was to invite risk and little reward. But as the ensuing days have proved, there is considerable danger in applying this standard to journalism, and not merely for the accused. Ultimately, refusing to subject accusations of rape to rigorous review hurts accusers, by failing to build the strongest case on their behalf, and other victims, by producing ambient skepticism in the culture. Take, for example, the accusation against musician Conor Oberst that emerged last year, which was later entirely recanted by his accuser. These accusations emerged piecemeal, first from comments on the website xoJane and later in an essay published on that site, from an initially pseudonymous accuser. This would seem to be a situation where care and skepticism are warranted; internet comments are, famously, the Wild West, largely unregulated spaces where people can say anything and usually do. It's easy to imagine someone making an accusation in such a space and having the story spiral out of control — which is exactly what happened in this instance. But prior to Oberst's exoneration, skepticism about that accusation was met with anger. Jezebel's Tracie Egan Morrissey, for example, asked, "Why would she want to hurt Oberst? And why would someone lie about being sexually assaulted? What could be gained from that? Nothing, really." This attitude presumes a rational mindset; Oberst's accuser later explained that she was driven to lie in part by grief over a sick child. Regardless, those who had reacted angrily to doubts about Oberst's guilt were left to retract their previous support, and in so doing, gave space to those who would deny rape writ large. Going to bat for every accusation, no matter how credible the evidence or circumstance, only plays into the hands of denialism when accusations are revealed to be false. The insistence that every rape accusation must be presumed to be true inevitably means that the credibility of those opposing rape will always be bound up with the least credible accusation. This, perversely, makes it harder for those people to speak out against rape, not easier. The notion that rape victims should be believed by default seems humane and understandable. But in practice it leads to a condition where all rape accusations must be true for any individual standard to be taken seriously. That's an impossible standard, one no crime should ever have to meet. You can see these risks in those who have responded to the skepticism about the story by doubling down on their insistence that it is true. Gawker's Sam Biddle, for example, published a piece arguing that the rebuttal by the fraternity does little to dispute the accuser's story. Meanwhile, the hashtag #IBelieveJackie has gained traction on Twitter, with many arguing that even after the recent revelations, failure to believe the accusations reflexively amounts to anti-feminism or rape denialism in and of itself. But consider the potential consequences of this kind of engagement: What happens if more information emerges that casts doubt on the story? What if there is a high-profile recantation, the way there was with the Oberst accusation? Those who are now doubling down will simply have their credibility further undermined. The denialists will enjoy another talking point. The refusal to adjust opinions in light of new information will play right into the denialist narrative, in which the media is determined to see rape everywhere regardless of facts. If the UVA gang rape allegations are found to be false, many people will have risked their credibility on this issue, and for little gain. Rather than doubling down, the most sensible strategy for those committed to ending campus rape is to broaden out: While Erdely's story may be untrue, and her journalistic failures egregious, the important point was never that individual story but the larger need to fight rape on campus. We have a lot of work to do in that regard, and a clear moral responsibility to do so. It isn't necessary for us to presume every individual accusation is true in order to work against sexual assault. The ways in which terms like "rush to judgment" and "due process" have gotten lumped into rape denialism does the movement against rape no favors. After all, while we can feel confident that false accusations of rape are rare, we also know that the system frequently fails to produce just outcomes in rape trials, with unjust outcomes falling along typical lines of class and race. In the long run, we will produce the most just outcomes by pursuing the truth about rape allegations the same way we should pursue all criminal allegations: by taking those allegations seriously, by investigating them rigorously, and by using consistent and fair standards of evidence. A commitment to a fair and careful process will ensure far better outcomes than social norms about believing all accusations ever could. The allegations detailed in Rolling Stone, and the continuing, nightmarish saga that has followed, represent something like a worst case scenario for this norm: the insistence that skepticism or review of any rape allegation necessarily amounts to rape denialism leads a reporter to fail to do basic diligence in her reporting. That in turn leaves her vulnerable to the terrible fallout of this case, which could do deep, lasting harm to our efforts to fight campus rape. Sabrina Rudin Erdely clearly failed in her reporting; she failed Rolling Stone, she failed her readers, and she failed Jackie. Frankly, I think she should never be hired by a major publication to do investigative reporting again. But on a deeper level, this type of problem is the product of the norm itself, as it leaves us constantly at risk of investing our credibility in allegations that are not credible. It was inevitable. "Feminism is not fragile," wrote Judith Levine regarding this situation. Our commitment to fighting rape must be equally strong. It can, and must, survive in a world where we know that not every allegation is true. |
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| abb | Dec 12 2014, 07:32 AM Post #359 |
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http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/12/12/chris-selley-believe-the-women-isnt-enough/ Chris Selley: Rolling Stone debacle has shown us that ‘believe the women’ simply isn’t enough Chris Selley | December 12, 2014 6:00 AM ET On Sunday, The New Yorker published an excellent piece by Margaret Talbot analyzing the catastrophically inadequate reporting that underpins Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s now very-much-in-doubt account, in Rolling Stone, of the alleged savage gang rape of a freshman University of Virginia student known as Jackie. The horrifying details are familiar to many by now: Jackie says she was assaulted by seven booze- and pot-reeking men, on a frat house floor covered in broken glass, all of them egged on by Drew, a sophomore member of the frat in question and Jackie’s ostensible date for the night. When she escaped and summoned her friends, she says they talked her out of reporting the assault, lest their social status suffer on campus. Jackie’s friends reject key parts of Rolling Stone’s account of alleged sex attack as discrepancies grow It was 1 a.m. on a Saturday when the call came. A friend, a University of Virginia freshman who earlier said she had a date that evening with a handsome junior from her chemistry class, was in hysterics. Something bad had happened. Arriving at her side, three students _”Randall,” “Andy” and “Cindy” as they were identified in an explosive Rolling Stone account — told The Washington Post that they found their friend in tears. Jackie appeared traumatized, saying her date ended horrifically, with the older student parking his car at his fraternity, asking her to come inside, and then forcing her to perform oral sex on a group of five men. In their first interviews about the events of that September 2012 night, the three friends separately told The Post that their recollections of the encounter diverge from how Rolling Stone portrayed the incident in a story about Jackie’s alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity. The interviews also provide a richer account of Jackie’s interactions immediately after the alleged attack, and suggest that the friends are skeptical of her account. Continue reading… Talbot draws an interesting parallel to the McMartin preschool case in California — a seven-year legal saga in the 1980s that saw highly respected daycare operators strung up on molestation charges based on stories that had been coaxed out of children by a team of social workers. The vast majority of students at the daycare alleged abuse, including “Satanic rituals, animal sacrifices, visits to a cemetery, molestations in a car wash and a market,” as David Shaw later wrote in the Los Angeles Times. They told of secret tunnels under the schools (there weren’t any), of rides in hot air balloons. One boy testified he had seen a defendant beat a horse to death with a baseball bat — an intimidation tactic to keep him quiet. The case eventually fell apart, but not before innocent people spent many years behind bars. McMartin is now widely seen as a classic case of moral panic — over both sexual predation (which remains a modern obsession to some extent) and Satanism (which, thankfully, does not). The case was massive nationwide news‚ and as Shaw detailed in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series, the media were initially sucked in just as much as everyone else, which in turn, of course, made everything worse. In hindsight, many of the children’s stories “seem patently ridiculous,” a Times reporter who covered the trial later told Shaw, “and yet [they] were reported by me and others with a lack of skepticism and never corroborated. That’s troubling.” “What’s always bothered me was the background music that playing in my head, which said, ‘Hey, these people are guilty.’ “ One wonders if Erdely might say something similar in a few years about her Rolling Stone piece. If rape on campus isn’t a moral panic, it is certainly a leading and volatile issue of the day; and Jackie offered her a jaw-dropping tale of it. To a skeptical mind, it almost reads as if the producers of Reefer Madness had come back to life and made an anti-rape film. And as we now know thanks to the work of other journalists (notably T. Rees Shapiro of The Washington Post), had Erdely done the most basic due diligence — talking to Jackie’s friends, talking to the frat, trying to track down Jackie’s purported assailants — she could not in good conscience have filed what she did. “One must be most critical about stories that play into existing biases. And this story nourishes a lot of them,” journalist Richard Bradley wrote in a blog post that was one of the first expressions of public skepticism. But while there’s no excuse on offer for Erdely or her editors, it’s not hard to understand how the story ran as it did. Not only was it a hideously perfect depiction of a perceived trend — the violence she endured; her friends, presumably utterly beholden to rape culture, demanding she stay quiet. Questioning women’s accounts of sexual assault is also one of the more politically incorrect things you can do nowadays. Related Barbara Kay: Rolling Stone was performing advocacy, not journalism Jonathan Kay on the reality behind sex crime allegations: Due process depends on who you are “Believe women” is the cause of the moment. The Rolling Stone story elicited all sorts of exhibitionist believing on social media. Many people seemed to feel a social obligation to state publicly their belief that a woman they had never met suffered a horrible assault at the hands of men they had never met, in a place they had never been, as recounted by the victim, via a reporter they had never met writing in a pop culture magazine. And once journalists started doing Erdely’s job for her and questions began arising, this only intensified. Many correctly observed that discrepancies in rape survivors’ accounts are hardly unusual. Something clearly happened to her, people said. That’s probably true. Shapiro’s latest story suggests Jackie may have been misleading her friends. “They said the name she provided as that of her date did not match anyone at the university, and [UVA] officials confirmed to The Post that no one by that name has attended the school,” he reports. “Also, photographs that were 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. That man, now a junior at a university in another state, confirmed that the photographs were of him and said he barely knew Jackie and hasn’t been to Charlottesville [where UVA is located] for at least six years.” What Jackie’s friends do not dispute, however, is that on the night in question, they discovered her in what they believed was a state of acute crisis. “Jackie appeared traumatized, saying her date ended horrifically, with [him] parking his car at his fraternity, asking her to come inside and then forcing her to perform oral sex on five men,” the Post reports. “She had very clearly just experienced a horrific trauma,” one of her friends says. “If she was acting … then she deserves an Oscar.” The friends insist they encouraged her to go to the police, but she refused. So in the end, it’s entirely likely that Jackie was assaulted in some fashion. But the case starkly illustrates what can go wrong if institutions adopt “believe women” as a mantra, as so many seem to demand. In this case the institution was journalism, and hopefully nobody’s life got ruined: Jackie was clumsily exposed against her wishes by Rolling Stone, and became a national sensation, but the furor will eventually die down; UVA’s frats were shut down for a while — no loss to society there, from the sounds of it — but they’ll probably open their doors again some day soon. But assuming they exist, Drew and the other men Jackie accused could easily have been hauled before a university disciplinary committee. Especially as President Obama has been badgering universities to get a handle on sexual assault under threat of losing their federal funding, they could easily have faced expulsion. Or, even more seriously, they could easily have found themselves in front of an elected prosecutor and then a jury. In that scenario, knowing what we know, “believe the women” isn’t quite as unimpeachable a catch phrase. The fact that something likely happened to Jackie can’t possibly be a high enough standard to get kicked out of school, let alone thrown in jail. The details matter. During the McMartin trial, Margaret Talbot recalls in her New Yorker piece, “the slogan many supporters of the accusations brandished was, ‘Believe the Children.’ It was an antidote to skepticism about real claims of child abuse, just as today, ‘Believe the Victims’ is a reaction to a long history of callous oversight of rape accusations.” It’s a comparison we need to keep in mind in the fight against sexual assault. National Post Chris Selley: • cselley@nationalpost.com | |
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| abb | Dec 12 2014, 01:11 PM Post #360 |
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/12/12/when-reporters-value-justice-over-accuracy-journalism-loses/2EbQiAvNPBGcW2W9bXY4DN/story.html When reporters value ‘justice’ over accuracy, journalism loses A Rolling Stone story describing the gang rape of a University of Virginia student has come under scrutiny amid glaring contradictions and irregularities. By Jeff JacobyGlobe Columnist December 12, 2014 Journalists, says Jorge Ramos, shouldn’t make a fetish of accuracy and impartiality. Speaking last month at the International Press Freedom Awards, Univision’s influential news anchor told his audience that while he has “nothing against objectivity,” journalism is meant to be wielded as “a weapon for a higher purpose: justice.” Of course, he continued, it is important to get the facts right — five deaths should be reported as five, not six or seven. But “the best of journalism happens when we, purposely, stop pretending that we are neutral and recognize that we have a moral obligation to tell truth to power.” As it happens, Ramos delivered those remarks soon after the publication of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s 9,000-word story in Rolling Stone vividly describing the alleged gang rape of a freshman named Jackie at a University of Virginia fraternity party. Erdely had reportedly spent months researching the story, and its explosive impact was — at first — everything a tell-truth-to-power journalist could have wished: national attention, public outrage, campus protests, suspension of UVA’s fraternities, and a new “zero-tolerance” policy on sexual assault. But Rolling Stone’s blockbuster has imploded, undone by independent reporting at The Washington Post that found glaring contradictions and irregularities with the story, and egregious failures in the way it was written and edited. Erdely, it turns out, had taken Jackie’s horrific accusations on faith, never contacting the alleged rapists for a comment or response. In a rueful “Note to Our Readers,” managing editor Will Dana writes: “[W]e have come to the conclusion . . . that the truth would have been better served by getting the other side of the story.” To a layman, that “conclusion” might seem so excruciatingly self-evident that Rolling Stone’s debacle can only be explained as gross negligence, or a reckless disregard for the truth. But much of the journalistic priesthood holds to a different standard, one that elevates the higher truth of an overarching “narrative” — in this case, that a brutal and callous “rape culture” pervades American college campuses — above the mundane details of fact. Erdely had set out in search of a grim sexual-assault story, and settled on Jackie’s account of being savaged by five men (or was it seven?) at a fraternity bash was just the vehicle she’d been looking for. Why get tangled in conflicting particulars? “Maybe [Erdely] was too credulous,” suggests longtime media critic Howard Kurtz in a piece on Rolling Stone’s journalistic train wreck. “Along with her editors.” Or maybe this is what happens when newsrooms and journalism schools decide, like Jorge Ramos, that although they have “nothing against objectivity,” their real aspiration is to use journalism “as a weapon for a higher purpose.” Somehow it didn’t come as a shock to learn that when Dana was invited to lecture at Middlebury College in 2006, his speech was titled: “A Defense of Biased Reporting.” Even after the UVA story began to collapse, voices were raised in defense of the narrative over mere fact. “This is not to say that it does not matter whether or not Jackie’s story is accurate,” Julia Horowitz, an assistant managing editor at the University of Virginia’s student newspaper, wrote in Politico. But “to let fact-checking define the narrative would be a huge mistake.” Well, if the “narrative” is what matters most, checking the facts too closely can indeed be a huge mistake. Because facts, those stubborn things, have a tendency to undermine cherished narratives — particularly narratives grounded in emotionalism, memory, or ideology. It’s a temptation to which journalists have always been susceptible. In the 1930s, to mention one notorious example, Walter Duranty recycled Soviet propaganda, assuring his New York Times readers that no mass murders were occurring under Stalin’s humane and enlightened rule. Duranty is reviled today. But the willingness to subordinate a passion for accuracy to a supposedly higher passion for “justice” (or “equality” or “fairness” or “diversity” or “peace” or “the environment”) persists. Has the time come to give up on the ideal of objective, unbiased journalism? Would media bias openly acknowledged be an improvement over news media that only pretend not to take sides? This much is clear: The public isn’t deceived. Trust in the media has been drifting downward for years. According to Gallup, Americans’ confidence that news is being reported “fully, accurately, and fairly” reached an all-time low this year. Would you be astonished to see that number sink even further next year? Me neither. |
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9:16 AM Jul 11