| UVA Rape Story Collapses; Duke Lacrosse Redux | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Dec 5 2014, 01:45 PM (60,501 Views) | |
| Quasimodo | Dec 5 2014, 02:59 PM Post #31 |
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Since the police are now investigating, perhaps that means Jackie can be charged with making false statements, at the least (even if she did not herself complain to the police). I would think she needs to repay the police for however many hours they spent on this case. |
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| abb | Dec 5 2014, 03:01 PM Post #32 |
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http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/rolling-stone-uva-rape-story-apology_b234936 A Huge Black Eye for Rolling Stone Magazine By Richard Horgan on December 5, 2014 2:45 PM PhiKappaPsiUVAIt’s every magazine editor’s worst nightmare. One that, per a Note to Readers posted today at the top of the November 19 Rolling Stone article heard around the U.S. college campus world (“A Rape on Campus”), has become a sad reality for managing editor Will Dana. From the Note: Because of the sensitive nature of Jackie’s story, we decided to honor her request not to contact the man she claimed orchestrated the attack on her, nor any of the men she claimed participated in the attack, for fear of retaliation against her. In the months Sabrina Rubin Erdely spent reporting the story, Jackie neither said nor did anything that made her, or Rolling Stone‘s editors and fact-checkers, question Jackie’s credibility. … In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced. We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story. Over at Romenesko, the first wave of Facebook reaction is uniformly critical: Michael David Smith: Rolling Stone‘s explanation is wholly inadequate. What, exactly, led them to stop trusting the primary source of the original story? Do they think she’s telling the truth as she knows it but have reason to doubt her memory of some of the details of the attack? Do they think she made the whole thing up and there was no attack at all? Somewhere in between? This requires a more thorough explanation than Rolling Stone has offered. Amy French This is so sad b/c fact-checking should have caught these issues, and RS should blame itself for that – not “misplaced trust” in a young woman who may have lied willfully, or may be ill. Something horrible may have indeed happened to Jackie at the party sponsored by the named fraternity. And her apparent difficulties in relating the details may be a result of that. But for the moment, it’s suddenly only about some very careless journalism and the muddying of a reading public’s perception of a very serious, endemic issue. |
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| Quasimodo | Dec 5 2014, 03:03 PM Post #33 |
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I guess this is now a bust:
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| abb | Dec 5 2014, 03:03 PM Post #34 |
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/05/rolling-stone-rape_n_6277308.html Rolling Stone Distances Itself From Explosive UVA Gang Rape Story Posted: 12/05/2014 2:45 pm EST Updated: 2 minutes ago CHARLOTTESVILLE -- Three weeks after a bombshell Rolling Stone article detailed an alleged brutal gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity, the fraternity released a statement that rebutted some of its central claims and the magazine is distancing itself from the article. Will Dana, the managing editor of Rolling Stone, said in a statement Friday that the magazine had chosen not to contact any of the accused rapists at the request of “Jackie,” the alleged rape victim at the center of the story, but that the magazine's trust in Jackie had been "misplaced." "In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account," Dana said. “We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story." The Washington Post reported on Friday that officials close to the accused fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi, or “Phi Psi,” can prove that several details of Jackie’s story are false. For instance, Jackie told Rolling Stone and The Washington Post in separate interviews that one of the alleged perpetrators was employed at a certain fitness center on campus when the rape happened in 2012, but no Phi Psi brother was employed at that facility at the time. Toward the end of its article, the Post reported that "Jackie contradicted an earlier interview" by saying she no longer knew if her "attacker actually was a member of Phi Kappa Psi." Reached by The Huffington Post, friends of Jackie said she was under “extreme duress” and could not speak publicly at the moment. The fraternity said it began its own internal review after the Rolling Stone article was released. One major flaw in the details of the alleged gang rape, according to the fraternity: The attack allegedly happened at the house during a party, but the fraternity said there was no “date function or social event” during the weekend in question. It also refuted the suggestion a “ritualized sexual assault” is part of its pledging of initiation process. “Our initial doubts as to the accuracy of the article have only been strengthened as alumni and undergraduate members have delved deeper,” the Virginia Alpha chapter of Phi Psi said in a statement Friday. The new information casting doubt on Jackie’s story is yet another huge development for a UVA campus that has been reeling from the original Rolling Stone story and, weeks earlier, the murder of student Hannah Graham. Evidence of the emotional trauma endured by the community in Charlottesville was on display this past week. The windows of the Phi Psi house, where “Jackie” claimed the brutal rape occurred, were broken, boarded up and surrounded by piles of shattered glass, apparently having been pelted with rocks and bricks. The entire Greek system, which makes up nearly a third of the students at the sprawling state university, has been temporarily suspended, and its members banned from speaking to the media. One freshman woman who is not in the Greek system -- a “first-year,” in UVA lingo-- told The Huffington Post on Thursday that she and her hallmates in the dorm no longer feel safe on campus. “We’re scared to go out now, even in groups,” she said. “The fraternities are shut down anyway until January, but even if they weren’t, I don’t think there’d be any rush to go back.” In the week following the publication of the Rolling Stone article, Jackie’s story reverberated across campus. Students say they discussed it in all of their classes. The Phi Psi house was vandalized, students and faculty staged multiple rallies on campus, and petitions circulated online for the university to permanently bar the fraternity from campus. The fraternity pulled its contact information from its website. UVA had already been under federal investigation in 2011 over concerns with how the university handle sexual violence on campus, but the Rolling Stone article published in November shined an even brighter spotlight on the issue. Emily Renda, a rape survivor and advocate for victims on campus, as well as a friend of Jackie’s who was featured in the Rolling Stone article, criticized the magazine's reporting and how its fallout would hurt rape survivors. “Rolling Stone decided to play all three roles of advocate, investigator and adjudicator, and those roles are kept separate and sacred for a reason,” Renda said. She worried these revelations would be “used to criticize survivors everywhere, which is cruel.” The Board of Visitors, the governing body for the university, held an emergency three-hour meeting about sexual assault on campus. The university retained the law firm O’Melveny & Myers to review its handling of rape cases. The university did not immediately respond to request for comment in light of criticism of the Rolling Stone report. As for the legal fallout of what has transpired, the day before The Rolling Stone article was called into question, The Huffington Post sat down with Charlottesville Police Lt. Gary Pleasant to discuss the case. He said the police are “looking into an incident referred to us by the University of Virginia,” but that the effort falls short of what he would call a formal investigation. “Our purpose is to find the truth in any matter and that’s what we are looking for here,” Pleasants told HuffPost Friday. “These articles do not change our focus moving forward.” This story has been updated to include comment from Renda. |
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| Quasimodo | Dec 5 2014, 03:08 PM Post #35 |
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Edited by Quasimodo, Dec 5 2014, 03:12 PM.
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| Quasimodo | Dec 5 2014, 03:12 PM Post #36 |
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Yeah, it was fake, but accurate... |
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| abb | Dec 5 2014, 03:12 PM Post #37 |
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http://mic.com/articles/105838/rolling-stone-may-have-set-the-fight-against-college-sexual-assault-back-decades Rolling Stone' May Have Set the Fight Against College Sexual Assault Back Decades By Tom McKay 5 minutes ago A statement from Rolling Stone and an investigation by the Washington Post have thrown doubt into a blockbuster article dealing an alleged gang-rape at a University of Virginia fraternity. Rolling Stone's story about "Jackie," a UVA student who alleged she was gang-raped by members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity in 2012, sparked national outcry and a police investigation into fraternity behavior at the university. But a Washington Post investigation reveals discrepancies in the Rolling Stone story — errors that could have a damaging impact in how the college campuses and other institutions view and handle sexual assault According to the Post, there are significant factual errors in the story: "Officials close to the fraternity said that the statement will indicate that Phi Kappa Psi did not host a party on Sept. 28, 2012, the night that a university student named Jackie alleges she was invited to a date party, lured into an upstairs room and was then ambushed and gang-raped by seven men who were rushing the fraternity. "The officials also said that no members of the fraternity were employed at the university's Aquatic Fitness Center during that time frame — a detail Jackie provided in her account to Rolling Stone and in interviews with the Washington Post — and that no member of the house matches the description detailed in the Rolling Stone account." Furthermore, after Jackie told friends the first name of the alleged attacker, "the Post determined that the student Jackie named is not a member of Phi Kappa Psi and had never met her in person." Rolling Stone editor Will Dana released a statement on Friday appearing to concede that the story may be inaccurate: "In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced. We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story." The failure, however, appears to be on Rolling Stone's fact-checking process rather than Jackie. Questions had risen over the past week regarding reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely's absence of interviews with Jackie's alleged rapists. The Washington Post confirms an alarming relationship between Jackie's story and the process by which Rolling Stone reports the article. "In July, Renda introduced Jackie to Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the Rolling Stone writer who was on assignment to write about sexual violence on college campuses. Overwhelmed from sitting through interviews with the writer, Jackie said she asked Erdely to be taken out of the article. She said Erdely refused and Jackie was told that the article would go forward regardless. Jackie said she finally relented and agreed to participate on the condition that she be able to fact-check her parts in the story, which she said Erdely accepted. Erdely said in an email message that she was not immediately available to comment Friday morning. Jackie said early in the week that she felt manipulated by Erdely, the Rolling Stone reporter, saying that she "'elt completely out of control over my own story.' In an in-person interview Thursday, Jackie said that Rolling Stone account of her attack was truthful but also acknowledged that some details in the article might not be accurate." In the original story, which remains on the Rolling Stone website here, Jackie claimed that she had been lured upstairs during a Phi Kappa Psi party and raped by seven men on top of a broken glass table on Sept. 28, 2012. Rolling Stone's investigation claimed that Jackie's story was subsequently ignored by college administrators. It further noted that the University of Virginia was among the 12 of 86 schools under federal investigation for their response to sexual assault cases flagged for a total "compliance review." Why it matters: Since the story received prominent national attention and a highly publicized response from university president Teresa Sullivan, who promised a full investigation, the unfortunate reality is that any collapse of the Rolling Stone story will likely tar the testimony of other rape victims who have stepped forward. Their stories shouldn't be written off, even if Jackie's account is eventually determined to have been fabricated, and the University of Virginia still has to answer for its wretched record on sexual assault. Nationally, RAINN estimates that around 54% of rapes go unreported to the authorities. Compare that to the 2%-8% of rapes that are ultimately determined to be "false reports" (which the National Center for the Prosecution of Violence Against Women reminds readers does not mean the same thing as "false accusations"). Often, the reason a report of sexual assault is determined to be "false" is because the alleged victim fails to name an attacker who they fear retribution from, or because police are unable to corroborate certain details of the attack. As Slate's Amanda Marcotte writes, the number of actual fabricated rape claims is almost certainly lower than the reported number. Rolling Stone's expose certainly may have some truth to it, but the poor reporting and fact-checking of Jackie's narrative, the emotional core of the story will cast a shadow over virtually every similar testimony to follow. That's not just terrible for the fraternity, if it was falsely accused, and Rolling Stone's credibility, but for virtually every woman who has experienced sexual assault on a college campus. "With a story this extreme, you want the assurance that a journalist did everything she possibly could to verify its accuracy. What's at stake here is not just a small point of journalistic standards," wrote Slate's Allison Benedickt and Hanna Rosin. "As [Caitlin] Flanagan pointed out to us in her email, if the story doesn't check out, 'it is going to cause so much trouble in the area of reforming fraternity sexual assault, I can't even tell you.' "Flanagan has recently been invited to speak to a large gathering of fraternity advisers about addressing fraternity rape," add Benedickt and Rosin. "Inviting her, she says, is a 'huge opening' in their thinking. 'But if this turns out to be a hoax, it is going to turn the clock back on their thinking 30 years.'" While many will seize on Rolling Stone's article as sign that outrage over college sexual assault is overblown, the national media would do well to remember that one in five college women will be raped during their time in higher education. There are countless victims whose stories need to be told, and their importance hasn't diminished just because one story may have holes in it. |
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| abb | Dec 5 2014, 03:15 PM Post #38 |
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http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/12/05/rape-story-unravels-rollng-stone-says-trust-in-uva-source-misplaced/ Rape story unravels? Rolling Stone says trust in UVa source 'misplaced' Published December 05, 2014 The dramatic Rolling Stone story of a gang rape at University of Virginia, which prompted national outrage until scrutiny of the alleged victim's account began to raise serious doubts, was based on "misplaced" trust in the still-unidentified woman, the magazine said Friday. The 9,000-word story, titled "A Rape on Campus," detailed a young freshman's horrific account of being gang raped on a floor strewn with broken glass after being dragged into a darkened room at a fraternity party in 2012. The author, freelance writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely, identified the victim only as "Jackie," and did not interview the alleged attackers. But the story blasted the Charlottesville school, saying university officials turned a deaf ear to Jackie's complaints in the latest example of its long history of indifference to alleged sexual assaults. But in recent days, Fox News' Howard Kurtz, the left-leaning Slate magazine, The Washington Post and other outlets had begun to question certain aspects of the account, noting, among other discrepancies, that no party took place in the location described in the time frame Erdely's story cited. The magazine initially stood by the story, but on Friday reversed course. "In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced," Rolling Stone Managing Editor Will Dana said in a statement. "We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story." In the wake of the story, university president Teresa Sullivan promised a full investigation and an examination of the way the school responds to sexual assault allegations. “The wrongs described in Rolling Stone are appalling and have caused all of us to reexamine our responsibility to this community,” Sullivan said at the time. “We are committed - above all else - to accountability with regard to these serious matters.” The case was reminiscent of the 2006 Duke lacrosse case, in which wealthy white fraternity members at an elite southern school were accused of being sexual predators. But unlike the Duke case, no suspects were named and no victim came forward, other than to Erdely, who has refused to fully identify Jackie. In addition to a growing drumbeat of media skepticism, based partly on Erdely's departure from journalistic standards that critics said required her to attempt to talk the accused rapists, several of the woman identified as Jackie’s close friends and campus sex assault awareness advocates cats doubts on the report. Rolling Stone said Erdely did not pursue the suspects at the behest of Jackie, who said she feared retribution from them. The magazine said Erdely and fact-checkers spent months working on the story and found Jackie to be credible. Capt. Gary Pleasants of the Charlottesville police department said that detectives are looking into the allegations at the request of the university but declined to comment on the status of that investigation. The University of Virginia fraternity named in the story, Phi Kappa Psi, released a statement Friday afternoon saying the organization did not host a party on Sept. 28, 2012, the night the attack allegedly occurred. Fraternity officials also said that no members of the fraternity worked at the university’s Aquatic Fitness Center at the time, as Jackie claimed, and that no room in the fraternity house matches Jackie's description. "It is our hope that this information will encourage people who may know anything relevant to this case to contact the Charlottesville Police Department as soon as possible," the statement read. "In the meantime, we will continue to assist investigators in whatever way we can." The Washington Post has interviewed Jackie, now a 20-year-old junior at the school, and others involved in the case in recent days and tried to verify the story. The paper reported that Jackie’s close friends said they believe something traumatic happened to Jackie but have come to doubt her account because her story has changed and key points cannot be verified. Mollie Hemingway, a media critic and senior editor at The Federalist, said she followed the story closely, from her "emotional" reading of the Rolling Stone story to the questions that soon followed. She said she prides herself on reading critically, but acknowledged buying in to Erdely's story until only recently. "This has been an absolutely devastating blow to Rolling Stone's credibility," she said. "[Erdely] has a lot to answer for as well. She literally took the memories of one person who claimed to have been traumatized and built an entire story around it. "But the worst things is that people who are victims of rape will not be believed," Hemingway said. "That is the worst part of this story. I don't think the writer or this magazine could have done more damage to victims of rape if they had set out to." |
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| Quasimodo | Dec 5 2014, 03:15 PM Post #39 |
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Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts. (Note that now it is "raped", not "sexually assaulted"...) Edited by Quasimodo, Dec 5 2014, 03:16 PM.
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| abb | Dec 5 2014, 03:24 PM Post #40 |
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http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-12-05/rolling-stones-rape-story-fails-victims Rolling Stone's Rape Story Fails Victims Dec 5, 2014 3:11 PM EST By Megan McArdle Rolling Stone's story about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia appears to be falling apart. The fraternity released a statement today rebutting specific aspects of the story. Friends of Jackie's on campus, including rape survivors, are now also questioning her story. Rolling Stone has issued a not-quite-retraction: Last month, Rolling Stone published a story titled "A Rape on Campus" by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, which described a brutal gang rape of a woman named Jackie at a University of Virginia fraternity house; the university's failure to respond to this alleged assault -- and the school's troubling history of indifference to many other instances of alleged sexual assaults. The story generated worldwide headlines and much soul-searching at UVA. University president Teresa Sullivan promised a full investigation and also to examine the way the school responds to sexual assault allegations. Because of the sensitive nature of Jackie's story, we decided to honor her request not to contact the man she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her. In the months Erdely spent reporting the story, Jackie neither said nor did anything that made Erdely, or Rolling Stone's editors and fact-checkers, question Jackie's credibility. Her friends and rape activists on campus strongly supported Jackie's account. She had spoken of the assault in campus forums. We reached out to both the local branch and the national leadership of the fraternity where Jackie said she was attacked. They responded that they couldn't confirm or deny her story but had concerns about the evidence. In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced. We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story. This may not be the biggest journalism pullback ever -- I'd say that the Bush national guard memos still hold the top spot, at least for a single story. But this certainly ranks high on the list. The story started off a couple of weeks ago as a blockbuster expose that forced a major institutional reaction from UVA; it now seems very possible that it will go down with the 8-year-old heroin addict and the collected works of Stephen Glass in the annals of journalistic hoaxes. As it happened, I finished a piece yesterday on the problems with the story. This morning I asked my editor to hold it, because there seemed to be some news ready to break, one way or another. I thought about canning the story when the news came out, but actually, I think that it's more important than ever to explore what was wrong with this story and why it should never have been published. On Monday, I briefly noted a post by Richard Bradley, pointing to some potential issues with the Rolling Stone story. Since I wrote that post, other reporters have also highlighted some very serious issues with it. I've read media reporter Paul Farhi of the Washington Post's two very good pieces on the reporting, the concerns raised by Judith Shulevitz of the New Republic, columns by Robby Soave of Reason, and a deeply troubling reported piece by Hanna Rosin and Allison Benedikt at Slate. I've also listened to the evasive interview that author Sabrina Rubin Erdely did with Rosin for a Slate podcast, in which she repeatedly dodges specific questions with general remarks that seem designed to sound as if she's answering in the affirmative, without actually doing so. After all this, I too had concerns: Erdely seemed to be backing up her story with assertions that she found the rape story credible, rather than with details of the reporting she did to attempt to ensure that it was. As Erik Wemple of the Washington Post said, "For the sake of Rolling Stone’s reputation, Sabrina Rubin Erdely had better be the country’s greatest judge of character." The criticisms of this story fell into two categories: critiques of the story itself, which suggested that it might be a hoax, and critiques of the reporting. So I'm going to deal with them separately. First I'm going to talk about the potential issues with victim Jackie's story, and why the red flags it raised should have made Erdely very cautious about going to press without more corroboration than she had. Then I'll tackle what I think Erdely should have done, and why she, and a few other writers, are wrong to insist that this is a side issue. (Disclosure: For this story, I attempted to contact Sabrina Rubin Erdely; Sean Woods, her editor at Rolling Stone; and Claire Kaplan of the UVA Women's Center. None of them responded. I succeeded in reaching Melissa Bruno at Wenner Media, who referred me to Will Dana, the managing editor of Rolling Stone. In response to a detailed list of questions, he replied that they were doing a follow-up that should answer the many questions reporters had been asking.) So to start with, Jackie's story: It's horrific. It's easy to see why the author chose to lead with the story. It's not one of the muddy "intoxicated woman/intoxicated man, was-it-rape-or-regret?" narratives that so often feature in stories about campus sexual assault. You have a young freshman who has barely taken a couple of sips from her drink, led upstairs by a boy she works with to be brutally raped for three hours in a pitch-black room, with shards of glass from a broken coffee table pressing into her back. So it's unsurprising that this story became the spine of the narrative in the Rolling Stone piece. It's almost cinematic in its horrifying detail. I'm not going to summarize that narrative here; you should go read the account for yourself, if you haven't. These are the biggest questions that were raised, most of them in the articles above or their comments sections: Three hours on broken glass should have left Jackie with wounds, even if it was tempered glass; those little marbles can still have sharp edges, and lying on top of them for three hours, with someone else's weight on top of you, seems like it would result in some bleeding -- for the brothers, as well as for her. Jackie said that she was led into a pitch-black room, then grabbed by someone she couldn't see. Later, she somehow knows that there are nine guys, and she recognizes one of her attackers in the low light. Of course, her eyes may have adjusted. The larger problem is that pitch-black rooms aren't pitch black when there's a door open, unless they're the size of a high school gymnasium; even a small amount of light from the hall should have illuminated the room enough for her to see the eight waiting guys when she walked in. Movies sometimes have what I've heard called "the corner of infinite darkness" where an attacker can hide, but lighting directors spend hours setting up and shielding their lights to get that effect; it's hard to achieve naturally, as you can see yourself by opening the door from a lighted hallway into an otherwise black room. There might be a few hiding spots; there are unlikely to be eight. Despite the fact that she had not been drinking, she passes out at the end of the rape and wakes up in an empty room. Was this blood loss? Did she hit her head? Dissociative amnesia? Why did the brothers leave the girl they'd just brutally raped alone in a room? Didn't they think she might scream? When she goes downstairs, she calls her friends, who try to persuade her not to report the rape or go to the hospital because they'll never be allowed in a frat party again. Do the Phi Kappa Psi brothers have spies at the hospital who report on the friends who accompany raped girls there? That seems like extreme paranoia, even for college students. 4a. Later, other friends downplay this sensational crime, even to the extent of telling her that she should have enjoyed the opportunity to have sex with a bunch of hot fraternity guys. College students are often callow and immature in dealing with the problems of others, and even the more mature often get impatient with loved ones who seem trapped in some trauma, but Jackie seems to have a lot of incredibly bad friends around her. Jackie declined to go to the hospital or make a formal accusation. The story is fully told for the first time when a dean calls her to talk about why she is flunking three classes. The story is clearly set up as involving pledges in some sort of initiation ritual. "Then they egged him on: 'Don't you want to be a brother?' 'We all had to do it, so you do, too.' " The party where this took place was allegedly given on Sept. 28. But the fraternity in question rushes in the spring; everyone in that room should already have been a brother, unless they were involving potential future pledges in their major felony. Sometime afterward, the brother who led her to be gang raped tells her he had a great time and asks why she's avoiding him. As Rosin and Benedikt note, "That’s not expected behavior even by the standards of rapists. That’s psychotic." It's a remark I'd expect to hear in a story of a date rape, not a gang rape. Erdely reports that after Jackie became a campus anti-rape activist, she was hit in the face with a beer bottle that broke. However, this appears to have left only a bruise near her eye, not lacerations or a medical report for having glass removed from her eye. People who confabulate for attention often have a series of amazing things happen to them, not just one; this should have made Erdely cautious. Gang raping someone who can identify you is a pretty bad plan on the part of the brothers, especially on a bed of glass. How could they know she wouldn't walk out of that room and straight into the police station? Rosin and Benedikt report a friend saying that Jackie's reaction was "extreme" when Erdely pressed her for the identities of her assailants -- "meaning that Jackie became so terrified that she reconsidered going public with her story, even anonymously." A source who has an extreme reaction when you try to identify people who might deny their story is an unfortunately classic staple of stories that aren't true. These are all red flags, which Erdely needed to resolve. But contra some of the commenters I've seen out there, they didn't simply prove the story was false. Print stories always have to economize on detail, because you only have so much space. Moreover, stories often get garbled in transmission. There could simply have been missing details that would resolve some of these apparent problems: that the brothers moved her off the glass after the first one got it in his knees, that "Drew" playfully put his hands over her eyes as they walked into the room. Sometimes people do luckily escape injury from flying glass, or there may have been lacerations the article doesn't mention. Many of the discrepancies fall into this category: things that don't quite make sense as written, but could with a few extra details. Others fall into the category of "I'd never do that." I'd never commit a cold-blooded gang rape, or fail to report same to the police. I'd never say such terrible things to a friend. Unfortunately, your imagination is a very poor guide to what other people will do. For that matter, your imagination is a very poor guide to what you will do. A lot more people imagined themselves, say, becoming a part of the Underground Railroad than actually did so when the chips were down. One personal story: When I was in college, I was the victim of someone who stole a bunch of money from me. I knew who it was, and I didn't report it to anyone except a couple of friends. Why not? Years later, I'm not sure I can say. I can cite a deeply ingrained aversion to asking for help from authorities, which is certainly a part of my character, or point out that the accusation would have been hard to prove, even though, for tedious reasons I won't go into, I was quite certain who had committed the theft. But that could just be post-hoc rationalization; what I actually remember is that it happened, and I didn't report it. Instead, I stopped buying food for about a week. And I wasn't even faced with having to rehearse hours of unimaginably gruesome trauma over and over to investigators. So I find it extremely easy to believe that a girl stumbled out of a fraternity house, bruised and humiliated, and just wanted to go home and pretend it never happened. But even if I couldn't, that wouldn't be evidence of much of anything, except the contours of my imagination. People do crazy, insane, unaccountable things all the time -- if you found it hard to believe that fraternity brothers committed a premeditated gang rape, why was it so easy to imagine that a girl made up a rape story to recount to a national magazine, where she risked humiliating exposure? Whichever you believe, the explanation for this seemingly insane behavior is the same: Sometimes, people aren't very good at counting the consequences of their own actions. However, while I certainly don't think that these problems meant that the story was obviously untrue, a giant collection of red flags like this makes me very cautious. When you have these sorts of issues in a story, you need to do your utmost to check it out. It's not enough to get corroboration that the alleged victim told the same story to other people at a later date, which is all Erdely seems to have done. Anyone reporting this story should press for inconsistencies with the victim, and do their utmost to talk to the people who were actually there that night -- the friends, and the alleged rapists, insofar as they can be identified. I understand how hard that is. If someone has been raped, treating them as if they might be lying is adding insult to unforgivable injury. Unfortunately, that's exactly what a journalist printing a felony accusation has a responsibility to do. And I want to digress a moment and talk about why we journalists have this responsibility. Investigative journalism can be an amazing tool for exposing injustice and righting wrongs. But journalists who do this kind of work have to be on their guard, because unless they are very careful to interrogate their stories, the medium will have a tendency to select for stories that aren't true. The best stories, the ones that result in institutional shakeups and journalism prizes, are clear-cut stories about very rare events. Think a presidential administration conducting illegal break-ins, or a president who was provably AWOL from his military duty during Vietnam. A drug company hiding evidence that its product caused fatal liver damage, a book exposing gruesome abuses at a women's lunatic asylum, or a book showing that the prevalence of guns in early America was a gigantic myth. A reporter with an improbable gift for finding and telling illuminating stories about finance and money, and one with an improbable gift for finding amazing stories about shocking events in war zones. As followers of the form know, about half the stories I've named were true blockbusters; about half of those turned out to be falsified by either the author or the author's sources. Terrible stories really do happen and are exposed by reporters. But some of the most amazing scoops have turned out to be fabricated, and I think there is a reason for that. As any journalist or cop or lawyer or academic can tell you, reality is usually complicated. Eyewitnesses are unreliable, narratives are cloudy, the data you want is missing or never existed, people seeking money or power have pushed deep into legal gray zones without quite breaking the law. It's not that clearer stories don't exist -- Bernie Madoff committed a very clear-cut and mediagenic crime. But those stories are hard to find, because the perpetrators are at pains to conceal their actions. Fabricators can create exactly the sort of story that becomes front-page news: an obvious and sympathetic victim, a clearly identified perpetrator who obviously broke the law, vivid details to hold the listener's attention. They don't need to backtrack and say "Oh, wait, no, that happened three weeks earlier" the way that real witnesses often do, or shamefacedly confess, when confronted, that they maybe left out a few parts of the story that didn't put them in the most flattering light. In other words, they can give us exactly the sort of story that can get us a prize, because they aren't constrained by the often banal and frequently ambiguous details of anything that actually happened. The very reason people like Stephen Glass and Jack Kelley were so successful was that lies generally make better copy than reality. I'm not saying that most of the amazing scoops that get printed are false. On the contrary. But it is true that journalists get offered many, many amazing scoops that simply won't stand up to scrutiny. We keep them out of the news stream by carefully checking the stories for inconsistencies and offering the accused the opportunity to respond. Thankfully, fabrications frequently reveal themselves as questionable when you try to corroborate the details -- often because these oft-rehearsed tales are carefully set up to be completely impossible to check, and the source disappears when you press. There's also a reason that so many of the worst fabrications we know about were created by journalists, who knew exactly what they had to do to get the story through the system. Unfortunately, reporting by others suggests that Erdely didn't do one of the basic things that reporters do to try to keep fabrications or exaggerations out of our stories: Check with the other side. It now seems clear that her story has always been essentially a single-source story; she spoke to Jackie, and people who heard the story from Jackie, none of whom turn out to have pressed Jackie for such details as the names of the accused. According to the Washington Post, when Erdely did press, Jackie tried to back out: In July, Renda introduced Jackie to Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the Rolling Stone writer who was on assignment to write about sexual violence on college campuses. Overwhelmed from sitting through interviews with the writer, Jackie said she asked Erdely to be taken out of the article. She said Erdely refused and Jackie was told that the article would go forward regardless. Jackie said she finally relented and agreed to participate on the condition that she be able to fact-check her parts in the story, which she said Erdely accepted. Erdely said in an e-mail message that she was not immediately available to comment Friday morning. That doesn't necessarily mean the story is false; it's easy to see why a rape victim wouldn't want to confront her attackers, even by proxy. But even if you think the story is almost certainly true, the correct response in this situation is to regretfully drop the story and focus on someone else, not to publish major felony accusations without attempting to contact the accused. Every good journalist has dropped at least a few stories when it becomes clear that he or she couldn't verify enough details to be confident, and it's really tough to have to drop a great story -- or, worse, an important story that you think is probably true -- after you've put a lot of work into it. It still has to be done. When Jackie tried to pull out, the red lights should have been flashing in Erdely's mind, with klaxons sounding warnings that she might be dealing with a student who fabricated or exaggerated a story, for attention or for some other reason, and hadn't realized that when she told this story to a major magazine reporter, she was inviting a level of scrutiny that her story could not withstand. Instead, Erdely seems to have adopted the "ask no questions" approach of community activists. On a UVA-focused Facebook page, a woman who seems to be Claire Kaplan, of UVA's Women's Center, writes: The survivor in the frat rape did NOT want anything done. Take this story with a grain of salt. She's been irreparably harmed by this story, as the reporter included comments that were given as "off the record" and then she published them. Now we are left to pick up the pieces. She lied to the survivors and she ambushed the other folks she interviewed. She was not interested in true investigative reporting, she just wanted her byline with a sensational story. Later in the same thread, she says: They aren't disappointed in the fact that the story is now public. I believe it was more about how their comments about Dean Eramo in particular were taken out of context as well as other comments about friends' reactions. Part of the issue here is that reporters needs to tread lightly when interviewing survivors of trauma so as not to exacerbate their sense of betrayal. Rosin and Benedikt's reporting suggests that Kaplan's attitude about questioning the stories of rape survivors is common among the campus activist community: What became clear from talking to Jackie’s supporters at UVA is that the community of victim advocates operates by a very specific code. “The first thing as a friend we must say is, ‘I believe you and I am here to listen,’ ” says Brian Head, president of UVA’s all-male sexual assault peer education group One in Four. Head and others believe that questioning a victim is a form of betrayal, because it will make her feel judged and all the more reluctant to ever speak about what happened. None of the people we spoke to had asked Jackie who the men were, and in fact none of them had any idea. They did not press her on any details about the incident. “A lot of the reason why we aren’t questioning Jackie urgently about who the names are or anything like that is because our role as advocates and friends is really just to support the survivor,” says Alexandria Pinkleton, another member of One Less and a friend of Jackie’s who was also quoted in the Rolling Stone story. “If she doesn’t want to give us the names, that’s not something were going to press her for." This is a point of tension between Erdely and the activists, one that is apparent in her conclusion. Erdely blames the UVA administration, “which chose not to act on her allegations in any way.” The activists, however, think the administration was correct not to pressure Jackie into pressing charges before she was ready. Pinkleton told the Washington Post that she now feels she was misled. Others echo her concerns: A group of Jackie’s close friends, who are sex assault awareness advocates at U-Va., said they believe something traumatic happened to Jackie but have come to doubt her account. They said details have changed over time, and they have not been able to verify key points of the story in recent days. A name of an alleged attacker that Jackie provided to them for the first time this week, for example, turned out to be similar to the name of a student who belongs to a different fraternity, and no one by that name has been a member of Phi Kappa Psi. As I've written before, I understand that organizations dedicated to helping survivors face a tough choice -- between pressing the victim to lodge an official complaint that could take a rapist off the streets and helping a survivor who may feel too traumatized to face an official investigation. I understand, too, the temptation to embrace this ethic as a reporter when confronted with a victim who is telling you a story of unimaginable horror. But for the reasons that I've outlined above, we can't do that. It's not our job to force a victim to go to the police. But it is our job to do the best we can to verify a story before we print it, even if that causes the victims more pain. We should do everything we can to minimize the discomfort of being questioned, and the fear of confronting your attacker, even directly. But we can't forgo it, unless we also forgo printing the story. I've seen a number of people defend Rolling Stone's decision, including, to my shock, some journalists. "If a reporter were doing a story about a university accused of failing to address the mugging or robbery of a student, that reporter would not be expected to interview the alleged mugger or robber," they say. Or "They'd just have denied it. Why bother?" Or even "she didn't really identify anyone, so there's no duty to check." This last is simply false; I've had people sending me the names of potential attackers for several days now. (I was preparing to contact a couple of them when the Post story dropped.) Those names were available in multiple places on the Web and could have severely damaged the men in question when they popped up on a Google search. As for the rest, the answer is that however remote the chance, there is always a possibility that the alleged attacker will say, "I was in Tampa on the weekend in question, and here is my credit card receipt for the gas I bought at a local convenience store, my e-ticket, time-stamped pictures of me at the Big Cat Rescue there, and the phone number of three people who can testify that I was with them the whole time." This being about what now seems to be happening. So you contact the accused to verify that they exist, and you give them a chance to tell their side of the story. Of course it's true that you don't have to wait until you've tracked down the mugger that fled the scene before you report that a mugging happened. But if someone told me that they had been mugged by someone who was known to them, then yes, I would be expected to try to contact the alleged assailant before I reported their age, where they worked and what fraternal organization they belonged to. This does not mean that reporters should start out believing that all alleged rape victims lie, or that most alleged rape victims lie. We have no idea how many rape accusations are false, and we probably never will, but it's not all of them, and I'm pretty sure it's not the majority, either, no matter what apocryphal "friend of a friend" opinions say on the Internet. But we do know that some rape accusations are false, including ones that became major media events and ones that put innocent men in jail. We don't verify because it's likely that a rape victim is lying to us; we verify because there is some chance, however small, and "some chance" that you will erroneously print a felony accusation is too high. Nor am I very convinced by the people -- including Erdely -- who have argued that focusing on Jackie's story is getting us "sidetracked" from "the real story," which is about the rape culture at UVA and the slothful institutional reaction to Jackie's story. The story was headlined "A Rape on Campus." The first thousand words are devoted to Jackie's horrifying story, and much of the rest of the story is devoted to Jackie's descent into depression and her interactions with the deans. If the story is so irrelevant to the real point of the article, then it should have been pulled out when the victim refused to provide details that would have permitted the author to contact the accused for comment. But of course, if Jackie's story had been pulled out, the article wouldn't have received anything like the attention it got. The story was so electric precisely because it was about the premeditated gang rape of an innocent girl, in a way that suggested that such callous and criminal treatment of women was commonly viewed by the university community as not really worthy of comment, much less punishment -- and that this view afflicted even the administrators charged with protecting students from rape. Without that element, this would have been a dull-but-worthy chin-stroker about institutional bureaucratic processes that probably wouldn't have been shared 170,000 times on Facebook. What's more, the way the story was written, and the way that Erdely responded to early interviews, suggests that she was aware that her failure to find the accused -- or at least the two boys who could clearly be identified -- was a problem. The Rolling Stone piece is beautifully written. Many journalists would happily give at least a small digit, maybe a toe, to be able to produce a story like that. But it is rather vague about who, exactly, she talked to. In interviews with Slate and the Washington Post, she repeatedly declined to specify whether she had spoken to "Drew," or if she even knew who he was. When Rosin pressed her, she kept giving vague answers that implied she had done more reporting than we now know she did. Rape is horrible, and it is indeed a problem on college campuses. I applaud the reporters who press for justice in these cases, the activists who are trying to curtail this criminal behavior, and the administrators who are looking for better ways to protect their students. Stories like Jackie's should certainly be reported, and so should the less extreme, more common, but still horrible attacks that countless women live through every year. Administrations should refer these cases to police when they happen on campus, and the government should prosecute them as vigorously as possible. But the very seriousness of the accusations, the very horror of rape, means that the reporter must try to get all sides of the story before it goes to print. The failure to do so did not mean that Jackie's story was a hoax -- but it adds plausibility to the suggestions that it might be. And as writer Caitlin Flanigan told Rosin and Benedikt, "If this turns out to be a hoax, it is going to turn the clock back ... 30 years.” Sabrina Rubin Erdely should have done everything she could to foreclose it. She didn't. Her editors didn't. So now the next time a rape victim tells her story to a journalist, they will both be trying to reach an audience that remembers the problems with this article, and the Duke lacrosse case, and wonders if any of these stories are ever true. That inference will be grotesquely false, but it is the predictable result of accepting sensational stories without carefully checking. The greatest damage this article has done is not to journalism, or even to Rolling Stone. It is to the righteous fight for rape victims everywhere. Reason employs my husband, Peter Suderman. To contact the author on this story: Megan McArdle at mmcardle3@bloomberg.net To contact the editor on this story: Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.net |
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| Baldo | Dec 5 2014, 03:25 PM Post #41 |
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Rolling Stone backs off from UVA rape story Rolling Stone magazine said Friday it found discrepancies in its controversial story about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia and had lost faith in the piece, a shocking retreat coming merely days after author Sabrina Rubin Erdely defended the reporting. "In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced," Will Dana, the magazine's managing editor, wrote on its website. ![]() A University of Virginia student looks over postings on the door of Peabody Hall related to the Phi Kappa Psi gang rape allegations at the school in Charlottesville, Va., Nov. 24, 2014 "We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account," the post said. "We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story." On Nov. 19, the magazine ran a story of "Jackie," an unidentified UVA. student who says she was gang-raped at a party at the house of Phi Kappa Psi in the fall of 2012. Her shocking story, with vivid details from the night of the incident, and its charges that sexual assaults at UVA. often go unreported deeply embarrassed the university and launched an investigation by school officials and local police. All Greek life activities were also suspended in the wake of the story. Soon after the 9,000-word story ran, media critics began to question Erdely's reportorial methods. According to Rolling Stone, she spent months talking to Jackie, her friends and university officials. But Erdely never spoke to the accused, "Drew" and other men at Phi Kappa Psi. Erdely didn't contact the men for comments due to an agreement with Jackie, Dana said. "Because of the sensitive nature of Jackie's story, we decided to honor her request not to contact the man she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her," he wrote. "We have no knowledge of these alleged acts being committed at our house or by our members," according to a statement released Friday by the university chapter of Phi Kappa Psi. "Our initial doubts as to the accuracy of the article have only been strengthened as alumni and undergraduate members have delved deeper."..snipped http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/12/05/rolling-stone-retracts-uva-story/19954293/ Another mega-narrative shot down Deja-vu Remember the rapist signs in Durham? The Castrate sign and the signs of support? Look at the picture and the sign on the right. Actually it is quite embarrassing, the lack of logic being displayed in our Universities. I am sorry but far too many are lacking in basic common sense skills. That has to effect their eventual professional life and the decisions they will make that will impact all of us. |
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| abb | Dec 5 2014, 03:25 PM Post #42 |
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http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-rolling-stone-uva-rape-apology-20141205-story.html Rolling Stone casts doubt on UVA gang rape story; fraternity responds UVA gang rape story Members of the audience hold signs during a meeting at the University of Virginia on Nov. 25 held in response to a Rolling Stone article describing a woman's account of a brutal gang rape at the school. The magazine says it now has doubts about the woman's account. (Ryan M. Kelly / Associated Press) By Christine Mai-Duc contact the reporter Sexual AssaultSexual MisconductNewspapersUniversity of Virginia Rolling Stone says it no longer trusts the main subject of its explosive UVA gang rape story UVA fraternity points to inconsistencies in Rolling Stone's story on alleged gang rape Rolling Stone says it no longer trusts the account of a brutal gang rape described in an explosive story it published last month about sexual assaults at the University of Virginia. The story, written by contributing editor Sabrina Rubin Erdely, opens with a grisly account from a woman identified only as Jackie, who described being attacked by several members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, sexually assaulted for hours and raped with a beer bottle at their fraternity house. Column The University of Virginia rape Rorschach test The University of Virginia rape Rorschach test Meghan Daum The article sparked anger and protests, and prompted the University of Virginia to suspend all fraternity activities until next year. The university also pledged to reexamine the way it handles sexual assault allegations and asked police to investigate the alleged assault, which Jackie said in the article occurred in 2012 when she was a freshman. lRelated University of Virginia suspends fraternities after rape allegations Nation Now University of Virginia suspends fraternities after rape allegations See all related 8 In a statement issued on the Rolling Stone website and appended to the top of the article, managing editor Will Dana says “there now appear to be discrepancies” in the woman’s account, and that editors have “come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced.” While reporting the story, the magazine did not contact the men Jackie alleged raped her and it has been criticized for that in recent days. Rolling Stone says the fraternity and its national leadership would not confirm or deny the claims, and that Jackie “neither said nor did” anything that made the reporter question her credibility. cComments @PeterLawrence The reporter has "patriarchal bosses" at "Rolling Stone"? woof woof at 12:16 PM December 05, 2014 Add a comment See all comments 16 Dana said the magazine now regrets the decision not to contact her alleged rapists or the man she claimed orchestrated the attack. “We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault,” Dana wrote. “We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story." In a statement released shortly after the apology, the UVA's Phi Kappa Psi chapter said it had no knowledge of the alleged attacks. "Our initial doubts as to the accuracy of the article have only been strengthened as alumni and undergraduate members have delved deeper," the statement said. The chapter pointed to several inconsistencies in the story, the result of what it called "internal fact-finding" over the past two weeks. The chapter did not hold a date function or social event during the weekend of Sept. 28, 2012, the night Jackie claimed she was raped, it said. The fraternity also said no member was employed at the campus pool in 2012, a detail the woman recalled about the man she claimed orchestrated the attack. "No ritualized sexual assault is part of our pledging or initiation process," the fraternity's statement continued. "This notion is vile, and we vehemently refute this claim." In interviews with the Washington Post, several of Jackie's close friends expressed doubts about her story, the newspaper reported. Alex Pinkleton, a close friend of the woman and rape survivor, told the Post that after speaking to Jackie in recent days, she now feels misled."One of my biggest fears with these inconsistencies is that people will be unwilling to believe survivors in the future," Pinkleton told the Post. The Post also reported that in an interview with Jackie Thursday, the day before Rolling Stone issued its apology, the woman contradicted an earlier account by saying she did not know if the man she says organized the alleged attack was a member of Phi Kappa Psi. "I don't even know what I believe at this point," another friend, Emily Renda, told the newspaper. Renda said she had introduced Jackie to Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the Rolling Stone writer. A spokeswoman for the University of Virginia could not be immediately reached for comment. This post will be updated. For more breaking news, follow me @cmaiduc |
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| LTC8K6 | Dec 5 2014, 03:29 PM Post #43 |
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Assistant to The Devil Himself
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People in the original RS story said that they knew who the rapists were. They knew who Drew was. Where did that come from? Drew, as described, is fictional. How did they know a fictional character? |
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| abb | Dec 5 2014, 03:34 PM Post #44 |
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/05/rolling-stone-said-yesterday-uva-rape-story-was-entirely-credible.html 12.05.14 By Lloyd Grove Rolling Stone Said Yesterday UVA Rape Story Was ‘Entirely Credible’ Under fire already about the accuser's story, the magazine said it could no longer trust her account of what happened. In an embarrassing reversal Friday afternoon, Rolling Stone magazine acknowledged serious problems with last month’s sensational report about an alleged rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house of a first-year student identified only as “Jackie.” The magazine said that it was a mistake not to have observed standard journalistic protocol and contacted Jackie’s alleged attackers to obtain their side of the storyand test the veracity of Jackie’s narrative, in which she said that in the fall of 2012, she was lured from a drunken frat party to a darkened room by a young man with the pseudonym “Drew” and then was repeatedly raped by seven of Drew’s fraternity brothers as he cheered them on. “In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced,” managing editor Will Dana wrote in a “Note to Our Readers” posted on on the magazine’s website. “We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story.” As recently as Thursday, Rolling Stone was still defending the story against a growing chorus of critics. The magazine’s in-house publicist sent The Daily Beast this statement: “The story we published was one woman’s account of a sexual assault at a UVA fraternity in September 2012—and the subsequent ordeal she experienced at the hands of University administrators in her attempts to work her way through the trauma of that evening. The indifference with which her complaint was met was, we discovered, sadly consistent with the experience of many other UVA women who have tried to report such assaults. Through our extensive reporting and fact—checking, we found Jackie to be entirely credible and courageous and we are proud to have given her disturbing story the attention it deserves.” That statement became inoperative on Friday. The Daily Beast left messages—as yet unreturned at the time of this posting—for Rolling Stone’s in-house publicist and the a UVA communications official. The 9,000-word story—by Rolling Stone Contributing Editor Sabrina Rubin Erdley— had immediate nationwide impact and prompted UVA administrators to shut down all of the campus’s fraternities and sororities pending an investigation by the Charlottesville police department of the alleged incident. Erdley’s story was written from “Jackie’s” point of view without the usual journalistic caveats and qualifiers. But a growing number of critics, including Michael Moynihan in The Daily Beast, expressed skepticism about details of Jackie’s harrowing account, about Erdley’s unorthodox journalistic methods, and about Rolling Stone’s decision to publish the extremely damaging story without attempting to confirm or rebut the allegations with the accused rapists or their representatives. In several interviews to promote her scoop, Erdley explained that she didn’t reach out to the university’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity members because she was concerned for Jackie’s safety and the potential that the fraternity members would seek retribution—an explanation that didn’t account for how the Phi Kappa Psi members might react to having their entire fraternity house accused of a serious felony. On Friday, The Washington Post reported that Ben Warthen, an attorney for Phi Kappa Psi, said the fraternity planned to issue a rebuttal of Erdley’s claims in the story. The Post reported that several of the alleged victim’s close friends and campus sex assault awareness advocates also said they doubted elements of Erdley’s narrative. In key discrepancies reported by the Post, “officials close to the fraternity” said that Phi Kappa Psi didn’t, as Erdley alleged, host a party on Sept. 28, 2012; nor was any fraternity member, during the time frame alleged in Erdley’s story, employed as a lifeguard along with “Jackie” at the university’s Aquatic Fitness Center. According to Erdley’s story—which the magazine initially claimed was meticulously fact-checked—Jackie went on a date with Drew, the supposed fellow lifeguard, and afterward attended an alcohol-fueled party at the Phi Kappa Psi house. Drew allegedly lured her upstairs to a pitch-black room where she was tackled by another man, shattering a glass table, and brutally gang-raped over the course of three hours, with shards of glass digging into her back, by seven male students; one them punched her in the face while the others laughed, and another allegedly penetrated her with a beer bottle. Erdley’s story—which was written from Jackie’s point of view without the usual journalistic caveats and qualifiers—also portrayed a widespread campus culture, from students to university administrators, that looked the other way from sexual assault complaints. As for Jackie, while she told The Washington Post that some details in Rolling Stone of her story might not be accurate, she maintains the rape happened. “What bothers me is that so many people act like it didn’t happen. It’s my life. I have had to live with the fact that it happened every day for the last two years.” |
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| LTC8K6 | Dec 5 2014, 03:35 PM Post #45 |
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Assistant to The Devil Himself
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In the story, Jackie’s roommate at the time, Rachel Soltis, tells Erdely, “Me and several other people know exactly who did this to her.” So, will a reporter re-interview Rachel? |
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9:17 AM Jul 11