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UVA Rape Story Collapses; Duke Lacrosse Redux
Topic Started: Dec 5 2014, 01:45 PM (60,466 Views)
Quasimodo


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A University of Virginia alum ashamed, disgusted and enraged by the brutal gang rape at a fraternity house detailed in a Rolling Stone article has decided to take action.


Is that money now going to be refunded to the donors?

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http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/29/doonesbury-cartoon-somehow-unaware-that


Doonesbury Somehow Unaware That the UVA Gang Rape Story Was Debunked Weeks Ago

Robby Soave|Dec. 29, 2014 12:16 pm

There's phoning it in, and then there's Doonesbury. The cartoon strip, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its incisive social commentary back in the Stone Ages (1975, to be precise), now seems to be paying very little attention to breaking news—or even last month's breaking news. Consider creator Garry Trudeau's latest attempt at relevancy, which was published just in time to make the last-minute journalism "epic fails" lists of 2014 (a parlance the old-fashioned Trudeau is probably unfamiliar with).

Here is the cartoon, which depicts a character expressing her outrage that the University of Virginia would allow a student to be gang-raped. "Who is this frat boy monster... Who tells his victim that he 'had a great time'?"

If Trudeau had read the news recently—or any time in the last month—he would know that this "frat boy monster" doesn't even exist. Numerous reporters who (unlike Rolling Stone) believe in interviewing multiple sources, verifying facts, and scrutinizing incredible accounts have debunked virtually every aspect of the UVA gang-rape allegations. Most recently, friends of the alleged victim, Jackie, have come forward to present a highly plausible alternative explanation for her claims. They also demonstrated that Jackie went to great lengths to catfish them into believing she had a relationship with an older student who later raped her, even though that person does not exist and text messages allegedly sent by him were actually fake—and, in all likelihood, sent by Jackie herself.

Given that The Washington Post has proved the UVA rape story to be false, it's grossly irresponsible to craft a cartoon that uncritically recounts debunked details. I understand that Trudeau may have drawn it before Rolling Stone's credibility went to hell, but that was a long time ago. I first aired my doubts on December 1st, and numerous other outlets followed suit. Within a few days, The Washington Post dug up enough contradictory evidence to render much of the story false. But it seems Trudeau was too busy polishing his Pulitzer to bother fixing a clearly misleading and outdated cartoon. Hey, it's the holidays, I suppose.

The Washington Free Beacon's Sonny Bunch makes a similar point:

Anyway, hopefully Garry Trudeau is embarrassed. I’d add to his embarrassment by sending him a piece of snail mail, but who knows how long it will take to get there. By the time he receives it, he’ll probably have penned a horribly out of date comic strip about the evils of Duke lacrosse or the travails of a poor young woman named Tawana Brawley.

Read Jesse Walker's excellent account of the rise and fall of Doonesbury—which has grown less skeptical of authority and less funny over the years—here.

Hat tip: Popehat

Robby Soave is a staff editor at Reason.com.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2014/12/29/doonesbury-and-the-u-va-campus-rape-strip-garry-trudeau-says-that-rolling-stones-flaws-didnt-change-point-of-yesterdays-comic/

‘Doonesbury’ and the U-Va. campus-rape strip: Garry Trudeau says that Rolling Stone’s ‘flaws’ didn’t change point of yesterday’s comic
By Michael Cavna December 29 at 3:01 PM

TAKING IN SUNDAY’S “Doonesbury,” some readers did a double-take and asked: Um, doesn’t creator Garry Trudeau know about the latest news developments?

The confusion stems not from the cartoon’s larger issues, but rather from a specifically cited recent case. Yesterday’s “Doonesbury” uses Rolling Stone’s would-be expose on campus rape as an entree into the strip’s fictional narrative, as the characters provide commentary on institutional cover-ups of sexual violence.

In the strip, Boopsie opens the action by telling her college-bound daughter: “You’re not going to UVA!” — before citing the news story in which an accused gang-rape assailant (here, a “frat boy monster”) is quoting as telling his University of Virginia victim that he “had a great time.”

Using the controversial Rolling Stone story as a springboard for the strip caused numerous readers to wonder: Did Trudeau submit his strip before the magazine very publicly backed away from major elements in the article? Before Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana issued a statement about troubling crucial discrepancies in the central “victim’s” account — painting her as an unreliable source? (The Post published a thorough re-examination of her claims here.)

On the official “Doonesbury” site, hosted by The Washington Post, one reader wrote: “I wonder how far in advance of the publication date they are drawn.” (The editor’s official reply: The Sunday strips are “turned in to production five to six weeks before the publication date.”)

Some readers accused Trudeau of treating the Rolling Stone story “as fact.”

Turns out, this wasn’t a matter of early deadlines or total reportorial belief in Rolling Stone. Rather, this was a case of Trudeau’s larger critique of institutional sex-crime cover-ups (“Doonesbury” has dealt before with this issue as it relates to the military.)

“We had some internal discussion about whether the flaws in the [Rolling Stone] reporting mattered here, and we concluded they didn’t,” Trudeau tells The Post’s Comic Riffs of his talks with his syndicate, Universal UClick. “U-Va. is only used as setup to get the reader to consider the larger problem of institutions prioritizing their reputations over the welfare of those they’re charged with safeguarding.

“That issue has remained front and center,” Trudeau continues, “and even U-Va. recognizes that sloppy reporting doesn’t change the fact that they have a huge problem within their culture.”

For any newspaper editors who might have balked at the campus-rape “Doonesbury” comic, a substitute strip was at the ready. The syndicate tells Comic Riffs that it received replacement requests from the Chicago Tribune, the Bergen Record, the Providence Journal and the Evansville Courier.

“We have made replacement strips available when asked,” Trudeau tells Comic Riffs. “I no longer have a problem with that, because the Internet creates such high visibility when a newspaper opts out that readers who care can look for the release elsewhere.”

And in an interesting footnote, the word “U-Va.” never appeared in The Post’s print version of Sunday’s “Doonesbury,” says Post comics producer and editor Donna Peremes, because that specific University of Virginia reference appeared in the strip’s two introductory “drop panels” — those optional panels that most all Sunday strips have, which can be “dropped” in some production configurations. So Post print readers were left to infer the University of Virginia context from the strip’s remaining six panels.


Writer/artist/visual storyteller Michael Cavna is creator of the "Comic Riffs" column and graphic-novel reviewer for The Post's Book World. He relishes sharp-eyed satire in most any form.
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Payback
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Garry, say hello to Teresa. You will love each other.
Edited by Payback, Dec 29 2014, 06:47 PM.
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cks
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Gary, Teresa. Dick, Mike - all birds of the same feather.
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Quasimodo

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“That issue has remained front and center,” Trudeau continues, “and even U-Va. recognizes that sloppy reporting doesn’t change the fact that they have a huge problem within their culture.”


"We got the facts wrong, but the narrative was right."



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http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/12/29/trudeau_defends_uva_comic_strip_doonesbury_cartoonist_blames_long_lead_time.html

Garry Trudeau Defends His UVA Comic Strip
By Betsy Woodruff

Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau today defended a comic strip based on the now-largely-debunked Rolling Stone story about an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity.

“We’d hoped it would be obvious that the strip was written before Rolling Stone admitted problems in its reporting,” he emailed. “It’s not the first time I've been overtaken by events, and it won’t be the last—the occupational hazard of a long lead time.”

The strip, which you can read here, features characters outraged over the Rolling Stone story and the “frat boy monster” it depicts. A mother reading the story tells her daughter she won’t be going to UVA. Given that Rolling Stone apologized for widely publicized problems in the story on Dec. 5, the strip’s publication drew biting criticism from the right.

“I’d add to his embarrassment by sending him a piece of snail mail, but who knows how long it will take to get there,” wrote Sonny Bunch at the Washington Free Beacon. “By the time he receives it, he’ll probably have penned a horribly out of date comic strip about the evils of Duke lacrosse or the travails of a poor young woman named Tawana Brawley.”

John Glynn, the president of Universal Uclick, which syndicates Trudeau’s strip, emailed that Trudeau submitted the strip before any of the story’s problems were publicized.

Trudeau still defends the strip’s value.

“Jackie’s story was not the focus, only the setup for commentary on institutional conflict of interest in adjudicating sexual assault, an issue that did not disappear with the credibility of the article,” he emailed. “Not even UVA has claimed otherwise.”
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http://www.cotwa.info/2014/12/this-is-how-stupid-college-students-are.html


Monday, December 29, 2014
This is how stupid college students can be when they talk about rape
At the University of Virginia -- which is to "rape" what Loch Ness is to real monsters -- a council of student leaders from a variety of different organizations has put together a list of action points to battle rape. One of their suggestions calls on the state legislature to enact "Closed Criminal Trials" for rape. They write: "One hurdle to pursuing criminal resolution may be the painstaking public nature of trials. Introducing privacy could make that path more attractive."

We are raising a generation of nitwits. Too many say stupid things like this, and too many others don't object when they hear stupid things like this said.

In this case, they have it exactly backward, of course. Criminal proceedings involving rape ought to be more public, not less. The news media ought to stop shielding the identities of rape accusers as if they were children. No less an authority than Professor Alan Dershowitz has written: "People who have gone to the police and publicly invoked the criminal process and accused somebody of a serious crime such as rape must be identified. In this country there is no such thing and should not be such a thing as anonymous accusation. If your name is in court it is a logical extension that it should be printed in the media. How can you publish the name of the presumptively innocent accused but not the name of the accuser?" Prof. Dershowitz also wrote: "It is absolutely critical that rape be treated like any other crime of violence, that the names of the alleged victims be published along with the names of the alleged perpetrators, so that people who know the victim or know her reputation can come forward to provide relevant information."

Feminist Naomi Wolf once wrote: "Feminists have long argued that rape must be treated like any other crime. But in no other crime are accusers kept behind a wall of anonymity. Treating rape so differently serves only to maintain its mischaracterization as a 'different' kind of crime, loaded with cultural baggage and projections. . . . . Though children’s identities should, of course, be shielded in sex-crime allegations, women are not children. If one makes a serious criminal accusation, one must wish to be treated – and one must treat oneself – as a moral adult."

Prof. KC Johnson wrote this about the UVA actions points:

The students’ recommendations were extraordinary. The most eye-popping came in a call for UVA to use its influence with the General Assembly to change Virginia law, and make all rape trials in the state secret (on grounds that the “painstaking public nature of trials” discourages victims from reporting crimes). The students seemed unaware—or indifferent to—the fact that secret trials are anathema to the U.S. legal tradition, or that open trials afford a critical protection to the wrongly accused.

Prof. Johnson dignifies the student's idiocy with a rationale that ought to be apparent to a ten year old.

We all know that college campuses are breeding grounds for puerile groupthink and conformity to the PC meme du jour -- in their defense, the ones doing the "groupthinking" are barely older than children, and a staggering percentage of them still think like children -- but all the supposed good intentions in the world can't excuse idiocy that would put innocents at risk.

All persons of good will need to start calling these sorts of morally grotesque ideas exactly what they are: stupid, and dangerous
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http://chronicle.augusta.com/opinion/editorials/2014-12-28/assault-truth

An assault on the truth
Fictionalized rape reports fueling hysteria on college campuses
By Augusta Chronicle Editorial Staff
Sunday, Dec. 28, 2014

It’s a journalistic travesty that Rolling Stone’s discredited and disgraceful University of Virginia rape story ever made it into print.

What’s more shameful is how so many people actually hoped the gory – and phony – tale of the fraternity gang-rape was true.

It’s as if many activists and politicians wanted a freshman named Jackie to have been brutally assaulted in September 2012 by seven men at the Phi Kappa Psi frat house. It’s as if they hoped she had gone through a three-hour ordeal that ended in her fleeing the house party in a blood-stained dress.

Because as horrific as all that would have been, it would have helped their agenda.

It would be convenient fodder for liberals crowing about the rape “epidemic” sweeping American universities, where, according to an oft-cited but thoroughly debunked academic study, “1-in-5” college women are sexually assaulted.

It would have bolstered their canard that colleges can’t properly deal with campus rapes, and are in need of “fixing” through expansive new federal legislation.

And it would have dovetailed nicely with the overall “war on women” theme Democrats will trot out between now and 2016, when Hillary Clinton, or possibly Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., runs for president.

But instead, the implosion of the ginned-up UVA rape tale – much like the yarn Hollywood it-girl Lena Dunham spun about being raped by a “moustached campus Republican” named Barry – only erodes public trust in the veracity of bona fide incidents of rape.

“After a while, the boy who cried wolf wasn’t believed, and the women who cry rape may likewise not be believed, especially with the accusations of rape at Duke University and the University of Virginia fresh in people’s minds,” George Washington University law professor John Banzhaf wrote in a USA Today op-ed piece.

Is rape on college campuses a problem? Of course it is, as much as it’s a problem everywhere.

But it’s not the routine occurrence claimed by liberals such as Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. – who says “women are at a greater risk of sexual assault as soon as they step onto a college campus.”

That’s as absurd as the bogus 1-in-5 statistic.

The fact is, the sexual assault rate for college students – 6.1 per 1,000 – is 20 percent lower than the rate for non-students, according to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. And nationwide, incidents of rape fell 50 percent between 1997 and 2013, mirroring the country’s overall decline in violent crime.

But bureaucrats and campus activists must have a crisis – even a phony one will do – to push their progressive agenda and the bigger budgets and expanded powers that go with it. And they’ll likely try to silence dissenters by labeling them “anti-women” or, worse, “pro-rape.”

The Rolling Stone piece has been exposed as the imaginative work of an activist reporter who abrogated her duty to properly investigate the facts, but that hasn’t stopped purveyors of gender politics, such as Gillibrand and Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., from pushing for a host of new mandates and penalties in the so-called “Campus Safety and Accountability Act.”

And it hasn’t prompted UVA President Teresa Sullivan to apologize or reverse her decision to suspend all fraternities – sororities, too – solely on the questionable claims of an anonymous accuser’s account in a rock-music magazine.

If anything, Sullivan is doubling down, saying she will continue “to rigorously examine our culture and climate.”

We’re not sure what that means, but we suspect it has more to do with expanding administrative bureaucracy and fanning the flames of gender politics than it does helping rape victims. Actual rape victims.
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Bill Anderson
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A newspaper had this editorial? Unbelievable! I had figured that by now, most newspaper staffs were so hopelessly PC that they were incapable of clear thought when it came to subjects like "campus rape." Glad you found this one, Abb.

:bill:
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kbp

abb
Dec 28 2014, 01:19 PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Chamber

Influence on the U.S. Constitution

The historical abuses of the Star Chamber are considered a primary motivating force behind the protections against compelled self-incrimination embodied in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.[13] The meaning of "compelled testimony" under the Fifth Amendment – i.e., the conditions under which a defendant is allowed to "plead the Fifth" to avoid self-incrimination – is thus often interpreted via reference to the inquisitorial methods of the Star Chamber.[14]

As the U.S. Supreme Court described it, "the Star Chamber has, for centuries, symbolized disregard of basic individual rights. The Star Chamber not merely allowed, but required, defendants to have counsel. The defendant's answer to an indictment was not accepted unless it was signed by counsel. When counsel refused to sign the answer, for whatever reason, the defendant was considered to have confessed." Faretta v. California, 422 U.S. 806, 821–22 (1975).

Due to the secrecy of its sessions and decisions, as well as its perceived consistent approval of government excesses, The United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is sometimes described[15] as a 21st-century version of the Star Chamber.
...more equal
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kbp

Quasimodo
Dec 29 2014, 07:23 PM
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“That issue has remained front and center,” Trudeau continues, “and even U-Va. recognizes that sloppy reporting doesn’t change the fact that they have a huge problem within their culture.”


"We got the facts wrong, but the narrative was right."



My favorite quote from the Duke case. It could almost be used to define PC.
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http://www.mindingthecampus.com/2014/12/uva-student-coalition-demands-secret-trials-in-virginia/

UVA Student Coalition Demands Secret Trials in Virginia
KC Johnson December 28, 2014 Leave a comment

The University of Virginia has distinguished itself in its ability to pretend that the collapse of Sabrina Erdely’s Rolling Stone article never occurred. President Teresa Sullivan—after rashly suspending not merely the fraternity at which “Jackie” was supposedly assaulted, but all fraternities—refused to lift the ban, or even to acknowledge that the factual basis for her actions had been undermined. With one exception, the faculty either embraced Rolling Stone’s flawed portrayal of the campus, or remained silent. And now a cross-section of student groups have joined the crusade against campus due process.

Last week, a coalition of six student organizations produced a document called “Taking Action on Sexual Assault.” The coalition included an extremist group whose title claims 25 percent of UVA female students will be victims of sexual assault while in Charlottesville. But it also contained the organization representing the UVA Class of 2018, the university’s umbrella fraternity group, and the UVA Student Council.

The students’ recommendations were extraordinary. The most eye-popping came in a call for UVA to use its influence with the General Assembly to change Virginia law, and make all rape trials in the state secret (on grounds that the “painstaking public nature of trials” discourages victims from reporting crimes). The students seemed unaware—or indifferent to—the fact that secret trials are anathema to the U.S. legal tradition, or that open trials afford a critical protection to the wrongly accused.

But the rights of the accused aren’t a concern to the UVA student organizations. The students also urge the school to violate Title IX, and establish a right to counsel for student accusers, but not for the accused. (Even the current OCR has mandated that accused students have the same nominal rights as accusers.) The document refers to the accusers as “survivors,” apparently under the belief that any female student who claims to have been assaulted was, automatically, a victim of a sexual assault. Under this definition, the lacrosse case accuser Crystal Mangum was actually a “survivor.”

The student coalition doesn’t ignore curricular matters. They demand that UVA require all undergraduates to take a course in “women and gender studies.” This approach would, of course, also result in a substantial hiring boost for a field that often struggles to attract substantial enrollments otherwise. UVA’s current women’s and gender studies program has 12 faculty, seven of whom are full-time; adoption of this requirement would ensure a department at least four or five times as large. A comparable curricular proposal was floated by a group of far-left faculty after the lacrosse case—and was seen as a non-starter even at Duke.

A handful of the coalition’s proposals, such as a call for UVA to do more to encourage social events without alcohol, are reasonable ideas—though for a generation, we’ve seen such hopes, and no university has successfully eliminated the alcohol-social life connection without adopting no-alcohol policies such as BYU’s. (The student groups don’t make this recommendation, apparently because their members don’t want to give up their ability to consume alcohol themselves.) As part of a call for a new campus social life, the coalition describes Block Party “as one of the most dangerous nights of the year.” Perhaps it is. But isn’t the student coalition under some obligation to provide crime data for such an assertion?

Maybe not, since it seems that regarding sexual assault and the University of Virginia, facts are optional.
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kbp

Many things in life seem to be bringing on the opposite reaction I'd anticipate.
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LTC8K6
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Assistant to The Devil Himself
Gawker defends Lena Dunham against right-wing ‘antagonists’ by outing alleged rapist

http://twitchy.com/2014/12/30/gawker-defends-lena-dunham-against-right-wing-antagonists-by-outing-alleged-rapist/

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Treading lightly here but if this true, Dunham better pay with her career. (Alleged rapist is a registered Democrat)


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In her book proposal, it's clear that what @leandunham was saying was non-consensual was the guy taking off the condom -- not the sex itself but in her book, now writing to justify that $3.7 million advance, her writing becomes vague on her allegation--vague enough to suggest......she was unconscious during the "rape." Um, in her book proposal, it's clear she's 1, conscious, 2, consenting.

Quote:
 

2014 was the year we learned that Lena Dunham was raped in college by a Republican and that she wasn't raped and he was a Democrat.
Edited by LTC8K6, Dec 30 2014, 10:44 PM.
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