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UVA Rape Story Collapses; Duke Lacrosse Redux
Topic Started: Dec 5 2014, 01:45 PM (60,498 Views)
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https://twitter.com/NBC29?original_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fcollege.usatoday.com%2F2014%2F12%2F05%2Fvoices-uva-community-shaken-by-rolling-stone-story-backtrack%2F&tw_i=540966297023287296&tw_p=tweetembed

NBC29 @NBC29 · 2h 2 hours ago

BREAKING: @HenryGraff reports "Jackie" from @RollingStone has retained lawyer from Central Virginia Legal Aid Society.



BREAKING: "Jackie's" lawyer tells @HenryGraff her and her client will discuss today's developments this weekend and aren't commenting now.
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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-blm-news-bc-colleges-assault05-20141205-story.html#page=1


Virginia gang rape allegations face long and divisive legal path
By David Glovin, Bloomberg News, Bloomberg

An anonymous college student said in a media report that she had been gang-raped at a fraternity house. She told the reporter that she was drugged and beaten around the face, legs and vagina, yet a university dean ignored her plight.

"My life is ruined," the student was quoted as saying.

This allegation came not at the University of Virginia, which is now confronting a similar account in Rolling Stone magazine of a 2012 gang rape at a fraternity, but at the University of Wisconsin three years earlier. The Wisconsin student's version of events, chronicled by the student newspaper, was rejected by two courts. Police brought no charges.

Evidence of "whether a sexual assault actually occurred" was "razor thin," a Wisconsin appeals court ruled in denying her lawsuit against the fraternity. The court called portions of her claim "problematic," "inconclusive" and "circumstantial" at best.

The Wisconsin case illustrates the long path that the University of Virginia and its students may face after Jackie -- Rolling Stone gave only her first name -- told the magazine that she was gang-raped as a freshman. Proving a rape is far harder than alleging one; what can begin with apparent certainty may end in skepticism or ambiguity. Whether the difficulty of documenting the allegations and meting out punishment is due to false accusations, deficiencies in police training on sexual assaults, or a refusal to believe victims sparks fierce debate.
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Already media critics at outlets such as The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Columbia Journalism Review have questioned the Rolling Stone article because the reporter said in interviews that she didn't contact the men accused of the rape. They also wrote that parts of the article were implausible or not independently verified. Rolling Stone and the reporter stand by their story, and activists on the UVA campus say Jackie told the same facts at a "Take Back the Night" program early this year.

Divided views on whether the courts would dispense justice in Jackie's case have already surfaced. An attorney for a former member of the fraternity house where the rape allegedly occurred said that, if Rolling Stone's account is accurate, the court "is the only place for this to be resolved." Sexual-assault victims say that a grueling judicial process both on campus and in the courts not only wears them down but also deters other women from pressing a case.

Advocates fear a blame-the-victim bias may emerge. Liz Seccuro, author of a 2011 memoir about a gang rape she said she suffered 27 years earlier at UVA's Phi Kappa Psi, the same fraternity featured in the Rolling Stone story, said rape victims are often met by disbelief. A man who in 2005 wrote her a letter apologizing for the attack later went to prison after pleading guilty to aggravated sexual assault.

"If you're a vulnerable survivor and this sort of thing takes shape and has legs, you think, 'Why in the world would you come forward?' " she said in a telephone interview. "After I fought a bit and realized that no one would help me, I just wanted to forge forward, get decent grades and graduate."

Some men who believe the media or university authorities wrongly presumed them guilty of rape say the court system offers a chance for vindication.

After Joshua Strange's girlfriend accused him of a sex offense in 2011, he was expelled from Auburn University in Alabama. His lawyer wasn't allowed to represent him in the disciplinary proceedings, he said.

In court, a grand jury decided not to indict him for rape and prosecutors dropped an assault charge against him. Still, the university refused to reinstate him.

"I was a 20- or 21-year-old college student trying to defend myself against one of the most heinous things you can be accused of," said Strange, 24, who later graduated from a college near his home in Spartanburg, South Carolina. "Legal protections are there for a reason."

While declining comment on Strange's case, the university said in a statement that federal law requires it to "follow a process that differs from the judicial and law enforcement systems in many ways. Those requirements are very clear and come with severe penalties for noncompliance. We at Auburn take these requirements very seriously."

In the Nov. 19 Rolling Stone article, Jackie said that seven men at the Phi Kappa Psi house raped her and that the university did not respond adequately to her complaint. The article has set off acrimonious debate about fraternity culture and spurred the university to take steps to combat sexual misconduct. Police in Charlottesville are investigating. No one has been charged.

At Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore last year, a student from another school told police she was gang-raped at the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. The allegation went nowhere. Prosecutors, citing insufficient evidence, didn't bring charges. In May, the school suspended the chapter until June 2015 for alcohol and other violations unrelated to the rape claim. Dennis O'Shea, a university spokesman, declined to comment on whether a sexual assault had occurred.

The incident had repercussions for Johns Hopkins. Under the federal Clery Act, colleges must warn students of ongoing threats to safety. Because the school didn't alert the campus to the gang rape claim, a student filed a complaint with the U.S. Education Department for violations of that law and of Title IX, which prohibits gender bias in education. The university said it didn't act because police said there was no threat.

"If a similar incident occurred today, we would weigh the facts and circumstances differently and reach a different conclusion," O'Shea said.

Johns Hopkins was far quicker to alert students after a 16- year-old told police she'd been raped by two people at a weekend party last month at another fraternity. Baltimore police arrested two men this week and charged them with rape. Neither they nor the victim were Johns Hopkins students. The school banned chapters from opening their parties to the public and stepped up safety efforts.

Fraternity gang rapes became a campus safety issue in the 1980s, with alleged instances at schools in Florida, Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Because of a "boys will be boys attitude" among police and court personnel, students are rarely arrested or convicted in such cases, said Peggy Reeves Sanday, author of "Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus." Her book explored a 1983 incident at the University of Pennsylvania that fraternity members said was consensual. No one was charged.

"You're seeing an all-too-common event that occurs across the country but is rarely talked about," Sanday said. "It's a male bonding thing."

An alleged gang rape at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, drew headlines in 2006. A woman who worked as a stripper claimed that lacrosse players raped her at a team party. Amid local protests and unremitting media scrutiny, students were suspended, the university canceled the season, and the district attorney brought felony rape charges against three players.

Inconsistencies in the woman's account soon emerged, as did claims of wrongdoing by the prosecutor. The state dropped the case the next year. With their names disseminated widely in the press, the students sued and reached settlements.

Though the episode at the University of Wisconsin drew less national attention, it dominated discussion on the school's flagship Madison campus.

On March 4, 2009, the student newspaper, the Badger Herald, reported what the headline called the "shocking" details of a gang rape at the Sigma Chi fraternity house. The article included a partial transcript of an interview with the woman and her friend. As in the Rolling Stone article, which used only Jackie's first name, neither the alleged victim nor her friend, a female student, was identified.

The woman told the newspaper she was drinking at a party at the off-campus Sigma Chi house on Oct. 4, 2008 before a college football game. Afterward, as she returned from the stadium, she met two Sigma Chi brothers and a new member of her sorority. The group went to one bar, where she had a drink, and then a second bar, where she bought a round.

The last thing she remembered was saying, "Wow, this pineapple vodka is really good," she told the newspaper. "I don't remember one thing after that."
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The woman said she awoke that night without pants in the bed of a fraternity member. He lived in an apartment in the same building where the Sigma Chi fraternity was housed. He ordered her to leave because he was angry that she had passed out in his room. She returned home. In the morning, she discovered she was "gushing blood" and went to the hospital.

The nurse who treated her "said from how I was down there, that more than one guy raped me, like they took turns with me," the alleged victim told the newspaper. "She said I was one of the worst cases she's seen with how violent it was." She telephoned her mother and said she may have been raped. She said she didn't know by whom.

Besides cuts and bruises, the woman said she suffered a swollen lip, which was either punched or which she bit during the attack. Her friend told the newspaper how a fraternity member had on another occasion slipped what appeared to be a date-rape drug in the friend's drink.

The woman said a dean "wasn't very empathetic," and she and her friend said they told administrators of another rape at the house. She said she was depressed and suffering emotionally.

UVA's response came under similar scrutiny in Rolling Stone. According to the article, the woman identified as Jackie said the university refused to pursue the allegations for fear of tarnishing its reputation. The school has now banned fraternity activities through Jan. 9.

As at UVA after the Rolling Stone article, reaction to the 2009 Wisconsin story was swift. Someone tossed a brick through the Sigma Chi window. Police opened an investigation. The university held forums on sexual abuse and urged other victims to come forward. Some fraternity members volunteered to give DNA to prove their innocence.

The university immediately suspended the chapter. It later lifted the suspension and placed the fraternity on probation for unrelated alcohol violations, according to Kevin Helmkamp, the associate dean of students.

"This article provides a powerful reminder of the toll of sexual assault on a survivor," the dean of students said in an e-mail to fraternity members on the night the story was published.

The campus was split. As some students rallied to the woman's side, others challenged her account and assailed her in online posts.

"There were people who came forward to say they were very proud of what the student had done," said Kevin Bargnes, then a staffer on the Badger Herald who covered the aftermath as a reporter and editor and was a member of another fraternity. On the other hand, "there were a lot of people who gave the whole talking points about, 'How could this girl go out and get this drunk and not expect this to happen?'" he said.

In July 2009, the student, identified only as Jane Doe, sued the Sigma Chi chapter and its Evanston, Illinois-based parent, claiming she was drugged and attacked by men she believed to be fraternity members. She offered medical records showing her injuries and cited instances in which Sigma Chi chapters elsewhere were sanctioned for wrongdoing such as sexual assault.

"The plaintiff was raped multiple times," according to her complaint.

The woman's lawyer, Robert Elliott, along with the fraternity's lawyers, declined to comment, as did Michael Church, the executive director of the fraternity's national organization.

A lower court dismissed the suit in March 2011. Then, almost three years to the day after the woman went public, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals rendered its judgment.

Medical tests found no evidence of sperm or that the woman had received a date-rape drug, the court said in a March 6, 2012, ruling.

The nurse who examined the woman denied in her pretrial deposition telling her that she'd been raped multiple times, the court said. The nurse also testified that the woman had said she could have been raped at the fraternity or one of the bars.

The woman suffered only "minor bruises and tenderness in various parts" of her body that would be consistent with either "rough treatment at the hands of an assailant or assailants" or "her loss of balance due to her acute intoxication," the court said.

A fraternity brother who went drinking with the woman that night said he offered to walk her home because she needed assistance. She declined and instead stayed at the building talking to Sigma Chi alumni who lived there, the court said. There were no previous reports of sexual assault in the building.

The court's description of the case added a detail not included in the newspaper account. After the football game, the woman returned to the building with the fraternity house and had a consensual sexual encounter with a student who lived there before heading to the two bars.

"There is insufficient evidence to establish a sexual assault," the appeals court said.

Police didn't bring charges in the case.

Strange, the ex-Auburn student, said public opinion in his case initially favored the accuser because his lawyer advised him against speaking out for fear of compromising his legal defense.

"People are so quick to rush to judgment when they only have half the story," Strange said. "Wait before you judge."

_ With assistance from John Lauerman and John Hechinger in Boston.
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OMG....watching Greta....she started out with this story...and in trying to say University of Virginia, it came out University of Vagina.
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http://online.wsj.com/articles/like-a-rolling-stone-1417823962

Like A Rolling Stone
A charge of rape at UVA unravels, and so does a political narrative.
Dec. 5, 2014 6:59 p.m. ET
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Rolling Stone magazine has now acknowledged “discrepancies” in an article it published last month about an alleged premeditated gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity. Reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely made sensational allegations based solely on the testimony of the alleged victim. Ms. Erdely also made no attempt to get a comment from the alleged assailants, a failing that bloggers and columnists first pointed out.

All publications make mistakes, including us, but this one is worth some meditation for what it says about our larger media and political culture. All the more so given the amount of laudatory national attention the story received, and the trauma it caused at UVA.

Part of the reason may be a natural human reluctance to investigate the credibility of an alleged rape victim. But that should not have stopped Ms. Erdely from doing some basic due diligence. The rape allegedly took place at a loud “date function” at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house on September 28, 2012. On Thursday the fraternity released a statement that it “did not have a date function or a social event during the weekend of September 28th, 2012.”

The larger problem, however, is that Ms. Erderly was, by her own admission, looking for a story to fit a pre-existing narrative—in this case, the supposed epidemic of sexual assault at elite universities, along with the presumed indifference of those schools to the problem. As the Washington Post noted in an admiring profile of Ms. Erdely, she interviewed students at several elite universities before alighting on UVA, “a public school, Southern and genteel.”

In other words, Ms. Erdely did not construct a story based on facts, but went looking for facts to fit her theory. She appears to have been looking for a story to fit the current popular liberal belief that sexual assault is pervasive and pervasively covered-up.

Now that the story has begun to fall apart, it’s worth considering the damage. Though it may never get as far as the bogus 2006 rape charges against the students of the Duke lacrosse team, members of the UVA chapter of Phi Kappa Psi will have to live with undeservedly tainted personal reputations, especially since the charges may never be decisively refuted. UVA has also taken an unfair blow to its reputation. Nor can the story do any good for the broader interest of preventing future campus sexual assaults.

We live in an era of politically driven narratives—particularly about race, class and gender—which the media often use to assert “truths” before bothering to ascertain facts. Last month in Ferguson, Missouri, and now at UVA, we’re seen the harm those narratives can do.
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Foxlair45
Dec 5 2014, 07:02 PM
OMG....watching Greta....she started out with this story...and in trying to say University of Virginia, it came out University of Vagina.
ROFLMAO
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/12/05/rolling-stones-disastrous-u-va-story-a-case-of-real-media-bias/

Rolling Stone’s disastrous U-Va. story: A case of real media bias
By Erik Wemple December 5 at 5:56 PM


On Slate’s DoubleX Gabfest podcast last month, reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely explained why she had settled on the University of Virginia as the focus for her investigative story on a horrific 2012 gang rape of a freshman named Jackie at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house. “First I looked around at a number of different campuses,” said Erdely. “It took me a while to figure out where I wanted to focus on. But when I finally decided on the University of Virginia — one of the compelling reasons that made me focus on the University of Virginia was when I found Jackie. I made contact with a student activist at the school who told me a lot about the culture of the school — that was one of the important things, sort of criteria that I wanted when I was looking for the right school to focus on.”

Rolling Stone thought it had found the “right” campus and the right alleged crime: Following her Nov. 19 story on Jackie’s alleged assault in a dark room at the Phi Kappa Psi house, the university suspended all fraternity activities and a national spotlight fell on the issue of campus rape.

Now it’s all falling apart. Thanks to several days of reporting by the Washington Post’s T. Rees Shapiro, Rolling Stone’s account is not even a semester away from becoming part of journalism classes around the country. Jackie’s friends now doubt her account of the traumatic event, reports Shapiro, and the fraternity insists it never held a “a date function or social event” on the weekend of Sept. 28, 2012, which is the date cited by Jackie in the Rolling Stone story.

Rolling Stone has issued a statement apologizing for the story, which includes this misogynistic, victim-blaming line: “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.” But Jackie was a freshman in college when her episode allegedly took place; the story itself references her misgivings about putting her life into the public realm; she requested that Rolling Stone not contact “Drew,” the ringleader of the alleged assault; the alleged sequence of events — nine college men conspiring to attack a freshman and sexually assaulting her for three hours — should have triggered every skeptical twitch in the Rolling Stone staff. This disaster is the sole property of editors and a reporter.

The story and Erdely’s comments about it, moreover, suggest an effort to produce impact journalism. While media critics on the right and the left cry about media bias in just about every news cycle, the complaints generally amount to nothing but ideological posturing. There are few things like a good media-bias claim to distract from a substantive conversation.

In the case, of Erdely’s piece, however, there’s ample evidence of poisonous biases that landed Rolling Stone in what should be an existential crisis. It starts with this business about choosing just the “right” school for the story. What is that all about? In his first, important piece on this story, the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi described the author’s thought process:

So, for six weeks starting in June, Erdely interviewed students from across the country. She talked to people at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. None of those schools felt quite right. But one did: the University of Virginia, a public school, Southern and genteel, brimming with what Erdely calls “super-smart kids” and steeped in the legacy of its founder, Thomas Jefferson.

A perfect place, in other words, to set a story about a gang rape.

Observe how Erdely responded to a question about the accused parties in Jackie’s alleged gang rape. In that Slate podcast, when asked who these people were, she responded, “I don’t want to say much about them as individuals but I’ll just say that this particular fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi — it’s really emblematic in a lot of ways of sort of like elitist fraternity culture. It’s considered to be a kind of top-tier fraternity at University of Virginia…It’s considered to be a really high-ranking fraternity, in part because they’re just so incredibly wealthy. Their alumni are very influential, you know, they’re on Wall Street, they’re in politics.”

The next time Erdely writes a big story, she’ll have to do a better job of camouflaging her proclivity to stereotype. Here, she refuses to evaluate the alleged gang rapists as individuals, instead opting to fold them into the caricature of the “elitist fraternity culture,” and all its delicious implications. Of course, one of the reasons she didn’t describe the accused is that she never reached out to them.
Rolling Stone has published a note to readers apologizing for an article about an alleged U-Va. sexual assault, saying new information shows discrepancies in the victim's story. (Reuters)

More grist comes from an Erdely interview with SiriusXM host Michael Smerconish. In a wide-ranging discussion, Erdely discussed some details of her reporting that didn’t surface in the story. Erdely alleges Jackie had told her some chilling things about the run-up to the alleged gang rape. As lifeguards at the U-Va. pool. Jackie couldn’t figure out why “Drew” was paying attention to her when the other female lifeguards were “model-gorgeous blondes,” said Erdely in the interview. “‘He was paying so much attention to me, showing so much interest in everything I had to say,’” Erdely said, paraphrasing Jackie. “And all she could think is that [Drew] was probably grooming her for something like this, and testing her for something like this.”

In a tale of hard-to-believe scenarios, this one distinguishes itself. It’s plausible that the repeat rapists plaguing college campuses case out their victims. Yet as academics David Lisak and Paul Miller note in their much-cited study “Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists,” the modus operandi of the serial campus rapist diverges from that of gang-rape orchestrator “Drew”:

Given the number of interpersonal crimes being committed by these men, how is it that they are escaping the criminal justice system? The answer may lie, in part, in their choice of victim and in their relative abnegation of gratuitous violence. By attacking victims within their social networks — so-called acquaintances — and by refraining from the kind of violence likely to produce physical injuries in their victims, these rapists create “cases” that victims are least likely to report, and that prosecutors are less likely to prosecute.

Under the scenario cited by Erdely, the Phi Kappa Psi members are not just criminal sexual-assault offenders, they’re criminal sexual-assault conspiracists, planners, long-range schemers. If this allegation alone hadn’t triggered an all-out scramble at Rolling Stone for more corroboration, nothing would have. Anyone who touched this story — save newsstand personnel — should lose their job. The “grooming” anecdote indicates not only that Erdely believed whatever diabolical things about these frat guys told to her, she wanted to believe them. And then Rolling Stone published them.

Aside from indicting Rolling Stone and setting back the fight against campus sexual assault, this episode affirms the importance of strong regional newspapers. After the Rolling Stone piece began to surface fissures, Washington Post local staff deployed to familiar turf, seeking out the folks that Rolling Stone had bypassed. The effort called on a week’s worth of reporting by Shapiro, the work of two researchers and the oversight of two editors. If Erdely had chosen some other campus, perhaps her skewed reporting wouldn’t have attracted such scrutiny. Something to consider the next time a debate arises over whether The Post should sustain its local reporting.
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"my friend pointed out the building to me and said that’s where it happened"

She wanted to be a victim, she is still angry with her parents for sending her to UVA instead of Brown...
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2014/12/05/the-best-way-to-respect-sexual-assault-survivors-is-to-get-their-stories-right/

The best way to respect sexual assault survivors is to get their stories right
By Alyssa Rosenberg December 5 at 6:52 PM

Protestors carry signs and chant slogans in front of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the University of Virginia late Saturday night, Nov. 22, 2014, in Charlottesville, Va. The protest, the most well-attended of several throughout the day, was in response to the university’s reaction to an alleged sexual assault of a student revealed in a recent Rolling Stone article. (AP Photo/The Daily Progress, Ryan M. Kelly)

The disintegration of the central anecdote in Rolling Stone’s recent expose of the University of Virginia’s treatment of sexual assault, “A Rape on Campus,” began with two questions about one facet of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s reporting: Had she talked to the men who Jackie, a student who told a harrowing story about being gang-raped at a UVA fraternity, accused of assaulting her? And if she had not interviewed them, was it because they were unavailable, or because Erdely had promised Jackie that she would not contact the men to protect her from retaliation?

From that initial question have grown other conversations about the challenges of covering sexual assault cases. Do inconsistencies mean that a source is lying, or are they proof of trauma? What standards of verification should reporters use when dealing with victims of sexual assault? And what are the risks of using point-of-view stories like Jackie’s to draw reader attention to systemic issues like campus procedures for handling rape allegations, which affect many students, rather than just one?

“A Rape on Campus” is not only Jackie’s story. But her account of being assaulted, one after another, by seven men, while two others looked on, is the lede, and it is the part of the piece that has provoked the strongest response. The Washington Post reported multiple discrepencies in Jackie’s story today, and Rolling Stone acknowledged in a note to readers from editor Will Dana that “n 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 may not have done the work necessary to verify Jackie’s story. But while the journalistic choices Erdely and her editors made are serious, they should not be mistaken for definitive proof that Jackie — or any trauma survivor whose story evolves or has gaps — is making up their entire account.

As the Dart Center on Trauma and Journalism, which works to establish best practices for reporters who are working with survivors of violence, cautions reporters:

Don’t be surprised if accounts only make partial sense. Frequently survivors of sexual violence ‘shut down’ emotionally: their recall may become fragmentary, and in some cases they may even block out an event entirely. Incomplete and contradictory accounts are not prima facie evidence of deception, but rather of the struggle interviewees may experience in making sense of what happened to them.

The existence of those inconsistencies doesn’t mean reporters shouldn’t work to sift through those contradictory or incomplete accounts to verify survivors’ testimony. The Center for Public Integrity’s Kristen Lombardi, who five years ago published a a major story on how campuses — including the University of Virginia — handle sexual assault cases, says she felt the best way to protect her sources was to vigorously report out their accounts of their assaults.

That meant obtaining their help in getting records of campus disciplinary proceedings, having them sign waivers that gave administrators permission to discuss their cases, and speaking to their alleged assailants. First, though, she did background interviews with survivors, and explained what her reporting process would look like in detail. And she only continued to report out the stories of victims who were comfortable with what that process would involve.

Lombardi says she told sources that doing that level of verification “is what I have to do. ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t believe you…Just because I have to ask questions and figure out to the best of my ability exactly what happened and talk to everyone who’s involved including the alleged perpetrator doesn’t mean I don’t believe you. It just means, it’s only going to make this story stronger.’ And once I did that, most students overwhelmingly were comfortable with that.”

If her sources did not feel comfortable participating in the verification process, Lombardi decided not to pursue their stories, because it was not worth it to put unwilling people through a difficult process. Sadly, that was an option “because there’s no shortage of campus rape stories out there. You will be able to find students who have gone through the process and are willing to help you verify [their accounts].”

Bruce Shapiro, the executive director of the Dart Center, emphasized that vigorous reporting does not have to trade off with sensitivity to victims of sexual assault.

“I do think that reporters can be vulnerable, empathetic reporters can be vulnerable to thinking that asking tough questions automatically re-traumatizes sources,” he told me. “There’s a difference between distress and actual trauma. Distress is short-term. Trauma is really damaging to someone in the long run. There’s not a lot of evidence that verifying a story is going to re-traumatize someone.”

Lombardi said that being overly deferential to victims’ accounts, and making agreements like the one Erdely did with Jackie, might avoid discomfort up front, but that the negative long-term risks were obvious.

“I see it as ultimately that’s who you’re protecting. I feel [Jackie],” Lombardi said. “Her story is being doubted at the highest levels…I think as a reporter, you have a duty to protect your sources and to speak to as many sides as possible. That’s your duty. One of the ways you do that is to make sure you cross every t and dot every i, and make sure you do it with as much care and consideration as you can.”

Shapiro also argued that trauma reporting frequently presents reporters with a “narrative challenge” of how to dramatize systematic problems, especially ones about which the public already has strong preconceived ideas.

“How do you get people engaged in an ongoing way in a national scandal involving the victimization of women? How do you get people engaged when people think they know the story already?” Shapiro asked. “This is not only true of rape. It’s true of stories about torture, about what veterans go through, crime victims. Sometimes focusing on that the details of what happened on the one hand are deeply engaging and are a source of empathy by readers, and on the other hand, you don’t want those details to take over your story when your story’s really about an issue.”

“We’ve all ended up focusing on Jackie, is Jackie telling the truth or not, what really happened, who are the perps, instead of on the core issue of how a university responds when a woman walks into a dean’s office with a serious allegation of sexual assault and when there’s a systematic problem on campus,” Shapiro continued. “The details do matter, of course they matter. But spectacular gotcha details can also distract.”

In the end, he suggested, “I think it would be a mistake to distract from the core issue, which is why this story’s so emotional and so powerful, which is the enormous problem of sexual assault on college campuses and the documented inadequacy of response by university administrations. The journalistic tragedy would be if we stopped looking at these stories, or stopped looking at the University of Virginia.”
Alyssa Rosenberg blogs about pop culture for The Washington Post's Opinions section.
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http://chronicle.com/article/In-Charlottesville-UVa/150453/

December 5, 2014
In Charlottesville, UVa Students Absorb New Doubts About Account of Rape

Earlier this week, it was hard to find U. of Virginia students who openly questioned a story about an alleged gang rape at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. But on Friday, many students said they had always wondered if the "Rolling Stone" article could be completely true.

By Rebecca Koenig


When Rolling Stone apologized for "discrepancies" in a gruesome and galvanizing story of a gang rape at the University of Virginia, members of a first-year English-composition class at the university were among the first to know.

The class happened to meet on Friday afternoon in the upstairs room of a Starbucks across from the campus. Rennie Mapp, a lecturer in the English department, noticed a man working at the table she had reserved. He turned out to be T. Rees Shapiro, a Washington Post reporter who had been investigating the Rolling Stone account. His article, which challenged key elements of the alleged rape at a fraternity party in 2012, was just minutes from being published.

Ms. Mapp asked Mr. Shapiro to speak to her class briefly. He explained how he had found Jackie, the young woman at the center of the story, and had investigated her claims.

After class, a few students offered their thoughts about the revelations in Mr. Shapiro’s article.

“If the details were wrong, they brought harm to other people,” said Danielle G., a first-year student who asked that her last name not be used. Referring to members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, she said, “They had to leave the house, their lives were threatened—that’s kind of a big deal, if they had nothing to do with it and they were in danger.”
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She and two classmates—Scarlett Bradley, a second-year, and Jamie Cranmer, a first-year—all expressed concern that doubts about Jackie’s story would detract from the issue of sexual assault at the university and at all other colleges.

“On the off-chance the story is true, this is really going to damage her,” Ms. Cranmer said.
'No One Believed It to Begin With'

Earlier this week, it was hard to find students who openly questioned the gang-rape account. But on Friday afternoon, many students now said they had always wondered if the Rolling Stone story could be completely true.

That said, many students seemed to accept that something terrible had happened to Jackie, and instead focused blame on Rolling Stone's journalistic standards and a young woman's memory damaged by trauma.

News quickly spread via Yik Yak, a mobile-phone application popular among college students that allows users to post anonymous comments. By early afternoon, students were discussing the topic around the campus.

Jason Motley, a second-year who was discussing the new development with a friend near the university's Rotunda, said he had first heard via Yik Yak.

“It looks like the reporter wasn’t super-careful,” he said.

A few of his other friends stopped to discuss the latest.

“I think a lot of people questioned the validity” before Friday, said Morgan Brazel, a first-year student who said she had discussed the initial story with other students on her dormitory hall. “It’s not really a shock or surprise because no one believed it to begin with.”

Ms. Brazel said the new revelations were a “relief” because she hoped they would take the university out of the spotlight.

Matt Pilsch, a first-year student, said he felt “relief that the outside world is seeing that the article wasn’t fair.” “I met people who know the Jackie girl," he said, "and I don’t doubt she was raped.”

Mr. Motley agreed. “No one is questioning that rape is an issue,” he said. “They’re questioned the way it was reported.”

For Emily Renda, the new reporting comes as a deep disappointment. “I strongly hope that, regardless of what happened with this story … that the momentum that has been built and the amount of women and men who have come forward … will be not ignored,” said Ms. Renda, a recent alumna and a project coordinator in the student-affairs office who works on sexual-assault policy for the university.

“I do think an immense disservice was done to victims everywhere,” she said. “I hope that our focus on this story doesn’t undermine the credibility of survivors everywhere. I hope it doesn't detract from the seriousness of the issue at hand.”

Ms. Renda said she did not know how the administration planned to respond.

“Frankly, as unbelievable as this may be, our first priority is still Jackie and still her well-being,” Ms. Renda said. “I support her to the utmost of my ability. That's still my job and still my first concern.”
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MikeZPU

The woman is a Mangum clone.

Despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary, she is standing
by every detail of her fabricated story, even the date.

So, I guess in that sense, she is not an exact replica of Mangum.
From what I can tell, she is not trying to change her story to
match the evidence.

I don't think she'll ever she admit she lied.

And it seems that people are afraid to call her a liar, even
though it's pretty clear that she is.
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chatham
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One has to compare virgina to duke and see the failure in the academic system.

I dont know why universities accept men as students anymore. All they are good for are accusations of rape amd grief for the administration.
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Mason
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nyesq83
Dec 5 2014, 07:14 PM
Foxlair45
Dec 5 2014, 07:02 PM
OMG....watching Greta....she started out with this story...and in trying to say University of Virginia, it came out University of Vagina.
ROFLMAO
.
Wow!

Ted Williams will coach her up on On-Air speech.

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Joan Foster

The President of UVA...tellingly never addressed the harm done to the falsely accused. Never, of course, apologized. Kinda had that..."whatever didn't happen...was bad enough" attitude that we know so well.
Edited by Joan Foster, Dec 5 2014, 09:40 PM.
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Joan Foster

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/12/05/rolling-stones-disastrous-u-va-story-a-case-of-real-media-bias/?tid=pm_opinions_pop


"In the case, of Erdely’s piece, however, there’s ample evidence of poisonous biases that landed Rolling Stone in what should be an existential crisis. It starts with this business about choosing just the “right” school for the story. What is that all about? In his first, important piece on this story, the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi described the author’s thought process:

So, for six weeks starting in June, Erdely interviewed students from across the country. She talked to people at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. None of those schools felt quite right. But one did: the University of Virginia, a public school, Southern and genteel, brimming with what Erdely calls “super-smart kids” and steeped in the legacy of its founder, Thomas Jefferson.

A perfect place, in other words, to set a story about a gang rape.

Observe how Erdely responded to a question about the accused parties in Jackie’s alleged gang rape. In that Slate podcast, when asked who these people were, she responded, “I don’t want to say much about them as individuals but I’ll just say that this particular fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi — it’s really emblematic in a lot of ways of sort of like elitist fraternity culture. It’s considered to be a kind of top-tier fraternity at University of Virginia…It’s considered to be a really high-ranking fraternity, in part because they’re just so incredibly wealthy. Their alumni are very influential, you know, they’re on Wall Street, they’re in politics.”

The next time Erdely writes a big story, she’ll have to do a better job of camouflaging her proclivity to stereotype. Here, she refuses to evaluate the alleged gang rapists as individuals, instead opting to fold them into the caricature of the “elitist fraternity culture,” and all its delicious implications. Of course, one of the reasons she didn’t describe the accused is that she never reached out to them."


See a pattern?
Edited by Joan Foster, Dec 5 2014, 09:45 PM.
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MikeZPU

Many on the talk shows making analogies to the Duke LAX case.

Megyn Kelly referred to Nifong as a "lunatic prosecutor."

She showed a montage of her reporting from Durham, and it was awesome.
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