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UVA Rape Story Collapses; Duke Lacrosse Redux
Topic Started: Dec 5 2014, 01:45 PM (60,431 Views)
Joan Foster

MikeZPU
Apr 10 2015, 06:22 PM
I am going to write an email to Emily Chappell. It will read something like this:

You could have used your Op-Ed piece to demand that Rolling Stone apologize directly
to the members of Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity.

You could have used your Op-Ed piece to demand that Rolling Stone pay for
the vandalism that was done to the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity House, as a result of
their reckless reporting of a provably false allegation of gang-rape at their fraternity.

You could have recommended to Rolling Stone that they endow an annual scholarship
to a member of the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity, as a gesture of good will given the
vilification and defamation that they suffered as a result of their reckless article.

But, instead, you want the false gang-rape allegation swept under the rug.

How dare you diminish what the fraternity members went through when the
university did not do a thing to deter the vandalism, and also did not even attempt
to discipline those who perpetrated the vandalism, not to mention that harassment.

Jackie was not charged for her willful and malicious false story of gang-rape.

you should have been happy with that but, no, you just want to sweep her
big lie under the rug.

Your motives are transparent.




Excellent!
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/columnists/rolling-stones-story-was-never-about-rape-on-campus/article23876848/


Tabatha Southey

Rolling Stone’s story was never about rape on campus

Published Friday, Apr. 10 2015, 12:17 PM EDT

I never imagined I’d be saddened to read of journalists not losing their jobs. Yet on Sunday, when Rolling Stone reacted to a lengthy report by three academics at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism on its thoroughly discredited “A Rape on Campus” story by saying no one would lose any work as a result, I was sad.

Rolling Stone magazine failed to follow basic journalistic safeguards in publishing a story about an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house, according to an outside review of the matter released on Sunday. Zach Goelman reports.

The author of the piece, freelancer Sabrina Rubin Erdely, spent six weeks scouring several university campuses looking for the story she wanted to tell – or more accurately, for the example she felt best illustrated, in the broadest possible strokes it seems, the narrative she’d assembled.

“Erdely,” the Columbia report states, “said she was searching for a single, emblematic college rape case that would show ‘what it’s like to be on campus now,’ ” and I have a fairly good idea how many actual rape cases she must have passed over before arriving at the blockbuster story she chose.

“A Rape on Campus” isn’t about, say, a second-year student who went to a party alone, had a few drinks, made out with a guy after he danced with her – a fun-seeming guy who offered to walk her back to her dorm and then raped her, taking apart her life.

Instead it’s the story of a woman who went on a proper date, wearing “a tasteful red dress with a high neckline,” to a fraternity event with a boy from work.

“Jackie,” the reader is assured, “discreetly spilled her spiked punch onto the sludgy fraternity-house floor” – as a lady does, it is implied. Yet, despite this undeserving-of-being-raped behaviour, Jackie was led into a dark room, thrown against a glass table which shattered, punched and gang-raped by seven men, in what is depicted as a horrific fraternity initiation ritual.

Afterward, she called three friends to fetch her and, with the frat house “looming behind them” like some crumbling gothic castle, two of them warned her – we switch genres here, and this part is scripted by John Hughes – that she will be a total social outcast if she reports her rape. This, her stock-character friends are alleged to have done, minus the word alleged, “while Jackie stood behind them, mute in her bloody dress.” Lest we missed the point.

Jackie’s character is contrasted (by her alone, as no one from Rolling Stone seems to have contacted the trio for corroboration, as is standard journalistic practice) with that of one of her rescuers, “Cindy,” who is described as a “self-declared hookup queen.”

“Why didn’t you have fun with it?” Cindy is said to have asked. “A bunch of hot Phi Psi guys?” suggesting it’s only rape if done to a certain kind of girl, in a certain kind of dress.

The option of a small story, well told, was very much not taken by the people at Rolling Stone. Theirs was not a “pedestrian” rape story, with all the messiness one of those often entails, accompanied by all the challenges telling a story like that can present to the writer – in large part because the story challenges the reader.

The reader of Rolling Stone’s story is not asked to believe a woman who says she was raped over a man who says she consented. The man is conveniently not in the story (or very possibly anywhere else on this earth, for that matter, as he was never contacted or identified by anyone from the magazine). But the rape and the aftermath are described very much as though the writer saw it all. Issue avoided.

The virtue of the woman who says she was assaulted is never in doubt – it is, in fact, Victorian-novel clear. Well played, Rolling Stone, it’s always easier to dodge a question than it is to dispute the validity of its premise. This was very much a rape story that catered to the sensibilities of readers who do not naturally trust women or who see “everyday rapes” as a real problem.

The victim in this story is not “just raped”: something that, if she’s had sex anyway, is all too often brushed aside as a thing that can just happen to a woman – especially if she is not careful.

No, the victim in the story is raped by many men, for many hours as they egg each other on, inserting a beer bottle into her.

You write a story like this, select it over all the other cases you encounter, and the odds that your reader will see himself in your story – perhaps be forced to recall that time when “C’mon, you know, there was some last-minute resistance,” or “She was pretty wasted anyway,” or “She wouldn’t have been there if she didn’t want it” – are pretty slim.

A gang rape by strangers (and these do happen, although there is virtually no evidence at all it happened here) is an easy story to tell. Highlight the rape-case outlier, write it like cheap horror fiction. And far from exposing the problem of rape on campus, as Rolling Stone has sanctimoniously insisted was the aim, you distract people from the issue – all but erasing thousands of below-the-fold rape victims.

Rape, as Rolling Stone chose to define it, is a seven-headed monster in a dark room to which our unsuspecting heroine is led. It’s not unlike focusing a story about racism on the Ku Klux Klan. Most of the actual problem of racism will fall back into the abyss.

Far from illuminating a problem, your race story may end up unhelpfully hinting that, if you’re black and didn’t get that job you were overqualified for or were stopped by cops three times last week in your nice car, you should try to keep that stuff in perspective because, well, lynching.

Rolling Stone’s tale of conspiratorial, ritualized rape is, like most tales of women in peril, not feminist at all – the magazine published a bodice-ripper, not a second The Second Sex. Tempting as it is for many, including Ms. Erdely and the editors at Rolling Stone, who have pleaded guilty only to being too noble to ask questions, to spin it that way, this was never a case of feminism run amok.

Exploitative, crap journalism is nothing new, and yet distinct lessons can be learned from this example of it. I do hope we can find a place between never questioning a woman when she says she was raped and questioning her way more than everyone else.

There are parallels between this disgraceful episode and the satanic-ritual-daycare-child-sex-abuse panic of the 1980s – often seen as a reaction to a societal shift wherein more women entered the work force, and thus more children attended daycare. The impetus for that alarm (much like the heightened discussion of the number of women pursuing higher education) seemed to be that the trend was somehow unnatural and a close-to-supernaturally-extracted price must be paid.

This is not to suggest that sexual abuse of children – the kind mostly committed by relations of the children and people we know, who rely on the shame of their victims to hide their crimes – is not very real, any more than it is to suggest that rape on campus is not committed and protected in the same manner; only that the problem needs to be addressed calmly and intelligently.
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kbp

Walt-in-Durham
Apr 10 2015, 03:14 PM
I posted the following reply to The Daily Collegian in response to their editorial: You ask: "What would legal action give the organization that they don’t already have?" Simply, recompense for the damages sustained to the fraternity. As a non-profit corporation, that is all Phi Kappa Psi can recover. Rolling Stone should immediately offer to pay them. But, the fraternity was damaged. Their property was vandalized, their business was disrupted.

The Daily Collegian seems to suffer from a malady I see all too often among college students, an inability to think clearly. They claim to be harmed by "microaggressions" which in the real world are inconsequential, even unnoticed. At the same time, they seem to forgive illegal and even immoral behavior when it suits their purpose. I sincerely hope that this is confined to something less than a majority of our young people. But, I wonder?

Walt-in-Durham
Quote:
 
This comes after Charlottesville police, while unable to prove the assault didn’t happen, didn’t find anything in their investigation to corroborate what was reported in the Rolling Stone magazine story
. The false premise begins here! Since the editorial is about Phi Kappa Psi v. Rolling Stone, "the assault" addressed in this editorial is "the assault" reported by Rolling Stone, the only accusation from Jackie the RS had published.

Quote:
 
The most important thing to come out of this failed journalism is the concept that sexual assault is a huge problem on college campuses, and false accusations are extremely unlikely. We cannot let this situation hurt and set back sexual assault reporting and investigating. But this lawsuit will do that.
The editorial focuses in on damage they perceive would result from the lawsuit.

Quote:
 
While we understand the fraternity may have a right to legal action... What would legal action give the organization that they don’t already have?
This notes damages that should be due through a legal right and then classifies it as if the privileged should not get it if could plant the mindset in some lesser privileged victim they would be victimized for reporting an actual crime. It almost comes across as if Phi Kappa Psi would be rewarded for the crime that they were unfortunately unable to prove.

Walt,

If your post was to their comments, it has not been published. As of now they only show 11 comments. The last comment was published 3:28 pm on Fri, Apr 10, 2015.

The editorial looks to be an affirmative balancing of rights based entirely on the false premise and hypothetical reactions to the lawsuit.

Knowing we've seen a pattern of such upside down and inaccurate reporting used to promote whatever 'conversation' the authors hope for, they may not publish your comment. We may have to wait until Monday to see if the comment monitor was off the clock after the last comment posted or if the comments went off the topic desired and they will just not publish any more.

Meanwhile, I think Phi Kappa Psi is still waiting for an apology.
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My guess is that the fraternity will only receive an apology if they pursue legal action - and that may very well still be a crap shoot.
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Walt-in-Durham

kbp
Apr 11 2015, 09:12 AM
Walt,

If your post was to their comments, it has not been published. As of now they only show 11 comments. The last comment was published 3:28 pm on Fri, Apr 10, 2015.

I honestly didn't expect them to publish it. It looks like the 11 negative comments are just too much disagreement for our collegians to deal with. From what I have been able to determine from my time interviewing for our summer associate position, law schools, and by extension, colleges in the U.S. are fine with differences, but intolerant of disagreement. That's not what I pay for. I want, need and expect people to disagree with my positions. I need that to sharpen my arguments. If they cannot do that, they aren't worth much to me.

Walt-in-Durham
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The Pulse: Red flags on piece were there
Michael Smerconish, Inquirer Columnist
Posted: Sunday, April 12, 2015, 1:09 AM

Just after the now-infamous Rolling Stone /University of Virginia rape story was published, but before it imploded, I interviewed the author for SiriusXM radio. Sabrina Rubin Erdely would soon stop promoting the piece after the Washington Post and other media outlets raised questions about its accuracy. But when we spoke on Nov. 25, six days after publication, she was still a believer in the account offered by "Jackie," the pseudonym the magazine used for the UVa undergrad who claimed she'd been raped by seven men in a fraternity.

Last week, after reading the results of an investigation into what went wrong at Rolling Stone, I went back and listened to our conversation. Several things stood out. Such as when I asked Erdely about the absence of any qualifiers in the title to her story: "A Rape on Campus." "I don't write the headline, but this is Jackie's perspective, you know, on her assault and we do write a lot of alleged in there, so I think there is a lot of implied alleged," she said.

Not quite. By my recent count, the word alleged appears only five times in the 9,000-plus-word story, and only twice with reference to Jackie's account. Alleged is used once with regard to others accused of assaults; once in reference to Jesse Matthew Jr., who has been charged in the murder of UVa student Hannah Graham; and once quoting the president of Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity named in the article.

It was also interesting to hear Erdely try to dissuade me from skepticism.

I asked her, "And, finally, because I have a healthy dose of cynicism about all matters, so I bring it to a case like this and everything else. As you were interviewing her, and interviewing all the people that you did for the story, you, Sabrina, had to be saying, 'Hey, ya know, does it pass the smell test?' I'm gleaning from what you wrote and the intonation of your voice that you buy it, that you believe it."

Her reply: "Yes. . . . I wasn't in that room, so I can't really know what happened, but everything about Jackie is entirely credible. I put her story through the wringer. I talked to all of her friends, all the people that she confided in along the way. Her story is very consistent; she has clearly been through a tremendous trauma. I don't doubt that something happened to her that night."

That answer illustrates a major problem. The investigation ("An Anatomy of a Journalistic Failure") completed by Steve Coll, the dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, and two of his colleagues, makes clear that, contrary to what Erdely told me, she did not talk to all of Jackie's friends. In fact, her failure to speak to the three friends in whom Jackie supposedly confided immediately after the alleged incident was perhaps the most egregious of a string of journalistic failures.


From the start

"In hindsight, the most consequential decision Rolling Stone made was to accept that Erdely had not contacted the three friends who spoke with Jackie on the night she said she was raped," the report said. "That was the reporting path, if taken, that would have almost certainly led the magazine's editors to change plans."

But the story was headed for problems long before any interviews were conducted, or the headline was written, a point that still might be lost on Erdely.

In reaction to the report, she released a statement saying, in part:

"I allowed my concern for Jackie's well-being, my fear of retraumatizing her, and my confidence in her credibility, to take the place of more questioning and more facts. These are mistakes I will not make again."

That implies she erred out of consideration for Jackie and belief in her narrative, but her real failure was in surrendering any sense of objectivity before she even spoke to Jackie or sympathized with her plight. The Columbia report suggests that Erdely went looking for a story that would fit her preconceived agenda. Her eagerness in this regard is laid bare in the very first paragraph of the report:

"Last July 8, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a writer for Rolling Stone, telephoned Emily Renda, a rape survivor working on sexual-assault issues as a staff member at the University of Virginia. Erdely said she was searching for a single, emblematic college rape case that would show 'what it's like to be on campus now . . . where not only is rape so prevalent but also that there's this pervasive culture of sexual harassment/rape culture,' according to Erdely's notes of the conversation."


Partiality

Erdely's notes then get even more damning, according to the report. It says that when Renda mentioned Jackie's story, she cautioned Erdely: "And obviously, maybe her memory of it isn't perfect." Erdely responded that she found the story "totally plausible."

In other words, she was accepting of Jackie's version of events even before speaking with her, and relying only upon a secondhand version that came with a warning. That partiality was then compounded by Erdely: lack of confirmation of what Jackie said she told her three friends; failure to learn the name of the student who facilitated the rape; and failure to figure out whether he even existed. Rolling Stone's solution to the latter two problems was to simply give the man a pseudonym, "Drew." Problem solved.

Likely the reason Erdely let her guard down on journalistic basics is that she'd decided Jackie's account was true before they even met. And it explains why she provided scant information in an e-mail to the fraternity before going to press ("I've become aware of allegations of gang rape that have been made. . . . Can you comment on those allegations?"), robbing the fraternity of an opportunity to defend itself, which, ironically, might have saved Erdely and Rolling Stone from the commission of journalistic malpractice.

Remarkably, Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone, who himself read the story prepublication and found it both "strong" and "powerful," has already said that Erdely will write again for his magazine. Meanwhile, Brian Williams' six-month hiatus continues for conduct that doesn't look as bad.


Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/20150412_The_Pulse__Red_flags_on_piece_were_there.html#jBuzRzDh7XoSEG51.99
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http://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2015/04/next-steps-for-phi-psi

Next steps for Phi Psi
Fraternity could face numerous legal obstalces
by Alexandra Hickey | Apr 10 2015 | 04/10/15 4:27pm


Phi Kappa Psi is seeking legal action against Rolling Stone magazine, but as of now not against Sabrina Erdely.

The University Phi Kappa Psi chapter announced Monday its intentions to pursue legal action against Rolling Stone Magazine shortly after the Columbia Journalism School released its review of the magazine Sunday.

The review detailed the journalistic failures of writer Sabrina Erdely and the Rolling Stone editing chain in the Nov. 19 publication of an article detailing a brutal gang rape of a University student by a member of Phi Kappa Psi. In the wake of the article and the impact it had on the chapter, Phi Kappa Psi plans to file a lawsuit against the magazine for defamation.

As a defamation case, the lawsuit will seek reparations for the injuries Phi Kappa Psi brothers experienced as a direct result of false statements made against them in the article. While specific details of the lawsuit have yet to be released, legal experts are speculating what it may entail.

One of the initial clarifications to be made is whether the court will rule the fraternity as a public or private figure. University Law Prof. G. Edward White said the latter would prove more advantageous to the fraternity during legal proceedings.

“Given the difficulty of showing out-of-pocket losses in defamation cases, it will be critical in this case whether the fraternity is considered a public figure or a private citizen defamed on a matter of public concern,” White said. “Private citizen plaintiffs defamed on matters of public concern can recover if they can show falsity, loss of reputation and a negligent attitude toward whether the statement was false or not — for example, failing to make a ‘good faith check’ on the accuracy of the allegedly defamatory statements.”

As a private figure, Phi Kappa Psi would need only prove negligence in checking for accuracy on the part of Rolling Stone, while if considered a public figure, the chapter would need to prove “actual malice” on the part of the magazine.

Questions have also been raised as to whether the fraternity brothers should sue collectively as a fraternal organization or as individuals. UCLA Law Prof. Eugene Volokh said he was not in favor of the idea of the brothers suing individually, especially given that courts generally draw the line well below 80 individuals for organizational cases.

“The size of the organization does matter, and it cuts against the organization, but what also matters is the nature of the accusation and how it bears against each member,” Volokh said.

Given the article’s implication that rape was part of a ritualized initiation all brothers had to go through and the lack of evidence linking the brothers in the article to actual brothers in Phi Kappa Psi, Volokh said the lawsuit would be better presented on behalf of the fraternity as a collective since the allegations of the article reflected on all brothers equally.

Though Phi Kappa Psi publicly stated intentions to sue the magazine, it is uncertain whether writer Sabrina Erdely will also face legal action. Volokh said both the magazine and Erdely are potentially culpable and that restricting the lawsuit to one party may pose problems.

“Since both of them seem culpable in different ways, I think sueing just one would invite the defendant to say, ‘This is the other defendant’s fault’ and would make the jury wonder why the other entity or person wasn’t sued,” Volokh said. “[This could] incline the jury maybe to saying, ‘Well, this defendant is only responsible for part of the damages, maybe half.”

Volokh said whether the lawsuit will go to trial by jury is another question entirely. He said he had some reservations as to what the best course of action for Phi Kappa Psi would be, mentioning that plaintiffs often get a better deal through settlement due to the expenses incurred during trial. He said he was doubtful the fraternity would refuse to settle.

White said he thought settlement would be a less sensible option for Phi Kappa Psi and hopes the fraternity will “aggressively pursue” the case to trial, as settlement would provide Rolling Stone the opportunity to avoid having its journalistic practices reexamined in a public forum.

“[The fraternity] is seeking primarily to vindicate its reputation as opposed to recovering a substantial damage settlement,” White said. “Any settlement, in my view, should include a very conspicuous public statement by Rolling Stone that none of the practices alleged to have been part of Phi Psi’s hazing protocols occurred, and that no members of the fraternity were involved in any assault on ‘Jackie.’”

Robert Turner, associate director of the National Security Law Center of the Law School, said Rolling Stone would have interest in stopping the lawsuit at settlement, explaining the magazine’s insurance company would face risks in a trial setting.

Turner said if the lawsuit does find its way to a courtroom, Phi Kappa Psi will need to provide evidence of the article’s harm to the chapter’s reputation, such as a decline in contributions or a loss of membership — and thus decreased revenue from membership fees. While he said no guarantee of legal success can be made for Phi Psi, the conduct of Rolling Stone both in producing and responding to the article will provide a challenge to the magazine’s lawyers.

“Now that [Rolling Stone’s lawyers] have asked top experts to investigate every aspect of the matter and the report is public, and they still have done nothing to hold anyone accountable for all the wrongful things that have been done, I find it difficult to fathom a legal theory by which Phi Psi would lose unless there is some procedural hurdle,” Turner said.

While the lawsuit is on behalf of the fraternity, it ultimately stands for something far greater for the University community, he said.

“Since the University itself cannot sue, in going forward [Phi Kappa Psi] would be vindicating the reputation of our entire community,” Turner said. “I think Phi [Kappa] Psi is in a position to champion not only its own reputation, but that of the University and its living graduates around the world. And I will be greatly surprised if they lack the courage to do what they believe is right."
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Quasimodo

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“[The fraternity] is seeking primarily to vindicate its reputation as opposed to recovering a substantial damage settlement,” White said. “Any settlement, in my view, should include a very conspicuous public statement by Rolling Stone that none of the practices alleged to have been part of Phi Psi’s hazing protocols occurred, and that no members of the fraternity were involved in any assault on ‘Jackie.’”


Wonder by Brendan Sullivan, Richard Emery, Rudolf, Scheck, et al, weren't able to at least get that much... (MOO)


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http://reason.com/archives/2015/04/12/campus-rape

The Real Problem With Rolling Stone's Campus Rape Fiasco
The hysteria over "rape culture" is still alive and kicking.

Brendan O'Neill|Apr. 12, 2015 10:00 am

It's great that those who value truth and reason finally won out over Rolling Stone, publisher of 2014's most egregious example of dime store fantasy journalism.

Through doing the things Rolling Stone flatly failed to—elevating fact-gathering over moral narratives; hunting down info; asking awkward questions—bloggers, journalists, and, now, the dean of the Columbia School of Journalism successfully exploded the myth of a gang rape at the University of Virginia (UVA) in 2012.

Truth, 1; Agenda-Driven Mythmaking, Nil. A clear win for fact over fallacy, objectivity over journalism more interested in telling a morality tale, however tall, than in communicating clear, proven facts. A victory for veracity. Right?

I'm not so sure. The Rolling Stone story might be dead, slain by an army of genuinely inquisitive observers. But the hysteria that made that fact-lite mess of a feature possible in the first place survives. It staggers on, bloodied but unbowed, Michael Myers-style.

Yes, Rolling Stone is reprimanded, but the unhinged panic about a "rape culture" on campus that made that mag so blind to the hollowness of Jackie's story is still getting away with it. Indeed, Rolling Stone's final withdrawal of its story this week, following Columbia's cool dismantling of it, has, perversely, given rise to a chorus of demands that we now focus on the true problem: the epidemic of rape on campus.

The hysteria is dead, long live the hysteria!

The most common criticism made of Rolling Stone in the past few days is that it has hampered the war against campus sexual assault. In publishing BS about a gang rape at UVA, it created a situation where female students, apparently under threat, might feel reluctant to speak out. In short: the problem with Rolling Stone's rape-culture mythmaking is that it made it harder to grapple with rape culture.

The Columbia report itself contains the seeds of this concern. It criticises Rolling Stone for spreading "the idea that many women invent rape allegations." In the section on "Reporting Rape on Campus," it doesn’t address the central problem with such reporting—that it too often buys into totally inflated stats about assault—but instead offers advice on how to sensitively cover rape stories.

In her statement on Columbia's report, the author of Rolling Stone’s rape tale, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, apologized to her readers and editors (but not to frats she so scandalously defamed), and she said sorry to the "victims of sexual assault who may feel fearful as a result of my article." Her main concern is ensuring that, even after her disastrous piece, "the voices of the victims" will still be heard.

UVA President Teresa A. Sullivan took a similar line, slamming Rolling Stone for distracting attention from the real problem, the "serious issue": sexual violence on campus.

Even as she rapped Rolling Stone's knuckles for publishing a scare story about rape, Sullivan promised to introduce "substantive reforms" to "improve culture" on her campus as a means of "prevent[ing] violence" and "ensur[ing] the safety of our students so they can learn and achieve their personal potential in an environment of trust and security."

So apparently there is a culture issue at UVA, a violence issue, an attitudinal problem that needs top-down fixing.

What these responses share in common is a desire to draw attention back to the alleged real stuff: female students not being believed; a warped campus culture that needs intervention; the need to turn campuses from alleged sites of violence back into "environments of security."

They're still buying the core misconception of Ederly's article, the really rotten part: the idea of a culture of rape, a culture of evil. According to Columbia's report, Ederly wanted to find a "single, emblematic college rape case" that would show, in Ederly's own words, "what it's like to be on campus now... where not only is rape so prevalent but also that there's this pervasive culture of sexual harassment / rape culture.” And much of the response to Columbia’s report is basically saying: Her emblematic case was hooey, yes, but she's right about the pervasive-culture thing.

Only she isn’t. And if we correct Rolling Stone without challenging the rape-culture myth, then we leave the colossal problems here untouched.

Media feminists have been even more explicit in their demand that we swiftly turn our eyes away from Rolling Stone’s failings and back to the alleged tsunami of sexual assault on campus.

Jessica Valenti frets that the Jackie fiasco will damage efforts “to end sexual violence on campus”—campuses where the “scourge of rape” is rife. Over at the radical lesbian magazine, Curve, Victoria A. Brownworth says it’s all well and good for Rolling Stone to have retracted its story, but “some things can’t be retracted”—like the fact that “Rape culture is real. There’s a pandemic of rape on college campuses like UVA.”

Feminist Suzannah Weiss says “we shouldn’t let Rolling Stone’s mistakes stand in the way of taking campus sexual assaults seriously,” since “campus rape culture is a very real problem.” This only says more openly what Ederly and Sullivan nodded to in their post-Columbia statements: that for all the faults in the Rolling Stone piece, the thing Ederly hoped to illustrate—the existence of a “pervasive culture of sexual harassment”—is still around and requires substantive action.

But this culture doesn’t exist. Are women on campus sometimes sexually assaulted? Yes, they are, as are women in all walks of life, tragically. But the idea of a culture of rape on campus is bunkum.

It’s been shot down by libertarian and liberal feminists, most notably Emily Yoffe at Slate, who trashed with facts the oft-spouted idea that one-in-five college women are sexually assaulted before they graduate.

According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, between 1995 and 2011 only 0.6 percent of college women had experienced an attempted or actual sexual assault, which is less than the 0.8 percent of non-college women aged 18 to 24 who had the same experience over the same time. So American colleges are not hotbeds of assault and rape, and are actually safer for women than most other zones of life.

Even the treatment of the Rolling Stone drama as just a failure of journalism—Columbia offered an “anatomy of a journalistic failure”—feels insufficient. Yes, its writers and editors messed up royally (and still are, by refusing to make any significant changes to their staff or editorial processes.) But that terrible article arose out of a moral swamp that still festers even following the article’s retraction. It spoke to and reflected and sought to capture one of the most hysterical panics of our time: the idea that largely middle-class women at some of the best universities in the United States are stalked by danger, hunted by rapists, threatened by a foul, free-floating culture of violation.

It’s this madness that we must now challenge. And it will require more than a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism dean to do that. It will require all of us picking apart victim feminism, advocacy research, the demonization of men (especially of the frat variety), the culture of misanthropy, and the modern urge to trash both due process and civil rights in the name of hunting down a new breed of Emmanuel Goldsteins: jocks, lads, college guys. All of these are the ingredients, not only of Erdely’s sorry excuse for reporting, but also of the still extant, still profoundly damaging moral panic about rape.
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Is the national fraternity suing or is it just the local chapter of the national fraternity?
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chatham
Apr 12 2015, 01:05 PM
Is the national fraternity suing or is it just the local chapter of the national fraternity?
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Brian Ellis, (804) 512-4797
“A Sad Example of the Decline of Journalistic Standards”

UVA’s Phi Kappa Psi Responds to Columbia Journalism School’s Review of Rolling Stone Article

Charlottesville, Va. (April 6, 2015)

After 130 days of living under a cloud of suspicion as a result of reckless reporting by Rolling Stone Magazine, today the Virginia Alpha Chapter of Phi Kappa Psi announced plans to pursue all available legal action against the magazine.
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http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/learning-nothing-from-rolling-stone-u.va.-institutes-radical-sexual-assault-policy/article/2562969

Learning nothing from Rolling Stone, U.Va. institutes radical sexual assault policy
By Ashe Schow | April 13, 2015 | 4:26 pm

Most reasonable people thought the lesson from the Rolling Stone gang-rape debacle was to think before making statements or taking actions with potentially detrimental consequences before even a few facts were in. But for the University of Virginia, the message appears to have been: More radical action!

Just one week before the Columbia Journalism Review published its scathing report on the Rolling Stone article about an alleged gang rape at U. Va, the school of Thomas Jefferson published a new sexual assault policy. The new policy is modeled after the California "yes means yes" law that has failed to find backing in other states (so far no other state has come close to passing its own version) except for on college campuses.

The new policy makes nearly all sexual or perceived sexual contact a punishable offense, with little recourse for the accused. The new policy defines sexual contact as "any intentional sexual touching/however slight/with any object or body part … performed by a person upon another person." By that definition a misplaced hug is a violation of the policy.

The new policy also defines affirmative consent as being informed, voluntary and active throughout sexual activity. Lack of protest or silence does not constitute consent. One area where the policy seems to be practical is by defining incapacitation as "a state beyond drunkenness or intoxication." In theory that would cut down on accusations coming from someone who had even a sip of alcohol; in practice, schools make no such distinction since the goal is to look tough on sexual assault.

U.Va. also asks whether "the person initiating" the sexual activity knew their partner was incapacitated, but we've seen in some cases that even if the accuser initiated the contact, the accused can still be found guilty.

Further, simply obtaining affirmative consent is not enough, because there's no way to prove consent in a he said/she said situation without recording the incident. The new U.Va. policy also states that consent can be withdrawn at any time and that if someone withdraws consent "through clear words or actions" then sexual activity must cease. But we've also seen cases where a student is accused even after they stop the activity when their eventual accuser asks.

One could say those examples aren't from the University of Virginia and therefore don't apply. Understandable, except that those examples are part of the culture currently surrounding campus sexual assault policies. And given U.Va.'s rush to judgment following the Rolling Stone story, I don't have any hope that the university will act any differently than the nearly 70 schools being sued by former students who were denied due process after being accused of sexual assault.
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April 14, 2015
Rolling Stone and Columbia University Share Bigotry, Not Bias
By Deborah C. Tyler

Conservatives understand secular progressive political bias in the mainstream media, so Sabrina Rubin Erdley’s “A Rape on Campus”, a hatchet job against the University of Virginia and the Phi Sigma Psi fraternity published in Rolling Stone magazine, was not a shocker. So egregious were the article's inaccuracies and misrepresentations that Rolling Stone, in a very public mea culpa, enlisted the Columbia School of Journalism to investigate what went wrong. The Columbia analysis acknowledged that the fraternity brothers had been defamed, and roundly faulted the article’s editorial and investigative lapses: “…The failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking.” The report also acknowledged the political motivations of the errant author and the Rolling Stone staff:

Erdely and her editors had hoped their investigation would sound an alarm about campus sexual assault and would challenge Virginia and other universities to do better.… UVA had a flawed record of managing sexual assault cases.

The criticisms of Rolling Stone's lapses may accurately describe the methodological problems that paved the way for Rolling Stone’s necktie party against the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. But they miss the deeper psychological context of why those lapses -- that bias – occurred in the first place: left-wing rage. Fundamentally, the report concludes that sincere, high-minded people let their biased -- but unquestionably good intentions -- trump editorial ethics.

But lynchings, physical or editorial, do not result from bias or slipshod ethics. They result from hatred.

Erdely’s ferocious hit piece was not spawned from mere political bias or sympathy for Jackie. In fact, her article and subsequent statements suggest that she detests frat-boys more than she cares about Jackie. Her rant against UVA in general and the brothers of Phi Kappa Psi in particular is a classist and sexist brown-shirt frenzy against a despised archetype of her imagination – privileged white males.

The left-wing media and Columbia University Journalism School are so steeped in that bigotry they cannot understand at the most significant level what went wrong. Does a fish know it lives in water?

When the gig of cleansing the world of sin transferred from God to the left-wing educational/media magisteria in post-Christian America, the judgment function is accompanied by a “social science” scripture that identifies the original sin of white, heterosexual, privileged males. But the dilemma for outraged progressives is that the wealth and power in academia and media still reside in the same colorless and grasping hands, i.e., their own

Post-Christianity bestowed the power and glory to cultural elites, enabling a predominantly narcissistic character structure in America’s who’s who. The narcissistic temperament resolves the dilemma of actually being the problem, rather than the solution, regarding issues like materialism and sexual immorality through an ego defense mechanism called “splitting.” To maintain entitlements and a sense of superiority, the ego splits off rigid, irrational entities from itself. One’s own weaknesses and failures become a hated entourage of “not-me’s.”

There is a collective dissociative splitting among the left wing against “bad whites, bad heterosexuals, bad privileged, and bad white males”. Those rejected aspects of the self inevitably evoke rage when they are imagined to exist in other people. Furthermore, narcissistic splitting tends to populate one’s world with characters who are either entirely admirable or entirely evil. This psychological dynamic was evident in Sabrina Rubin Erdley’s representation of pure-as-driven-snow Jackie who was “crushing it” after just four weeks at UVA and who was “floored” by the (apparently nonexistent invitation) to dinner by the (apparently) nonexistent rapists. Idealized female goodness was destroyed by the proportionately evil, cruel, and unredeemable frat-boys.

Narcissistic splitting is the psychological explanation for how the left wing can passionately despise people who are actually quite like themselves, only less wealthy. A vernacular term for splitting is bigotry. It is why neither Sabrina Rubin Erdely nor Rolling Stone magazine did not apologize to the real victims of their sensationalistic offal. Their apologies studiously avoided the hated the objects of their bigotry: the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. That organization embodies a perfect storm of splitting: white, heterosexual, privileged males. For the left to relinquish that bigotry they would have to be honest about themselves.

The largely unconscious ego-defense mechanism of “splitting” plausibly explains Erdely's antipathy and Rolling Stone’s willingness to endorse it. The immature personality splits off “the bad” from itself, and cathects hatred against those who reminds the ego of itself. But even this apt psychodynamic explanation tends to diminish personal responsibility for what is essentially an intellectualized tendency, as Maimonides put it, to be only for oneself.

Let us build the broadest platform of understanding the treacherous peculiarities of the postmodern mind. In the grand scheme, scientific advancement enabled two vast, world-changing defamations. First socialism and then today’s identity cults of secular progressivism. Sigmund Freud’s underlying worldview of scientific materialism, of human beings as Godless organisms of wanting, is itself one of the missing ties that caused the derailment of Judeo-Christian morality in America. Still, Freud’s creative genius was such that it can be enlisted in understanding the self-righteousness of the left-wing rationalized hatred of white, heterosexual, privileged males.

A long while ago, in a western movie the title of which escapes me, a ‘good guy’ is about to kill a ‘bad guy’ for a crime. The exact dialog also escapes me, but the gist is that the bad guy pleads, “But I didn’t do it.” The good guy replies, “I know, but a crime’s been committed and somebody’s gotta pay.”

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/04/emrolling_stoneem_and_columbia_university_share_bigotry_not_bias.html#ixzz3XH0IPb1Z
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http://reason.com/blog/2015/04/14/now-that-jackies-story-is-false-can-we-b

Now That Jackie’s Story Is False, Can We Be Honest About Rape and Alcohol?
In the wake of the Rolling Stone debacle, two experts examine the link between the drinking age, alcohol abuse, and campus violence.

Robby Soave|Apr. 14, 2015 2:40 pm

Of all the incredible details in Rolling Stone's now-discredited story about a gang rape at the University of Virginia, there was just one that struck me as unbelievable from the start. No, it wasn't the astonishingly high number of assailants, the implication that the violence was ritualistic, or the inhumane behavior of the victim's friends.

It was actually the very first thing in the story: Jackie claimed she wasn't drunk. That detail made her story unusual, given that alcohol abuse is both the issue undergirding the campus rape crisis and the problem for which there is a more obvious solution.

And yet Sabrina Rubin Erdely ruled out the influence of alcohol in the first sentence she wrote. Jackie had taken a single sip from a spiked drink, according to Erdely, and then deliberately spilled the rest onto the floor of the Phi Kappa Psi house. The story described her as "sober but giddy"—in other words, perfectly lucid enough to remember "every moment of the next three hours of agony" while she was brutally raped by nine members of the fraternity.

Her story is a false from beginning to end (thank goodness), as recent investigations by The Washington Post, Charlottesville police, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism have demonstrated. But even if Jackie's story were true, it wouldn't have been a particularly representative example. Despite what Erdely would have had us believe, rape cases don't typically involve a cult of secret sociopaths executing an elaborate and premeditated ritual that necessitates luring a fully conscious victim to her doom. Reality is more boring: Alcohol abuse is almost always the real culprit.

Journalists who routinely cover campus rape stories know that most disputes involve a victim who is at least partly incapacitated from alcohol or drug consumption. Rapists, in fact, are rational actors who want to commit their crimes without a struggle and ensure that they escape punishment. It's much easier to abuse someone whose state of intoxication has rendered her unable to resist, and it's much simpler to discredit subsequent accusations if the victim's memory of the attack is foggy or unreliable.

University campuses, unfortunately, have become epicenters of excessive drinking that provide no shortage of easy marks for rapists. By some accounts, binge drinking rates on American college campuses have worsened over the past decade, even as society-wide alcohol abuse has purportedly lessened.

New York Times contributor Gabrielle Glaser, author of Her Best-Kept Secret: Why Women Drink and How They Can Regain Control, told me the reason is obvious: the federally-mandated drinking age of 21 fosters a culture of reckless, illicit drinking among teens who never learned moderation.

"Young people don't have moderate models," she said in an interview with Reason. "If you're not allowed to go buy alcohol until you're 21, what are your models going to be?"

The National Minimum Drinking Age Act (NMDAA)—passed by an alarmist Congress in 1984—forced every state in the country to capitulate to a drinking age of 21 or lose federal highway funds. The law made criminals of teen drinkers, but it didn't sap their determination to obtain booze: it merely changed where, when, and how fast they typically get drunk. Eighteen-year-old students—legal adults, in every other sense of the word—could no longer order a few drinks at a bar or buy a bottle from the local liquor store and head home, according to Barrett Seaman, a former correspondent for Time and author of Binge: Campus Life in an Age of Disconnection and Excess.

"The 21 year-old drinking age is part of the problem," said Seaman, who is also president of Choose Responsibility, a non-profit organization opposed to the federal drinking age of 21, in an interview with Reason. "It contributes to this forbidden fruit mentality. It's the only thing that differentiates an 18-year-old from all other full citizens. And I think it's built up a resentment."

Nowadays, teens have to go looking for older students to supply them illicit alcohol. They have to beg a friend's acquaintance, or check out a sketchy house party, or ask someone at a fraternity house to get them a drink, or take a swig from a mysterious trough of blended booze—even though they're not sure exactly what's in it. They can't drink out in the open, or during the day, and they down their red solo cups as fast as possible so they don't get caught by campus cops.

The inevitable result is more teens getting drunk more rapidly and in riskier environments, according to Seaman.

"College students have no trouble at all getting a hold of alcohol," he said. "I think [the drinking age] has created this atmosphere where people when they get their hands on alcohol will drink it quickly. They pregame, a term that did not exist when I was in college and the drinking age was 18. That creates the dangerous scenario."

When the law incentivizes a culture of reckless campus drinking, more students become victims of worse things than hangovers.

Even Erdely must understand this, on some level. According to the Columbia report, Emily Renda—the UVA student and sexual assault victims' advocate who introduce Erdely to Jackie—first piqued the author's interest by asserting that "many assaults take place during parties where 'the goal is to get everyone blackout drunk.'" If there was less blackout drinking, perhaps there would be fewer assaults.

But all too often, purported anti-rape activists refuse to admit that alcohol is a significant aggravating factor in the campus rape crisis. Blaming alcohol is "politically incorrect," according to Glaser, and frequently draws harsh condemnation from certain feminists who are fixated on less practical solutions. Such outrage is dishonest and unhelpful, she says.

"It's not blaming the victim," she said. "I'm saying everybody has a role here, everybody needs to be responsible."

The best way to encourage teens to drink responsibly—and safeguard themselves against campus assaults—is for Congress to repeal NMDAA. This would allow state and local authorities to try out different alcohol policies. Right now, they are all bound to de facto Prohibition—a policy that was correctly regarded as a failure when it applied to adults, but is for some reason still considered a success at preventing teens from drinking.

"By having some sort of local experimentation, maybe we could start to turn things around," said Glaser.

Seaman is also optimistic that a lower drinking age would promote saner drinking practices, based on his personal observations. He spent time living at a dozen different campuses across the U.S. while researching his book in the early 2000s. He also took up residence at one Canadian college, Medill University. The drinking age there was 18, and the students at Medill—Canadians, Americans, Europeans, and others—were far more responsible drinkers than their U.S. counterparts, he says.

We now know that Jackie's narrative is untrue. But worst of all, it's a distraction. The problem is not that rape is ritualized and campuses are brimming with sociopaths; the problem is that teens are bad drinkers who put themselves in unsafe situations—and will continue to do so, until federal policy changes.
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Now That Jackie’s Story Is False, Can We Be Honest About Rape and Alcohol?


Honestly I don't mean to be cruel. But the evidence is, the question should be: can we be honest about mental impairment and dubious rape allegations? If that impairment was caused by alcohol, or some kind of mental illness, without allowing anyone to "get away with" anything, you need more than a single-sourced story to destroy someone's reputation and life.

The cases we keep reading about range from "clearly it was rape" to "clearly it was a regretted/embarrassing incident" to "clearly the story keeps changing and there is a chance that nothing happened or at least we don't know which version of the story to believe."

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