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UVA Rape Story Collapses; Duke Lacrosse Redux
Topic Started: Dec 5 2014, 01:45 PM (60,429 Views)
MikeZPU

Payback
Apr 22 2015, 11:45 AM
"True, many of them have been discredited, but there has also been consensus that something egregiously wrong took place."
Well, yes, Ms Abbe, a consensus that "Jackie" (whatever her motives) did something "egregiously wrong" by making false accusations about a "rape" that did not happen.
:toast:
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MikeKell
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Still a Newbie
I'll post here and in news. Another rape charge dropped, this time the other color blue: UNC

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/crime/article19257057.html
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mike in houston
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UVA Dean Maligned by Rolling Stone Received Death and Rape Threats, Hires Lawyer

Nicole Eramo, the UVA dean of students portrayed as the face of administrative neglect of rape victims in Rolling Stone’s now-discredited story, revealed in a letter to the magazine’s publisher that she received death and rape threats as a result of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s reckless reporting.

She has hired an attorney and may pursue legal action against the magazine, which has never really apologized for defaming her.
snip-

http://reason.com/blog/2015/04/22/uva-dean-maligned-by-rolling-stone-recei

The letter is here
https://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/262720332?access_key=key-4ToHQw8JUCs9WwYBK5zG&allow_share=true&escape=false&view_mode=scroll
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/u-va-dean-assails-her-portrayal-in-rolling-stone-story-about-alleged-rape/2015/04/22/79df7646-e906-11e4-aae1-d642717d8afa_story.html

U-Va. dean assails her portrayal in alleged rape story in Rolling Stone
By T. Rees Shapiro April 22 at 10:22 PM

In times of crisis, countless University of Virginia students have turned to Associate Dean Nicole Eramo.

From her campus office in Peabody Hall, Eramo counsels young adults — mostly women — in the aftermath of what is in most cases the darkest moment of their lives: deciding what to do after they have been sexually assaulted.

“All the things she did and continues to do are really in the best interest of students,” said Emily Renda, a 2014 graduate who said Eramo supported her as a student seeking to come to terms with her own rape on campus.

But in November, a sensational Rolling Stone magazine account — since discredited and retracted — described Eramo as callous and indifferent to one student’s claims that she was gang-raped at a fraternity in 2012. The article alleged that U-Va. systemically pushed aside rape cases and left victims struggling.

“I felt that it was a total misrepresentation of who she is,” said Renda, who now works alongside Eramo at U-Va. on sexual-assault prevention issues.

“After the article came out, I felt disgusted by the way Dean Eramo was portrayed,” said junior Alex Pinkleton, who says she survived a rape and an attempted rape during her first two years in Charlottesville. “She has been a beacon of hope and a strong support system for many of us who have endured sexual violence on campus.”

In her first public remarks about the Rolling Stone account since it was published online six months ago, Eramo on Wednesday assailed the magazine for its “false and grossly misleading” portrayal of her efforts to help students in need.

“Using me as the personification of a heartless administration, the Rolling Stone article attacked my life’s work,” Eramo wrote in a letter to Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, which The Washington Post obtained Wednesday morning. Eramo wrote that her name will now “remain forever linked to an article that has damaged my reputation and falsely portrayed the work to which I have dedicated my life.”

Rolling Stone spokeswoman Kathryn Brenner said Wednesday that “we sincerely regret any pain we caused Dean Nicole Eramo and others affected by this story.”

The Post reported in December that there were numerous discrepancies in the magazine’s account of an alleged gang rape at the campus Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, and police later confirmed that they could not substantiate the major claims in the story.

Earlier this month, a report from the Columbia University journalism school concluded that the magazine account by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, titled “A Rape on Campus,” was deeply flawed. In response to the Columbia report, Rolling Stone apologized, retracted the story and posted the Columbia report in its place.

Eramo has retained legal counsel with the firm Clare Locke, a boutique practice based in Alexandria that specializes in defamation cases. U-Va. officials declined to comment on Eramo’s letter Wednesday.

In the letter, Eramo describes receiving death and rape threats after the Rolling Stone article caused a sensation on campus and across the country. The story detailed the administration’s alleged inaction to a student’s claims that she was viciously assaulted in 2012 at a fraternity house by seven men while two others watched. The article alleged that U-Va. officials did nothing to warn the campus after learning of the assault.

A months-long Charlottesville police investigation into the allegations by the U-Va. junior at the center of the story, identified by the magazine only as Jackie, found that detectives were “not able to conclude to any substantive degree that an incident occurred at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house or any other fraternity house for that matter.”

In interviews with The Post last year, Jackie said she stood by the Rolling Stone account. Her attorney, Palma Pustilnik, declined to comment Wednesday.

Eramo also writes in her letter that Erdely and Rolling Stone failed to capture the administration’s work to prevent sexual assaults on campus and instead chose to publish a sensational story that fit a predetermined theme.

“Ms. Erdely squandered an opportunity to have a more nuanced and accurate conversation about this issue because she was busy filling in her preconceived narrative and ultimately setting back the cause of advocacy and support in ways that we are still only beginning to understand here in Charlottesville and across the country,” Eramo wrote. “Inflamed by the false portrayal in the article, protestors showed up at my office, demanding I be fired. Perhaps most egregious and shocking were the e-mails that I received expressing hope that I be killed or raped, and commenting that they hoped that I had a daughter so that she could be raped.”

Eramo wrote that the article described a lackluster university response to Jackie’s claims. But Charlottesville police showed that Eramo moved swiftly to arrange for Jackie to speak to police detectives about her rape allegations. Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy J. Longo told reporters in March that Jackie has refused to cooperate with investigators, both before and after the Rolling Stone article was published.

Lambasting the magazine’s journalism practices, Eramo wrote that “Jackie’s story of being victimized by a brutal gang rape at the hands of a UVA fraternity was simply too enticing not to publish — and UVA, its administration, and its students were too easily painted as callous villains for Rolling Stone to be burdened by the facts.”

In February, Eramo met with attorneys representing Rolling Stone to discuss the allegations in the article. But Eramo wrote that she walked away from that meeting deeply disappointed.

“Adding insult to injury, your attorneys said that the article’s portrayal of me — which cast me as an unsympathetic and manipulative false friend to sexual assault victims who is more interested in keeping assault statistics down than providing meaningful guidance to victims or holding perpetrators of sexual assault accountable — was ‘fair,’ ” Eramo wrote. “The University of Virginia — and those of us who work for the University supporting victims of sexual assault — deserve better.”
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http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/local/uva/experts-photo-illustration-that-accompanied-retracted-rolling-stone-article-raises/article_8f422260-e963-11e4-8b00-03bd389ff785.html


Experts: Photo illustration that accompanied retracted Rolling Stone article raises ethical questions

By Chris Suarez | Posted: Wednesday, April 22, 2015 11:00 pm
Eramo-Cavalier Daily

A photo illustration packaged with Rolling Stone’s debunked University of Virginia gang rape expose raises ethical questions beyond the magazine’s shattered reporting, experts said Wednesday.

The illustration depicts UVa Associate Dean of Students Nicole Eramo in what appears to be an office, with a lamp in the right frame, a student with her head in her hand in the foreground and protesters holding signs seen through a window in the background.

That accompanies a piece in which the university is described as more concerned about image than safeguarding students against sexual assault, with Eramo cast as a central figure.

In an open, four-page letter to Rolling Stone obtained Wednesday, Eramo charged the magazine with “using [her] as the personification of a heartless administration” and “dragging [her] name through the mud,” leading to “numerous abusive, vitriolic and threatening emails, letters and phone calls” along with demands that she be fired.

“Rolling Stone celebrated these malicious and false allegations by accompanying the article with a cartoonish picture of me doctored to appear as though I was smiling and giving a ‘thumbs up’ to a crying victim sitting in my office while angry protestors marched outside with signs like ‘Stop Victim Blaming,’” Eramo wrote.

Rolling Stone obtained the original photo of Eramo from Cavalier Daily, UVa’s student newspaper. The relatively nondescript image originally appeared with a story published online April 9, 2013, about a mock trial Eramo and the UVa Sexual Misconduct Board organized to show students how sexual offense complaints are taken to a university tribunal. Eramo was in a classroom setting, rather than an office.

A visual journalism faculty member at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism school based in Florida, said the illustration poses problems.

“Taking original context and manipulating it is similar to taking an author’s narrative for another purpose,” Kenny Irby said. “The original picture had nothing to do with the rape story. Mixing content as [Rolling Stone] did is unethical and inaccurate.”

Eramo said the magazine depicted her as an “unsympathetic and manipulative false friend to sexual assault victims.”

Asked about Eramo’s letter, Rolling Stone spokeswoman Kathryn Brenner offered an apology, but did not comment further.

“We sincerely regret any pain we caused Dean Nicole Eramo and others affected by this story,” Brenner wrote in an email.

Manipulation of photos has been an issue in mainstream media before, notably in 1994 when Time magazine published its famous cover of O.J. Simpson’s police mug, with the photo darkened by an illustrator, giving the Hall of Fame football player a sinister look. Critics charged racial undertones in the illustration of the man accused of killing his ex-wife and her friend.

Taken in context with the story’s depiction of Eramo, the Rolling Stone illustration could be legally problematic for the magazine, said William G. Oglesby, an assistant professor teaching communications law and ethics at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Robertson School of Media and Culture.

“In and of itself, there is nothing defamatory about [the original image],” he said. “But it is in the context of an alleged coverup of sexual assaults at UVa that the juxtaposition of such a photo can be argued as defamatory.”

Cavalier Daily Editor-in-Chief Julia Horowitz said the student-run publication charged Rolling Stone a standard $50 fee for reprints of its photos.

“The [Rolling Stone] editor never specified that they were planning to alter the photo, though we also did not explicitly prohibit alteration,” Horowitz said in an email. “We were, however, ultimately surprised to see the photo printed in its altered state.”

The magazine took down its expose earlier this month and replaced it with a Columbia Journalism School review that excoriated the story under the headline “Rolling Stone’s investigation: A failure that was avoidable.”

Published online Nov. 19, the 9,000-word piece was centered on the account of a woman named Jackie who claimed she was raped by seven men in an upstairs room at a UVa fraternity house. The magazine backed off the story Dec. 5 saying it had found discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and a Charlottesville police investigation found no evidence that an attack had taken place.

Taking down the story from the magazine’s website does not eliminate damage, Oglesby said.

“The fact that ... it can still be found in archival sites points out the difficulty of ever truly removing a defamatory expression from public exposure,” Oglesby said. “Even if it were to be eradicated, the original damage may remain.”

Eramo’s grievances against the magazine, Irby said, are just the “tip of the iceberg” regarding photo editing ethics.

“This is happening all over the Internet,” Irby said. “We’ll see more case law with expectations of privacy and accurate representation if more people come to challenge the use of their likeness in photographic representations.”
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http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/local/uva/uva-s-eramo-hires-lawyer-blasts-depiction-in-rolling-stone/article_d138008e-e960-11e4-ac53-fb4caaeeb4e5.html

UVa's Eramo hires lawyer, blasts depiction in Rolling Stone

By Dean Seal | Posted: Wednesday, April 22, 2015 11:00 pm

The University of Virginia associate dean who sent a scathing letter Wednesday to Rolling Stone has retained a high-profile defamation lawyer.

Making her first public comments since the magazine published its Nov. 19 tale of gang rape at a UVa fraternity house, Nicole Eramo wrote, “Rolling Stone deeply damaged me both personally and professionally.”

Eramo, who as associate dean of students counsels sexual assault victims at UVa, was a central figure in the story that described the school administrators as more worried about image than protecting women. The story’s gang rape claim has been discredited.

In the four-page letter to Rolling Stone founder and publisher Jann S. Wenner, Eramo said the magazine characterized her as an “unsympathetic and manipulative false friend to sexual assault victims” who was “more interested in keeping assault statistics down than providing meaningful guidance to victims or holding perpetrators of sexual assault accountable.”

“Using me as the personification of a heartless administration, the Rolling Stone article attacked my life’s work,” Eramo wrote.

Rolling Stone has issued an apology for the story and commissioned the Columbia Journalism School for a review of the magazine’s work. Published earlier this month, that report described the story as a journalistic failure.

“There is nothing much more that we can say,” Wenner told The Daily Progress on Wednesday. “We have apologized, we regret all of this and are deeply, profoundly sorry.”

Eramo has retained Tom Clare, a defamation lawyer with Clare Locke, an Alexandria-based firm “devoted to litigating complex business disputes and representing clients facing high-profile reputational attacks,” according to its website.
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http://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2015/04/dean-eramo-publishes-open-letter

Eramo defends survivor support process, criticizes magazine's public response
by Katherine Wilkin and Mitch Wellman | Apr 22 2015 | 14 hours ago


Associate Dean of Students Nicole Eramo spoke out for the first time since the release of Rolling Stone’s “A Rape on Campus” in a letter to Rolling Stone CEO Jann Wenner, dated Wednesday. Eramo wrote a scathing critique of how the magazine has handled the story and its reaction to public scrutiny.

While there has been a focus on the flaws of the article’s portrayal of the alleged assault, there has not been enough emphasis on the negative portrayal of the University’s counseling process for survivors, Eramo said in the letter’s opening.

“Understandably, much of the public’s attention has been focused on the inaccuracy of the article’s account of a sexual assault involving Jackie and the flawed journalistic process processes at Rolling Stone that lead to the publication of the article,” she said. “Much less has been said, however, about the article’s false account of the University’s attitude regarding sexual assault and, in particular, the article’s false and grossly misleading portrayal of the counseling and support that I have provided to Jackie, including encouraging her to report.”

Eramo defended the University’s efforts to help Jackie, as well as her own. She said the University encouraged Jackie to take action against her assailants through the legal system, which she said was confirmed by both the Charlottesville Police Department investigation and the Columbia Journalism School’s review of the article published Apr. 8.

“As the Charlottesville Police Department’s press release makes clear, Jackie met twice with investigators (at my encouragement) in April and May of 2014, but she refused to provide any specific details about her assault and chose not to cooperate with any criminal investigation,” Eramo said.

Eramo criticized the response she received from Rolling Stone’s attorneys when she approached them in February. Then, they said the paper stood by their characterization of Eramo and the University’s response to Jackie’s case — a characterization the Charlottesville Police Department and Columbia Journalism School review subsequently disproved. She also addressed the article’s portrayal of her actions specifically, and said the article painted her as a “false friend” to assault victims..

“Adding insult to injury, your attorneys said that the article’s portrayal of me — which cast me as an unsympathetic and manipulative false friend to sexual assault victims who is more interested in keeping assault statistics down than providing meaningful guidance to victims or holding perpetrators of sexual assault accountable — was ‘fair,’” Eramo said.

Eramo said she attempts to show sensitivity to victims while still encouraging them to take action against their assailants, a difficult task.

“I encourage survivors to hold perpetrators accountable, while at the same time showing sensitivity to victims who believe they are not emotionally prepared for the rigors or perceived shame that often accompany reporting,” Eramo said. “Striking this balance — and many other aspects of the job — is not easy.”

Eramo also said Sabrina Erdely, the author of the Rolling Stone article, failed to include important information regarding the process by which sexual assault victims are assisted. She said the desires of each survivor must be taken into account when determining the best course of action.

“There is no simple road map for working with rape survivors,” Eramo said. “Reactions to trauma are as unique as the victims who suffer it.”

Since the publishing of the article, Eramo stated she has received not only a notorious reputation in the national press and the public eye, but also numerous threatening and malicious emails, letters and phone calls. During the investigation of the article’s accusations, University officials prohibited Eramo from working with current student clients.

The letter states the measures taken by Rolling Stone leadership in response to the article’s criticism are “too little, too late,” citing the permanent negative impact on Eramo’s public reputation and life’s work.

“Although the magazine has finally removed the original article from Rolling Stone’s website (something we asked for months ago), my name — and the photo-shopped picture of me — remain forever linked to an article that has damaged my reputation and falsely portrayed the work to which I have dedicated my life,” she said. “These steps are not good enough. The University of Virginia — and those of us who work for the University supporting victims of sexual assault — deserve better.”
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http://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2015/04/eramos-letter-and-rolling-stones-ramifications

OPINION
​Eramo’s letter and Rolling Stone’s ramifications
The magazine’s failures were more than just journalistic

by Managing Board | Apr 23 2015 | 5 hours ago | Updated 5 hours ago

Yesterday, Nicole Eramo, associate dean of students and chair of the Sexual Misconduct Board, released an open letter to Rolling Stone magazine condemning the magazine for its defamatory portrayal of her and her work in its article “A Rape on Campus,” touching upon how the magazine’s failure has affected sexual assault survivors here at the University.

Dean Eramo’s letter is not only accurate in its complaints about her own portrayal but also speaks to the severe damage Rolling Stone has done to survivors themselves and those who work to help survivors. Sabrina Rubin Erdely — the author of the article — did not just incorrectly portray one story; she mischaracterized the issue of sexual assault on college campuses altogether.

Following the release of the Columbia Journalism School’s report on the article, we described our frustrations with the lack of investigation into the magazine’s failures in portraying our school — that while the failure to fact-check the specific incident in question was immense, so was the author, editor and managing editor’s failure to correctly portray the environment they attempted to investigate. The damage this has done to our school and us, as students, is incalculable. But the damage the article’s portrayal of sexual assault has done to survivors deserves its own analysis.

Aside from failing in their presentation of Dean Eramo’s commendable work — which Dean Eramo says in her letter is “sustained by [her] passion for assisting young people through one of the most difficult experiences they will ever face” — the article’s author and overseers, after the article’s retraction, only took responsibility for their journalistic failures, and failed to acknowledge the damage their expose into campus sexual assault ultimately caused, however well-intentioned.

The rape portrayed in “A Rape on Campus” is one of the most extreme versions of rape. Most rapes on college campuses are not gang rapes; they are more similar to the experience Jenny Wilkinson, a University alumna, described in an op-ed for The New York Times.

The people who put together this article, at least based on their public statements, do not seem to wholly comprehend the damage they have caused to women whose assaults do not fit the mold they presented. The danger of their work is not just that survivors may not come forward for fear of being met with disbelief — a serious concern that Erdely mentioned in her recent apology. The bigger danger of their work is that survivors will not understand or believe their rapes were, in fact, rape, because what happened to them wasn’t violent enough by the standards Erdely set out. That is the environment that has been created at our school, and, quite possibly, beyond it.

At our school, this article had tangible, negative effects on students who have been sexually assaulted — one of which was that Dean Eramo, a strong advocate for survivors, had to be removed from working, in her words, “with the students with whom I had spent so much time building a relationship, forcing them to ‘start over’ with someone else.” Outside our school, this article has perpetuated a false image of rape: that it must look a certain way; that there is such a thing as a typical victim; that college campuses, in particular fraternities, are one of the few or perhaps the only space where this kind of oppression exists; and that the ways to help survivors are obvious.

We cannot overstate the harm these generalizations have created. People who are survivors may not see themselves as such, or if they do, they may not report their stories. And those who work tirelessly on behalf of survivors and take all the right steps — such as informing survivors of all their options and allowing them the room to make a choice to give them back their agency, something Erdely condemned in her article — must fear that doing the right thing will be manipulated and distorted by an ill-informed public.

We know that looking backward can provide us with ideas for how to move forward. Undoing the harm this one article caused is a bigger challenge than we know how to solve. But it starts with educating ourselves not just on why Erdely and her editors committed journalistic malpractice: it starts with understanding what rape is and how they got it wrong.
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http://legalinsurrection.com/2015/04/hugging-without-permission-now-sexual-assault-at-u-va/

Hugging without permission now ‘sexual assault’ at U.Va.
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Posted by Hans Bader Thursday, April 9, 2015 at 5:16pm

Punishing even innocent human contacts.
http://youtu.be/QwQmYSASlXo

I and my wife are happily married, and neither of us is abusive, much less criminal.

But under the University of Virginia’s broad new “sexual assault” policy, my wife could be deemed guilty of “sexual assault” when she hugs me without advance permission.

So, apparently, would any couple in America that engages in making out, without lots of explicit discussion in advance — that is, pretty much every person in America who is married or in a committed relationship. U. Va.’s policy bans a wide array of conduct that is perfectly legal under Virginia state law, and that neither involves sexual intercourse, nor occurs against anyone’s wishes. This is an outrageous invasion of students’ privacy, and an insult to U.Va. alumni and state taxpayers (like me).

U.Va. adopted its new “Interim Policy on Sexual and Gender-Based Harassment” to appease the Office for Civil Rights, where I used to work.

Under its policy, if you hug your boyfriend, and as an inevitable result your “clothed” “body parts” (such as “breasts”) touch him, you could be accused of “sexual assault” that “consists of” “sexual contact.” That’s because U.Va. now defines such touching, “however slight,” as sexual assault, lumping together both touching and intercourse as “sexual assault” when they are deemed “sexual” and occur without “affirmative consent.”

(“Affirmative consent” is a misleading term, and does not include certain types of consent that occur in the real world, and are recognized by the courts, as I explain at this link. The new policy further warns that “Relying solely on non-verbal communication before or during sexual activity can lead to misunderstanding and may result in a violation of this Policy.”

Any “intentional touching of the breasts, buttocks,” etc., is deemed “sexual contact,” as is “touching another with any of these body parts.” The relevant portions of U.Va.’s policy are reprinted at the bottom of the article at this link.).

The practical effect of the new policy is to ban making out as it is practiced by virtually all couples in the real world. U.Va.’s new policy requires “affirmative consent” (rather than “effective consent,” as it previously did) — “clear,” “active” “permission” — not just for sex, but also sexual contact, such as the touching that commonly occurs during making out and heavy petting. No one ever says things like “may I touch your breast” before doing so, especially when the touching is likely to be welcome. In the real world, these things are welcomed after they begin, not authorized or permitted in advance. But U.Va.’s policy effectively forbids ratification after the fact (i.e., making out) by banning any touching “however slight” without such authorization, so if you touch your partner an instant before they welcome it, you’ve presumably violated the policy.

It thus forbids the gradual, step-by-step escalation of intimacy without verbal discussion that is how making out actually happens in the real world. That is pointlessly intrusive. Conduct should not be banned where it was not “unwelcome,” and not against the victim’s will, since unwelcomeness is an essential element of a Title IX sexual harassment claim (U.Va.’s policy was adopted under Title IX, which the courts have interpreted as requiring that colleges not ignore sexual assaults and other behavior that constitutes unwelcome sexual harassment that is severe and pervasive. For potential legal and constitutional problems created by policies similar to U.Va.’s, see this link.)

There is no evidence that U.Va.’s policy will do anything to prevent sexual assault, or that that women want to be explicitly asked for consent at every step while making out. The “affirmative” consent requirement will not help rape victims or prevent rape, since rapes are seldom the result of mixed signals, and rapists, who already lie about whether they have committed rape, will just lie and claim the victim affirmatively consented by saying “yes” to sex. Nor do women want to constantly be asked for consent over and over again, every time intimacy deepens during making out, as many college affirmative-consent policies seem to require. At The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf quotes from the misadventures of a man raised by feminist parents who tried to follow “affirmative consent” in his dating relationships with women, who discovered just how much it annoyed them: “one of my first partners threw up her hands in disgust. ‘How am I supposed to get turned on when you keep asking for permission for everything like a little boy?’”

In some ways, U.Va.’s new policy echoes the controversial “affirmative-consent” law passed by California’s left-wing legislature last year, over objections from even liberal newspapers like the Los Angeles Times. Some advocates of that deeply intrusive law argued that it requires “state-mandated dirty talk,” such as forcing couples to discuss explicit sexual details (like agreeing in advance on each touching of intimate areas) during sexual encounters.

They want to require such discussion even when it would serve no useful purpose, such as where the touching is almost certain to be welcome, based on the fact that it was welcomed by the recipient in similar past circumstances. Perhaps echoing this mindset, U.Va.’s policy states that “Affirmative Consent to sexual activity on a prior occasion does not, by itself, constitute Affirmative Consent to future sexual activity,” and that “Affirmative Consent to one form of sexual activity does not, by itself, constitute Affirmative Consent to another form of sexual activity.”

For example, one advocate of “affirmative consent” endorsed expelling a male student merely for touching his partner while making out without reaching verbal agreement prior to the touching (for asking “does this feel good” while doing it, to see if she wanted him to stop, rather than saying “may I touch your breast” before doing it). That affirmative-consent advocate said that if it’s not feasible for a man to discuss every individual touching of a woman’s intimate areas in advance (as some “affirmative consent” policies literally require for a couple taking things on a step-by-step basis), he should instead seek consent from his date to a wide array of touching and licking in advance, using this disturbingly graphic example:

“Listen, I think you’re hot, I’m really attracted to you. Someday, maybe even tonight, I hope to run my hands, my mouth all over your body, over all your parts. But we might not be there yet, and I need to know that if I start to touch you in a place you’re not comfortable with, you’ll just tell me to stop, and we’ll stop immediately. You’ll feel okay, you won’t feel assaulted.”

How many women would ever want to hear something that creepy and explicit from their date? (Especially the passage in italics)? It would disturb many women, and few men could bring themselves to say something so awkward. And it would serve little purpose: There is nothing inherently bad about something merely because it occurred without advance permission (I like it when my wife or daughter suddenly hug me without asking for permission).

Requiring “affirmative consent” intrudes deeply into people’s private lives.

Ezra Klein, a former Democratic operative and leading supporter of “affirmative consent” rules, says they will define as guilty of sexual assault some people who “slip naturally from cuddling to sex” without a series of agreements in between, since the “affirmative consent” requirement

tries to change, through brute legislative force, the most private and intimate of adult acts. It is sweeping in its redefinition of acceptable consent; two college seniors who’ve been in a loving relationship since they met during the first week of their freshman years, and who, with the ease of the committed, slip naturally from cuddling to sex, could fail its test.

[It] is a necessarily extreme solution to an extreme problem. Its overreach is precisely its value….

If [it] is taken even remotely seriously it will settle like a cold winter on college campuses, throwing everyday sexual practice into doubt and creating a haze of fear and confusion over what counts as consent. This is the case against it, and also the case for it. . . . men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter… To work, “Yes Means Yes” needs to create a world where men are afraid.

But creating a “world where men are afraid” constitutes precisely the sort of sexually hostile educational environment that Title IX and the Fourteenth Amendment forbid state officials to create. Creating an anti-male climate constitutes sexual harassment. (See, e.g., Hartman v. Pena, 914 F.Supp. 225 (N.D. Ill. 1995), a case in which a judge allowed male employees to sue over an intimidating, anti-male sexual-harassment sensitivity training seminar)).
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Joan Foster

Apparently I have been "assaulting" my friends' husbands for years. Who knew? 🙀
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comelately

Joan Foster
Apr 23 2015, 03:17 PM
Apparently I have been "assaulting" my friends' husbands for years. Who knew? 🙀
Several years ago, a PhD student of mine came to my office, blushed, and informed me that she was pregnant, and that this fact was likely to impact her graduation schedule, etc. I congratulated her, and viciously assaulted her by giving her a hug...
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Joan Foster
Apr 23 2015, 03:17 PM
Apparently I have been "assaulting" my friends' husbands for years. Who knew? 🙀
Theres a bright side to the new UVA policy:. trees on campus finally get to shake those suffocating Sierra Clubbers.

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http://dcinno.streetwise.co/2015/04/23/uva-deans-letter-to-rolling-stone-causes-major-online-reaction/


How the Internet Reacted to the UVA Dean's Letter to Rolling Stone
Julia Arciga - Intern
04/23/15 @12:31pm in Education


UVA Dean Nicole Eramo wrote an open letter to Rolling Stone on Wednesday, bashing the magazine’s journalistic practices and damaging attacks to her reputation in the controversial “A Rape on Campus” story.

The story, published in December of last year, told the narrative of “Jackie,” a student who was gang raped at a Phi Kappa Psi fraternity party. In the story, it claimed that Dean Eramo and the University did “nothing” to support Jackie. Even after the story started to fall apart, Rolling Stone still stood by its statements against the Dean.

“Adding insult to injury, your attorneys said that the article’s portrayal of me — which cast me as an unsympathetic and manipulative false friend to sexual assault victims who is more interested in keeping assault statistics down than providing meaningful guidance to victims or holding perpetrators of sexual assault accountable — was ‘fair,'” Eramo wrote in the letter obtained by The Washington Post.

Eramo went on to describe how her professional and personal life has been damaged due to the publicity of the now-retracted story.

“Using me as the personification of a heartless administration, the Rolling Stone article attacked my life’s work. I saw my name dragged through the mud in the national press, and have received numerous abusive, vitriolic, and threatening emails, letters and phone calls,” she wrote. “Perhaps most egregious and shocking were the emails that I received expressing hope that I be killed or raped, and commenting that they hoped that I had a daughter so that she could be raped.”

She said that the magazine’s recent actions were “too little, too late,” and according to The Post, Eramo has lawyered up with the firm Claire Locke in Virginia, who specializes in defamation cases.

People took to the comment boards online in reaction to the letter. Most of the responses were strongly in support of the Dean and and her sentiments.

On The Daily Cavalier website, commenter “nanbroga” wrote, “I pray to God Dean Eramo sues. I hope this is the opening salvo against the soft target that Rolling Stone has become. They don't care about their reputation, as they are now happy to be relegated to the ranks of other check-out line tabloids. I bet they care about their bottom line and wallets, so HIT THEM THERE!”

On The Post’s web article, many reflected nanbroga’s views. Commenter “Rabid Centrist” wrote, “Good for you Dean. I particularly appreciate the succinctness with which you call out Erdely's drive to file a story based on a narrative she had already decided she wanted to publish before ever finding any facts.” Another comment from “VA Reader” said, “IMO (In My Opinion) Dean Eramo has a stronger legal case than even the fraternity. She was individually named and had false quotes attributed to her. Here's hoping she takes RS to the cleaners.”

The comment board also had less numerous but strong dissenters to the majority opinion in support of Dean Eramo. One commenter, “KS8284,” wrote: “The Rolling Stone article didn't make her look bad - her arrogant, air-headed interview with the student journalist for UVA Radio did. This woman has no business being a dean at a community college, much less a highly-ranked public university. I find her use of the phrase ‘life's work’ hilarious as it would seem she has no personal frame of reference for what constitutes real, actual work.”
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Foxlair45
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Ms Eramo is being bitten by the viper she nursed to her bosom. (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/viper-in-one%27s-bosom). While I hope she sues, and condemn the brown-shirts who threaten her -- I have to say she helped create this mess. I'll bet she never spoke up for the Duke Lacrosse team.
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kbp

Duke parent 2004
Apr 23 2015, 05:14 PM
Joan Foster
Apr 23 2015, 03:17 PM
Apparently I have been "assaulting" my friends' husbands for years. Who knew? 🙀
Theres a bright side to the new UVA policy:. trees on campus finally get to shake those suffocating Sierra Clubbers.

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Would the not be pornography?
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