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UVA Rape Story Collapses; Duke Lacrosse Redux
Topic Started: Dec 5 2014, 01:45 PM (60,422 Views)
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http://www.roanoke.com/news/education/higher_education/uva-s-renda-leaves-job-after-rolling-stone-hell-and/article_0d95c829-60da-53f0-a059-d94975fff244.html

UVa staffer leaves job after turmoil riled by Rolling Stone article

Richmond Times-Dispatch | Posted: Wednesday, September 9, 2015 4:42 pm

A University of Virginia graduate who served on the governor’s task force to combat campus sexual violence describes the year that followed the Rolling Stone debacle as “all hell and hopelessness,” Vanity Fair magazine says in a report on the aftermath of the retracted story about a gang rape.

Emily Renda, a 2014 graduate who worked at the university as program coordinator for sexual-misconduct prevention, will go to law school at the University of California at Berkeley to get as far away as she can from UVa, the magazine said.

“I don’t want to say it’s been the worst year of my life, but it has been the worst year of my life,” Renda told Vanity Fair for its October edition.

Renda did not return a request for comment. UVa said she left her job in July.

In August 2014, when Gov. Terry McAuliffe announced creation of the task force, she spoke on the Capitol steps about being assaulted her first year at UVa. She served as chair of the task force’s committee on prevention.

But in Vanity Fair’s article “Shadows on the Lawn,” Renda tells writer Sarah Ellison, a UVa alumna, that she no longer plans to work with sexual assault victims.

Renda said that when she was contacted by Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely, she referred her to five women, all with different stories. The case of Jackie, the eventual subject of Erdely’s story, was meant to show the lack of support women often receive after they report an assault.
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http://www.richmond.com/news/virginia/article_d81721f1-af5b-513a-b6cf-930e741e6129.html

Sex-assault prevention leader leaves U.Va. after Rolling Stone 'hell'

Posted: Wednesday, September 9, 2015 3:30 pm

A University of Virginia graduate who served on the governor’s task force to combat campus sexual violence describes the year after the Rolling Stone debacle as “all hell and hopelessness,” Vanity Fair magazine says in a report on the aftermath of the retracted story about a gang rape.

Emily Renda, a 2014 graduate who worked at the university as program coordinator for sexual-misconduct prevention, will go to law school at the University of California, Berkeley, to get as far away as she can from U.Va., the magazine said.

“I don’t want to say it’s been the worst year of my life, but it has been the worst year of my life,” Renda told Vanity Fair for its October edition.

Renda did not return a request for comment. U.Va. confirmed she left her job in July.

In August 2014, when Gov. Terry McAuliffe announced creation of the task force, she spoke on the Capitol steps about being assaulted her first year at U.Va. She served as chairwoman of the task force’s committee on prevention. But in Vanity Fair’s article “Shadows on the Lawn,” Renda tells writer Sarah Ellison, a U.Va. alumna, that she has now abandoned plans to work with sexual assault victims.

Renda said that when she was contacted by Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely, she referred her to five women, all with different stories. The case of Jackie, the eventual subject of Erdely’s story, was meant to represent the lack of support women often receive from friends and family when they report an assault.

Renda and two other U.Va. students who knew Jackie told Vanity Fair that they were shocked to read details of Jackie’s account that were reported by Rolling Stone last November. Their discussions with her had focused mainly on the responses she received and not on the assault itself, they said.

They also said they have not heard from Jackie since shortly after the story fell apart about nine months ago.
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They also said they have not heard from Jackie since shortly after the story fell apart about nine months ago.


Telling, imho.

Why haven't the media sought her out?

(After all, there was no aspect of the lax players' lives they were unwilling to uncover --including the architecture of their houses.)

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"An independent review of the University of Virginia's handling of a student's gang rape allegations will not be publicly released because of privacy concerns."

I got all this far before starting to laugh. Privacy concerns is a good one. Jackie's privacy?
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http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/09/university-of-virginia-most-horrible-year

After a Rape Story, a Murder, and Lawsuits: What’s Next for the University of Virginia?
Sarah Ellison - October, 2015

In an exclusive, Vanity Fair’s Sarah Ellison speaks to three former supporters of “Jackie,” the woman at the center of a now discredited Rolling Stone article about an alleged gang rape, and takes stock of a horrific year on campus.

I. The First Layer

Any story about the University of Virginia must begin with its founder, Thomas Jefferson, who is often referred to locally as “Mr. Jefferson”; with an invocation of the Rotunda and the surrounding “academical village”; and with a discussion of the venerable Honor Code and the exclusive secret societies. There must be a reference to the university as a “Public Ivy” or perhaps a “Southern Ivy,” and to the act of being physically on campus as being “on grounds.” There must be a nod to “girls in pearls and guys in ties” attending football games and horse races but paying attention to neither.

I like the dreams of the future
better than the history of the past.
—Thomas Jefferson

More recently, there’s another thing that any story about the University of Virginia must mention: the horrific period the institution has just come through. The school year started in September 2014 with the disappearance and murder of Hannah Graham, an undergraduate in her second year. Then came the publication, in November 2014, of an explosive Rolling Stone story about the alleged gang rape of a young woman named Jackie at a U.Va. fraternity—an investigative report that was quickly discredited and has now been retracted but that has left lasting divisions. In late November, a second-year U.Va. student and heir to the D’Agostino supermarket chain committed suicide, one of three students to do so last fall. The following March there occurred an incident involving a 20-year-old African-American honor student, Martese Johnson, who presented his driver’s license at a bar near the school and was turned away. Shortly afterward, after questioning the validity of his ID, two white state Alcoholic Beverage Control (A.B.C.) agents had him pinned to the ground. With rivulets of blood lining his face, he was heard to scream, “I go to U.Va.! I go to U.Va., you f*cking racists!” Any one of these events would have been enough to puncture the idyllic façade of Mr. Jefferson’s university. Taken together, the impact has been profound. The entire school seems to be suffering an institutional form of PTSD.

I recently returned to my alma mater on a glorious day in May. Final exams were under way, amid radiant bursts of azaleas, tulips, and dogwoods. I walked the serpentine gardens that surround the Lawn with an old friend who has settled in Charlottesville, and we talked about how hard and strange the year had been. I felt the familiar pull of the loveliness of the place—eliciting a desire, built into the mortar of the undulating brick walls, not to dwell too much on the negative.

When I arrived at U.Va., in 1992, Bill Clinton was on the presidential campaign trail for the first time. We were already hearing stories about his alleged longtime mistress, Gennifer Flowers. We took it for granted that Clinton was the Horndog President. He was a recognizable archetype—the roguish, charming, bad-boy southerner, though far too plebeian for the University of Virginia’s tastes, which run to a Regency-rake version of the same basic character. But Clinton’s election spurred a revived discussion of a New South, one that was modern and attractive to the rest of the country. It was this part of Clinton that appealed to students at U.Va., who are always engaged in an exercise of trying on the variety of southern raiment that the university has to offer.

Many people love their alma mater, but the University of Virginia invites a special loyalty. Part of this, I think, has to do with the care Jefferson took when he conceived the place. He designed the campus personally and regarded the creation of the university as more significant than his presidency. U.Va. has been at the forefront of defining what an American university should be ever since its founding, in 1819. The ranks of its alumni range from Edgar Allan Poe and Woodrow Wilson to Tina Fey and Katie Couric to Tiki Barber and Ralph Sampson. This year, U.S. News & World Report ranked it as the second-best public university in the country (behind Berkeley and tied with U.C.L.A.). About 70 percent of the school’s 16,000 undergraduates come from Virginia and pay $13,000 a year to attend, one of the great bargains in higher education; the 30 percent from out of state pay $42,000, still a relative bargain. Poet laureate Rita Dove, civil-rights leader Julian Bond, and philosopher Richard Rorty have all taught at U.Va. William Faulkner was a writer-in-residence. Graduates of U.Va. see the place as particularly distinctive. Whenever my husband wants to get a rise out of me, he tells me that U.Va. is a great school, just like Michigan or Wisconsin. And like any place that is particularly distinctive, the flaws are distinctive as well.

If the Deep South is determined to position itself deliberately as “Other,” something that is separate and apart from the rest of the country, U.Va. provides a southern buffet, a place where one can dabble as a Virginia gentleman or a southern belle—trying on a lifestyle if not fully committing to a life. In her book, Bossypants, alumna Tina Fey wrote, “At the University of Virginia in 1990, I was Mexican. I looked Mexican, that is, next to my fifteen thousand blond and blue-eyed classmates, most of whom owned horses, or at least resembled them.” One friend recently described U.Va. to me as the “first layer” of the South—the safe version. U.Va. sets itself apart from its coarser cousins in the Deep South, the region that elites up North reject and that revels in this rejection. Even so, it embodies the South in all its inconsistencies and contradictions. The university is a defining institution in a state that, perhaps more than any other, has a rooted aristocracy. Wealthy donors, many of whom sit on the university’s Board of Visitors, are hugely influential. In the past, U.Va. students looked at Ole Miss, with its Confederate flags hanging in fraternity-house windows, and felt superior. Sure, you might have come across the occasional Confederate flag at U.Va. too, but they were hardly ubiquitous and were usually met with a roll of the eyes. In the Deep South, the shadowy side is actually out in the sunlight. Thomas Jefferson’s U.Va. prefers the shadows to be in the shadows.

Over the past few months, I’ve spoken to students and administrators at U.Va., and to many of the school’s alumni. They described a feeling of deep exhaustion. I have also spoken to people who were close to Jackie, the woman at the heart of the Rolling Stone story, and who were willing to address on the record for the first time how the story came together, now that the official police investigation has concluded. These young women are exhausted, too, as well as confused and angry. Visiting U.Va., you can’t escape a beleaguered defensiveness. When I walked onto the front porch of Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity at the heart of the Rolling Stone story, one of the brothers politely gave me the name of the fraternity’s public-relations representative and said that he and others had been instructed not to talk to anyone. The notion of college kids’ being fluent in the art of public-relations deflection saddened me. But it seemed fitting, given the horrors of the year that had just ended.
II. Jackie’s Story

At the end of the third week of classes, in the early-morning hours of Saturday, September 13, 2014, an 18-year-old student at the university, Hannah Graham, texted her friends: “I’m coming to a party … but I’m lost.” It was the last anyone heard from her that night, or the next day—or ever. On Sunday, the police were notified. On Monday, the university’s president, Teresa Sullivan, issued a statement expressing “deep concern.” On Thursday, the police released a surveillance video of Graham and a black man walking separately on Charlottesville’s downtown pedestrian mall, and that night students held a vigil. Graham was freckled and blue-eyed. She had studied abroad and was on U.Va.’s alpine-ski and snowboard team. Many people I spoke to about the episode followed it like a grim soap opera, relating emotionally to Hannah and her parents.

Students felt unsafe. No one wanted to walk alone from the libraries. The case became even more emotionally charged when, on September 23, an African-American man who worked at the U.Va. medical center, Jesse Matthew Jr., 32, was identified as a suspect in Graham’s disappearance. The next day, Matthew was arrested and charged with abduction with “intent to defile” in the Graham case. In early October, with Hannah still missing, Hannah’s parents delivered a tearful, televised plea for her safe return. The divide between Jefferson’s privileged university and the neighborhoods that surround it moved from the back of students’ minds to the front. “We saw Charlottesville breaking into the world of U.Va.,” one student told me.

On October 18, five weeks after Graham had disappeared, Kevin Spacey was in Charlottesville to give a speech on the arts, the second in a series inaugurated a year earlier by Tina Fey. The much-anticipated Spacey event was to start at six P.M., in the John Paul Jones Arena, named for the father of hedge-fund manager and U.Va. alumnus Paul Tudor Jones II. Spacey took the stage, but members of the audience were distracted by something else: the police had found remains that would turn out to be those of Hannah Graham. Jesse Matthew Jr. was charged with her murder and will face the death penalty when he goes on trial next July. (In June of this year, Matthew was found guilty of attempted murder and sexual assault of a young woman in Fairfax, Virginia, in 2005. He faces up to three life sentences. And forensic evidence links him to the 2009 slaying of 20-year-old Virginia Tech student Morgan Harrington.)

The search for Hannah Graham was still in full swing when another series of events began to roil the campus. Emily Renda, who had graduated from U.Va. in the spring of 2014 and taken a job at the university as the project coordinator for sexual-misconduct prevention, would find herself in the middle of them. Renda had arrived at U.Va. in August 2010, planning to major in religious or environmental studies. “I thought I was going to be a pastor or a park ranger,” she recalls. Her path was deflected by a sexual assault six weeks into her first year. Those first three months of college are a period that some experts refer to as the Red Zone, when new students are most vulnerable to sexual assault as well as accidents due to alcohol abuse. Renda told me she had let her perpetrator walk her home after a party, and he suggested they go back to his room until she sobered up. She agreed, and what happened next shaped the rest of her college experience.

Renda’s assault involved “pushing, hitting, and punching,” elements that, she explained, later helped her realize that the incident was not her fault. She didn’t report the assault initially, and listed for me the reasons why not: “I didn’t want to ruin someone else’s life. It was a mistake. This person had parents, too. It wasn’t worth it.” She became an intern at the university Women’s Center and an advocate for sexual-assault survivors. She also became involved in the school’s annual Take Back the Night events, whose centerpiece is a candlelight vigil during which sexual-assault survivors can speak out about their experiences. By the time Renda was ready to report to the university what had happened, her alleged attacker had transferred to a different school and the issue was moot. Under federal Title IX legislation, colleges and universities are required to have procedures in place to adjudicate all such complaints. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, in 2015 U.Va. was one of 106 colleges and universities across the country with open Title IX sexual-violence investigations. Renda never considered going to the police or the courts, believing that she didn’t have the kind of evidence she needed for a successful prosecution.

In the spring of her final year, 2014, Renda was nearly finished with her major in sociology and had been accepted to a joint law-school and master’s-in-public-health program at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins. That was when, through her work with the sexual-assault-prevention community, she met a young woman at the university named Jackie. It was a fateful encounter. Jackie told Renda that she had been raped during her first year at U.Va., in 2012, by multiple assailants. Renda says that the conversation between the two women focused primarily on the unsupportive reactions that Jackie said she had received from friends and family, not on the alleged assault itself. Renda elected to stay at U.Va. as an intern in the Office of Student Affairs. In June 2014, Renda testified before a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and used Jackie’s story to underscore the need for increased reporting of sexual assault. She referred to Jackie anonymously and told lawmakers that Jackie didn’t report her assault until almost a year after it happened “because immediately after the attack she confided in peers who did not believe her,” a reaction that meant that the young men she claimed had attacked her “went unpunished and remained a threat to the other students throughout that year.”

Another young woman drawn into Jackie’s orbit was Alex Pinkleton, who had come to the university in 2012. Pinkleton sailed through the Red Zone with no problem, but in November of her second year, she says, she was sexually assaulted at a party. She had been drinking, and all she remembers is eventually coming to, naked, with a friend’s friend on top of her, and asking him what had happened. She put on her clothes and walked out. Afterward, she tried to joke about it but grew increasingly uncomfortable. She says the young man she had had sex with later told her, via a private Facebook message, that she had been so drunk she had forgotten his name four times in the course of the evening. The two ran into each other at parties and were, in Pinkleton’s telling, hostile to each other. Eventually, she says, she talked about the incident with Nicole Eramo, U.Va.’s associate dean of students and the school administrator responsible for handling sexual-assault complaints. Eramo asked Pinkleton if she felt safe, how she was doing emotionally, and if she wanted to pursue a formal or informal complaint through the university system, or instead wished to report the incident to the police. Pinkleton told Eramo she didn’t know what she wanted to do and deferred any decision.

In February 2014, as Pinkleton was walking out of the bathroom in New Cabell Hall, a 1950s-era brick building with classrooms and faculty offices, a young woman stopped her. It was Jackie. Because of her role in One Less, a student sexual-assault-education group, Pinkleton was well known as a victims’ advocate. Jackie told Pinkleton her story—which allegedly involved being raped by multiple perpetrators—and asked Pinkleton about her own history. The discussion, again, focused not on the details of any assault on Jackie but on the reaction from friends and family afterward; on how to feel safe; and on what action she might take to help the healing process, such as an adjudication through U.Va. The two women ultimately agreed to make their accounts public at the next Take Back the Night rally. “We decided, ‘If you do it, I’ll do it,’ ” Pinkleton remembers. They did speak at the event, but Pinkleton says Jackie offered few details about the assault itself—it was very much in the background.

That was the state of affairs when, on July 8, 2014, after most of her fellow class-of-2014 graduates had left Charlottesville, Emily Renda received a phone call from a woman named Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a writer for Rolling Stone magazine. According to her notes—as laid out in a report by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which Rolling Stone asked to investigate its article after serious questions about it arose—Erdely was intending to write about rape at colleges and universities and was looking for an emblematic case that would show what it is like to be on a college campus today—where, in her view, sexual harassment and assault were so prevalent as to constitute a “rape culture.” Renda was soon to begin a new job at the university. “She was talking broadly about rape culture, and we talked about whether it was even an appropriate term,” Renda recalled, adding, “I think it is divisive”—her argument being that it makes the conversation immediately contentious when it doesn’t need to be, and therefore makes finding a response all the harder. The conversation ranged from psychology and advocacy to policy and law. Renda remembers speaking to Erdely for “four very unpleasant hours about my own experience.” In the end, Renda directed Erdely to five women, all of whom had very different stories to tell. Jackie’s was meant to represent the invalidating responses women often get from their friends and family. Another woman had successfully prosecuted her rapist through the criminal-justice system. Yet another had received protective orders through the school. She also put Erdely in touch with another woman, who had gone through the school process.

Erdely contacted multiple women but evidently came to view Jackie’s story as the most dramatic. (Erdely, through a Rolling Stone spokeswoman, has declined to comment for this story.) The next time Renda spoke with Erdely, in August, Renda learned that the writer was focusing her article narrowly on the alleged gang rape of Jackie. Renda says she regarded Erdely’s journalistic focus on a single extreme episode as misleading—an outlier, even if true. She told Erdely that Jackie’s story “wasn’t representative of campus rape as a whole.” Much of Renda’s work involved speaking to students whose cases do not include explicit violence, that occur in the context of a lot of drinking and between people who already know each other. Even though Renda didn’t have the details of Jackie’s story, she was aware that it allegedly included multiple assailants, and she worried that it could make the experience of other victims, whose stories weren’t nearly as dramatic and yet were personally devastating, seem almost trivial by comparison.

Erdely, meanwhile, had been in touch with Jackie by e-mail, and on July 14 they spoke on the phone. According to Erdely’s notes, Jackie seems to have shared her rape story with Erdely in a way she never had with Renda or Pinkleton. A fellow lifeguard, given the name “Drew,” had invited her to her first fraternity party, and after midnight he led her upstairs. As reported in Rolling Stone:

“My eyes were adjusting to the dark. And I said his name and turned around…. I heard voices and I started to scream and someone pummeled into me and told me to shut up. And that’s when I tripped and fell against the coffee table and it smashed underneath me and this other boy, who was throwing his weight on top of me. Then one of them grabbed my shoulders…. One of them put his hand over my mouth and I bit him—and he straight-up punched me in the face…. One of them said, ‘Grab its motherf*cking leg.’ As soon as they said it, I knew they were going to rape me.”

Jackie’s account was graphic. She described the lifeguard’s coaching seven other young men as they raped her, seemingly as part of a fraternity pledge ritual. “Don’t you want to be a brother?” one of the young men asked another who had hesitated. Erdely told the Columbia investigators that she had been “sickened and shaken” after the call, even though she was also “a bit incredulous” about some of the details, such as a glass table shattering under Jackie as the first rapist assaulted her. The article, published in the fall, described U.Va. as an institution so defined by rape culture that women had taken to calling it “UVrApe.” Erdely portrayed U.Va. as a place that discouraged the reporting of sexual assault and infantilized survivors by telling them to focus on healing rather than justice. In the article, Nicole Eramo, the associate dean of students who served as a counselor to sexual-assault survivors, was quoted as responding this way to a question posed by Jackie about why U.Va. statistics on rape were hard to find: “Because nobody wants to send their daughter to the rape school.”

In the fall of 2014, Pinkleton felt she had somehow become a main pillar of support for Jackie as she navigated the process of telling her story publicly to a reporter for a national magazine. In Pinkleton’s recollection, Jackie appeared increasingly distressed. “She would message me at four A.M.,” Pinkleton told me. To give Jackie someone else to talk to, Pinkleton introduced her to Sara Surface, a fellow U.Va. student and a co-selection chair for One Less. The three women met in September at Para Coffee, on the Corner, the commercial strip of shops and bars where U.Va. students regularly socialize. They sat outside, and, Pinkleton says, Jackie shared certain general elements of her story with Surface, though not in anything like as much detail as she had with Sabrina Rubin Erdely. Jackie was talkative and friendly but appeared anxious about the upcoming Rolling Stone article. “I don’t think she fully grasped how big the article would become, but she was worried about it,” Pinkleton recalled. Pinkleton was worried, too. “The extra stress on someone who had been gang-raped by tons of people would be a reason someone might do something dramatic,” Pinkleton told me. “I was worried she would kill herself.”

Erdely arrived in Charlottesville for interviews two days before Hannah Graham went missing. Pinkleton told me Jackie met with Erdely alone, and then the three of them had dinner the night Graham disappeared. By that time Erdely had been reaching out to various administrators and students at U.Va. but making little headway. The administration seemed to be media-shy—a consequence, possibly, of ugly events in 2012, when some high-profile members of the Board of Visitors had led a failed coup against the university’s president, Teresa Sullivan. But it was also preoccupied: Around this time, Erdely “called to complain that no one was talking to her,” Renda told me. President Sullivan had postponed phone interviews with Erdely. Renda thought at the time, Do you know we have a student missing and an all-out manhunt for her?

There was another reason the U.Va. administration may have seemed guarded. Word was getting around—based on the nature of Erdely’s questioning and her apparent disdain for university officials—that the article was likely to be deeply critical of the administration’s handling of sexual-assault cases. “People thought it was best not to talk to her, because anything you told her was not going to be fairly represented,” Renda told me. This made Erdely’s reporting all the more difficult. At that point, Renda felt hesitant about continuing to speak to Erdely, and told me she emphasized to the reporter that anything she said reflected nothing more than her own personal experience—that she didn’t have access to case files from Jackie’s discussions with Dean Eramo or any other U.Va. administrators, could not have shared them even if she did, and knew only what Jackie was telling her. “I knew so little about the actual story,” Renda explained—meaning the specific details of the alleged gang rape.

Skeptical of U.Va. officials, Erdely appears to have relied increasingly on Jackie and her circle of supporters, but her friends knew only what they had been told, which was relatively little and not always the same thing. Although Jackie had told Erdely her story in graphic detail, she wasn’t always eager to maintain contact with the reporter. Jackie seems to have cut off contact with Erdely, or tried to. At one point, Renda says, she received an e-mail from Erdely asking if she had heard from Jackie lately, because Erdely hadn’t. After getting Erdely’s message, Renda contacted Jackie directly and told her that if the story was becoming too much she could drop out of participation at any time. Jackie told Renda that she was fine—just stressed out by school. Jackie wavered on whether she should name the fraternity explicitly. Pinkleton felt that Erdely was trying to manipulate Jackie into cooperating, though Pinkleton’s view of the dynamics would gradually become more complicated. Pinkleton remembers contacting Erdely on one occasion to tell her that Jackie didn’t want her name in the story. Erdely called back, confused, saying she had just spoken to Jackie, who did want her name in the story. “At first I thought Sabrina was manipulating us,” Pinkleton told me. Later, after everything unraveled, she came to a different conclusion: “Jackie was manipulating us as well.”

In October, according to Pinkleton, arguments and tensions mounted among Jackie, Surface, Pinkleton, and Erdely. Surface and Pinkleton were trying to shield Jackie, or help Jackie shield herself. For her part, Jackie seemed uncertain about how she wanted to be represented in the story. She went from not wanting to be named at all to agreeing to the use of just her first name. Pinkleton said, “She started evading questions from us and confessing more to Sabrina.” And Pinkleton went on: “I just feel like she really started telling us things that didn’t make sense. We offered her help in standing up to Sabrina, but she didn’t want it.” Pinkleton noted a few worrying signs as the story was closing and Rolling Stone was calling to confirm various pieces of information: “I remember telling the fact-checkers that ‘UVrApe’ was nothing I had ever heard of.” Other rape-prevention advocates at the school had never heard the term, either.
III. The Unraveling

The week the Rolling Stone story came out, the four women—Renda, Surface, Pinkleton, and Jackie—were scrambling to prepare for what they suspected would be a bombshell. On Tuesday, November 18, a friend of Sara Surface’s found a copy of the magazine on a newsstand. The friend took pictures of the pages with her cell phone and sent them to Surface, who downloaded them onto a laptop. All four women had been anticipating the story for months. Some of them had come to distrust Erdely. Nobody wanted to read it alone. They wanted to see one another’s reactions and talk about it afterward. “Everybody come to my apartment now,” texted Renda. She lived off campus, far enough away from most student housing to feel truly removed. Everyone arrived right away. “We were really nervous, and we knew it was going to be really bad,” Pinkleton told me. Bad for U.Va. and bad for Dean Eramo, whom the women, save perhaps Jackie, regarded as a mentor.

Once the women had gathered, Renda read the story aloud, detail by harrowing detail. Jackie was identified by her first name only, and the leader of her alleged rapists, as noted, was given the pseudonym “Drew.” Three allegedly unsympathetic friends whom Jackie had sought out in the aftermath of the attack were also given pseudonyms—“Cindy,” “Randall,” and “Andy.” Renda read aloud the story of Jackie’s brutal gang rape at the hands of seven men at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house. She read aloud how, after the attack, her friends and U.Va. officials had discouraged Jackie from reporting the incident to the police or the university. As some of the women had feared, Dean Eramo became the face of an administration that was depicted as unsympathetic and indifferent to a pervasive rape culture.

As Pinkleton listened to the horrific details, she said, she thought, Oh, I didn’t hear that, and Oh, I didn’t know that. While they were aware of the outlines of the story, much of the specific information was being imparted to them for the first time. Looking back on it now, Pinkleton remembers that Jackie seemed upset as Renda read the story but did not break down. At one point, Pinkleton reached over to pat Jackie’s back to comfort her. Renda told me that hearing the story read aloud was “like being hit over the head with a baseball bat,” because the details of Jackie’s rape were so shocking and because the dean had been treated so unfairly. After Renda finished reading, Jackie’s boyfriend, who had driven her to Renda’s apartment, took her home. Once Jackie had departed, the three women left behind looked at one another, realizing that there was a lot they didn’t know about what had happened to Jackie. And maybe a lot they didn’t know about Jackie.

The next day, “A Rape on Campus” was on nearly every laptop before, during, and after classes at U.Va. There were countless “I stand with Jackie” messages on Facebook, Yik Yak, and other social media. There was a lot of anger at Jackie’s friends—“Cindy,” “Randall,” and “Andy”—who were portrayed as unsupportive in Rolling Stone. Renda described to me the protests that followed the story. Vandals painted UVA CENTER FOR RAPE STUDIES on the side of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house. They threw rocks through the windows. The Phi Kappa Psi brothers moved out. Especially distressing to Renda was a sign she saw at a protest march: PROTECT OUR WOMEN. The sign seemed to epitomize all the “damsel in distress” tropes that women like Renda had been trying to dispel—a difficult task anywhere but particularly at a place like U.Va., with its ethic, in some quarters, of chivalrous paternalism. “I remember feeling really overwhelmed and like this was going to set back all the positive work that had been done,” Renda told me. There were only two types of women in Erdely’s story, she explained: bimbos and victims. “There were no women of agency,” she said. One key issue from Renda’s perspective was that much of her work had been trying to help women who had suffered a much less violent, much less dramatic version of Jackie’s story—the so-called gray area of rape, one that, Renda says, is all too common at U.Va. and other college campuses. For her part, Pinkleton was annoyed that she and Surface weren’t identified as working to prevent sexual assault at U.Va., nor was anyone else. Erdely “acted like there were no feminists or anyone supporting survivors,” Pinkleton told me. Pinkleton was also upset that Erdely “had destroyed the administration’s credibility and said”—falsely—“that there is no one at this school who will listen to your story and believe you.”

Jackie’s circle of supporters were in an unenviable situation. They ostensibly knew more than anyone about what had happened to Jackie—but began to appreciate that they really didn’t know what they knew, or whether what they thought they knew was true. At some point during the two weeks that followed the story’s publication, Jackie told Pinkleton and Surface what she claimed to be the real name of “Drew,” the alleged ringleader of her rape. Pinkleton says that, when she and Surface looked him up, they realized he didn’t fit the story. There was no one by his name who was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. Then it began to get worse: a Washington Post reporter, T. Rees Shapiro—one of the many reporters who had descended on U.Va.—was attempting to speak to the student Jackie identified as “Drew.” “We realized the chances of it happening at Phi Kappa Psi at that point were slim to none,” said Pinkleton. And they realized that they had, in Pinkleton’s words, a “moral obligation” to tell Shapiro about discrepancies in Jackie’s story. Sara Surface added, “At a certain point Alex and I had to start making decisions about Jackie versus every other survivor in our cause. It wasn’t a distinction that we as advocates ever thought we would need to make.”

On Tuesday, December 2, two weeks after the Rolling Stone story’s release, Surface and Pinkleton had dinner with Jackie and told her they were concerned that the person Jackie had identified to them didn’t match the description of the Drew character named in the story. Pinkleton says that Jackie avoided answering their questions. She began to cry and told them she was stressed and tired and overwhelmed. On Thursday, December 4, Surface and Pinkleton met with Shapiro, the Post reporter, and essentially compared notes. They had all identified what seemed like discrepancies in Jackie’s story. “We just sat there, like, ‘Holy shit—what is going on?,’ ” Pinkleton told me. “Meanwhile, Sara and I are, minds blown, but we also felt like we had betrayed her. Did we just have it wrong?”

Later that Thursday was the traditional “Lighting of the Lawn,” when students string lights, sing, play music, and have a party. Pinkleton, Surface, and Renda missed the lighting and instead met with Jackie at her apartment. “We needed to tell her that the Washington Post article was coming out and destroying her story the very next day, because we didn’t want mental-breakdown suicide going on,” Pinkleton told me. The meeting included a university-affiliated counselor in the event some sort of emergency arose.

“We all got together to say, ‘Jackie, this is what’s coming. How are you going to prepare for this?,’ ” Renda told me. What was coming, they feared, was a virulent backlash against a false accusation—and an onslaught of victim blaming. The women wanted to support Jackie, because they sensed that what was about to follow would be difficult. They also, gingerly, wanted to get some explanations for the inconsistencies in her story. They told her that the Post story would be out soon, and she said she knew. Pinkleton lost her temper. She told Jackie she should stop thinking about herself and start thinking about the damage a discredited story would do to the movement against sexual assault. Pinkleton told me that the conversation was heated and that she doesn’t remember what everyone said, but she does remember that at one point Jackie, frustrated, told them: “I don’t even know why I talk to you guys anymore. Sara and Alex, you all have been such shitty friends lately.” The women told Jackie that Shapiro had offered her one last chance to tell him what really happened.

Later that night they met with Shapiro in an academic building, where Jackie repeated her story again, including details such as the color of the alarm clock. To Pinkleton, the level of detail about the room seemed unusually vivid. Jackie was adamant: what she had told Erdely was what really happened. “That is my story,” Jackie said.

That night, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who had been engaged in her own effort to find Drew and who had just spoken to Jackie, called Pinkleton at one A.M. “I need to hear from you if her story was true,” she said, in Pinkleton’s recollection. “And I just said, ‘I don’t think you should have written the article.’ ” The following morning, December 5, Pinkleton said, she received another call from Erdely. “ ‘I’m writing the retraction right now. I just need to hear one more time what you think,’ ” Pinkleton told me. “She started bawling and said, ‘I am going to lose my job.’ ” That same day, The Washington Post wrote that Phi Kappa Psi said that it had not held an event the night of Jackie’s alleged rape, and that the “friends” who had spoken to Jackie then had heard details of her attack that differed from what was in the Rolling Stone article. Rolling Stone’s managing editor, Will Dana, issued a statement later that day in which the magazine admitted to mistakes in the story and apologized to readers. Dana would leave the magazine in August.

In the next week, the Post identified further holes in the story. The friends of Jackie’s provided Shapiro with text messages from Jackie that made it seem that she may have simply invented the Drew character in the Rolling Stone article. Some speculated about another source for certain details in Jackie’s account: in 2011, a U.Va. alumna named Liz Seccuro published a book in which she described how, as a student in 1984, in the midst of a date function at Phi Kappa Psi, she had ventured upstairs, been drugged, dragged into a room, and raped repeatedly.

Eramo has sued Erdely and Rolling Stone for nearly $8 million for the way she is described and quoted in the story, which she has claimed is false and defamatory. Three Phi Kappa Psi brothers, one of whom lived in a second-floor bedroom of the fraternity house, have sued Rolling Stone and Erdely for causing them “mental anguish and severe emotional distress,” even though none were named in Erdely’s story. Renda and Pinkleton, not to mention Jackie, have all been personally attacked by media outlets for their role in the article.

Shortly after the publication of Rolling Stone’s statement, Jackie vanished. Renda, Surface, and Pinkleton have not heard from her in the nine months since her story fell apart. Approached through her attorney, Jackie has declined to answer questions. For Renda, the rest of the year has been “all hell and hopelessness.” The experience has made her abandon the idea of working with sexual-assault survivors, she told me. She is headed to law school—electing to go to Berkeley, as far away from U.Va. as she can get. “I don’t want to say it’s been the worst year of my life, but it has been the worst year of my life.”
IV. “Farm Equipment”

When the Rolling Stone story appeared, my U.Va. friends and I were transfixed by it—and took the account at face value. There was a reason for that. Extreme as Jackie’s story was, it touched on something recognizable about U.Va. While a fraternity pledging ritual that involved gang rape was shocking, there were certain aspects of U.Va.—in its history and its rituals—that could be characterized as debauched, dehumanizing, or just plain bizarre.

When I was applying to college, my brother, who had gone to Princeton, was in his first year at U.Va. law school. My mother told me she thought I’d like the young women better at U.Va. than at Princeton, and I applied early and was accepted. I arrived with a flowered bedspread and a curling iron. I dressed up for football games and, in the spring of my first year, pledged a sorority. We attended fraternity mixers where we drank “grain punch” scooped from a garbage can. I heard stories of fraternity hazing and secret societies. On the night I was inducted into Tri Delt, we drank a lot and wore blindfolds, and I think we may have had to wear our bras outside our blouses, but only for a short time, and only in the company of our sorority sisters. Any hazing was halfhearted. There was no forced vomiting or the occasional simulated fellatio on bottles—as there was, however, for the women’s society at U.Va. known as Thursdays, a “secret” society that was essentially a drinking club. There was no staged fighting or bodily penetration with fruit—as I had heard about, however, from friends in the male drinking society known as Eli Banana, which at one point in the late 19th century was disbanded for its behavior (but then allowed to re-materialize). On bid night—when secret societies tap their initiates—some of the drinking societies have been known to gather privately in a basement for a cockfight. This is the kind of atmosphere where someone could be forgiven for thinking that misogynistic or violent episodes might occur.

“Pimps and Hos” mixers between fraternities and sororities were still pretty common when I was a student, and when I started reporting this story I was certain that I didn’t know anyone who had been sexually assaulted at U.Va. That changed within hours of calling friends, and I came to understand that what passed for a “bad hookup” when I was in college is today what we would rightly call rape—which was precisely Renda’s point. We just weren’t talking much about any of it. When we did talk about it, we tried to laugh it off. I’m sure this is true at most colleges. But U.Va. has a particularly challenging past. It was among the last of the flagship state universities in the country to become co-educational (in 1970), and did so even then under the threat of a federal lawsuit. When women were first admitted, U.Va. men referred to female classmates as “U-bags.”

An act of violence was responsible for the creation of the vaunted Honor System in the first place. During a disturbance in 1840, a masked student shot and killed a professor who had tried to restore order. The Honor System at U.Va., today overseen by a 27-student Honor Committee, grew out of that incident: students agreed to “vouch” for one another and to voluntarily report episodes of misbehavior. Since 1998, U.Va. has expelled 187 students for lying, cheating, or stealing, but not a single person has been kicked out for sexual assault. The deliberations are confidential, and there have been allegations both of vigilante justice and of a double standard at play. In 1990, The Washington Post, in an article exploring the Honor System, reported that in 1988 J. Brady Lum, the Honor Committee chair at the time, was accused of plagiarism in a letter he wrote to incoming students introducing them, ironically, to the Honor System. He was cleared by an investigation. Lum’s successor, Lonnie Chafin, had been convicted of an assault involving the Charlottesville police. He was voted off the Honor Committee but not expelled from the university.

The opening pages of the Rolling Stone story.

The Columbia report on the Rolling Stone article, which found failures at all levels of the magazine’s editorial process, was made public in early April. By then the university was caught up in yet another controversy. The day after Saint Patrick’s Day, U.Va. students started seeing a cell-phone video from the night before pop up in their social-media feeds. It showed a fellow U.Va. student, Martese Johnson, who is black, lying on the pavement outside a bar on the Corner, his face bloodied, with two white A.B.C. agents on his back. He kept yelling, “I go to U.Va.!” It was a linguistic amulet that was both heartbreaking and ineffective.

The issue of race has never been faced squarely by the university, just as Jefferson never faced it squarely. Johnson is an honor student, heavily involved in extra-curricular activities, and one of only two African-Americans on the Honor Committee. Virginia’s population is 20 percent black, but the percentage of African-American students at U.Va. has dropped from 12 percent in the 1990s to around 6 percent today.

Most black U.Va. students I spoke to told me that they face a choice when they arrive in Charlottesville. They have to decide whether they want to be part of the black culture of U.Va.—which has its own sororities and fraternities, its own clubs, and, effectively, because of self-segregation, historically, even its own bus stop—or be part of the white culture, which entails joining predominantly white organizations such as the predominantly white fraternities and sororities and the predominantly white debating societies and other clubs. U.Va. throws a “spring fling” for incoming black students, hosted by the office of admissions. “A lot of African-Americans come with a bit of apprehension as to whether there is a place for them” at an institution with “a southern, white, aristocratic history,” Vendarryl Jenkins, an African-American second-year student, told me. The spring fling is designed to show “there is a community here for you.”

The white and black communities don’t mix much. Memories of those “Pimps and Hos” mixers can’t help. Jenkins told me of the night last fall when Martese Johnson, who happened to be a friend of his, was tapped to be a member of the secret society IMP. Not many African-Americans are tapped for secret societies, but Johnson brought Jenkins and a few other black friends to the party for new members. At first, everyone, black and white, was in the main room of the house hosting the party, listening to music together and dancing. “As the party continued, a slow separation began to take form,” Jenkins later wrote in an unpublished account of that night, which he shared with me. “Black students remained in the main room, lights off, blasting hip-hop, and dancing jovially in celebration.” The white students migrated into a separate room, brought up the lights, and turned on Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” “with the door shut.”

Last December, black students at U.Va. protested the decision not to indict a police officer involved in the death of Eric Garner, an African-American who died on Staten Island after police arrested him for selling loose cigarettes and the officer held him in a choke hold. Among other things, the black students marched through the university’s libraries. Virulently racist messages soon appeared on Yik Yak. “I hope the people who protested ride back home on the back of the bus,” one commenter wrote. Another, referring to the protesters as if they were field slaves on a plantation, wrote, “Did anyone just see all that farm equipment walk through Clemons?” Jenkins told me, “That is what people are saying in private. It’s not what you see on a tour of grounds.” All this occurred before Martese Johnson was turned away from a bar on the Corner and found himself set upon by law-enforcement officers. Johnson spent several hours in jail and was released that morning. All charges against him have since been dropped. No charges were lodged against the A.B.C. agents. A crucial six-minute segment of a police surveillance video had apparently gone missing.

There is a temptation among many in Charlottesville to blame the national media for the sheer intensity of this year’s events, and it’s certainly true that the continual presence of camera crews has not been a positive inducement. Others voice what I think of as the Pantene theory of U.Va.’s situation: some people dislike the school in part because it’s beautiful. If nothing else, the year has been hard to explain and translate to outsiders. One student told me about a conversation she had had with a former high-school teacher. “How’s U.Va.?” he asked her. The student replied, “What do you want to talk about—murder, rape, or beating?” For all that, students I spoke to said time and again that they loved U.Va. I can understand why. Though fraternities and sororities dominate the popular image of the school, only 30 percent of students participate in Greek life. Two of the most prestigious and secret of the secret societies, the Sevens and the Z’s, are primarily philanthropic in nature, not sowers of drunken discord. An active minority, a layer of elites within the university’s elite clubs and other institutions, sets an inescapable school-wide tone, but a great variety of experiences are available to students at U.Va., and there are many communities to join. The people I met there remain some of my dearest friends today.

But the university is also a petri dish of issues facing society at large, and a little more intensely so, given its location and its special history. The events of the past year forced a reckoning of sorts, and some students and professors I spoke to said they were optimistic that the trauma would bring positive changes: it’s an example of that Cavalier instinct to look for solutions. But the feeling was by no means universal. In one dialogue group that Jenkins moderated last semester, a young woman said to him, “I just want everything to go back to normal.” A return to normal is not what U.Va. needs. Normal is part of the problem. It was Jefferson himself who said that he liked the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. If there’s anything U.Va. should be able to get behind, it’s a directive from Mr. Jefferson.
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http://www.newsadvance.com/opinion/editorials/make-uva-rolling-stone-abc-reports-public/article_1645d2ec-58be-11e5-8acd-dffa1ebf6d53.html

Make UVa 'Rolling Stone,' ABC Reports Public

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD | Posted: Sunday, September 13, 2015 4:00 am

Moviegoers know the final scene from “Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Arc” by heart.

The camera is focused tightly on a man placing a lid over a wooden crate marked “Top Secret” containing the Arc of the Covenant, hammering it shut. Then, we see him pushing the hand cart with the Arc as the camera slowly pulls out to reveal a giant warehouse, filled floor to ceiling with other wooden crates, all marked “Top Secret.” The worker takes a left turn down an aisle and vanishes as the credits begin to roll.

Sometimes, life imitates art, and this is one of those times.

Sitting somewhere in Richmond, likely locked away in a lawyer’s office or on a password-protected computer, are two documents all Virginians should have access to but don’t because some government bureaucrat or some politician doesn’t want the information getting out.

We’re talking about a $550,000 report the University of Virginia hired a top Washington, D.C., law firm to compile examining the university’s handling of the incident that led to the now-discredited Rolling Stone expose, “A Rape on Campus,” and the investigation Gov. Terry McAuliffe ordered into how agents of the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control handled an encounter with a UVa student earlier this year in March.

The news media has been pushing for release of both reports, but so far to no avail.

In the case of the UVa Rolling Stone report, state and university officials want it to be available to the public. That way, they argue, the public can see that university officials responded properly from Day One in their first encounter with the student claiming some sort of sexual assault had taken place. The Rolling Stone article explicitly accused UVa officials of all but ignoring the student’s claims, in violation of state and federal law; the UVa-commissioned report would refute that point by point.

The ABC report stems from a March 17 encounter between an African-American UVa student and ABC agents that went terribly wrong. Thinking Martese Johnson possessed a fake ID, agents threw him to the sidewalk and took him into custody. Cellphone video and photos of a bloodied Johnson went viral online, igniting a firestorm of criticism of the agency.

Gov. McAuliffe immediately ordered an independent review of the agents’ actions, and it’s that report now being withheld from the public. The Charlottesville commonwealth’s attorney declined to prosecute charges against Johnson, and the ABC later said its agents had not violated any regulations.

In the case of the UVa Rolling Stone report, it’s the federal Department of Education blocking release, based on concerns for the privacy of students mentioned. The Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act forbids any willful violation of a student’s privacy. McAuliffe and state lawyers are blocking release of the ABC report on the grounds that it deals solely with a personnel matter, an often-used exemption in the state’s Freedom of Information Act.

In both instances, the information being kept behind government lock and key deserves to be in the public realm.

Lawyers could easily redact any names and identifying information from the UVa Rolling Stone report to meet the Education Department’s FERPA concerns. Regarding the ABC report, no such redactions of the agents’ names should be done; this is an agency that has been under fire for poor training and lax oversight for years.

These two reports go to the heart of the public’s right to know how its government is operating. Is it behaving properly? Are laws and regulations being carried out as they should? Are government agents being held to the high standards the law requires?

If the public doesn’t have the information necessary to properly assess government’s performance, we all suffer. To Gov. McAuliffe we say, “Release the ABC report … now.” To UVa, its lawyers and the Office of the Attorney General, we say, “Press the Education Department to stop blocking any dissemination of the Rolling Stone report.”

Good government is in the balance.
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http://dailycaller.com/2015/09/12/rolling-stone-reporter-cried-over-false-gang-rape-article-but-for-selfish-reasons/

Rolling Stone Reporter Cried Over False Gang-Rape Article, But For Selfish Reasons

Posted By Chuck Ross On 12:56 PM 09/12/2015 In | No Comments

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For Sabrina Rubin Erdely, it’s all about her.

The disgraced author of a retracted Rolling Stone article about a gang-rape at the University of Virginia reportedly sobbed to one of her sources in the weeks after the story fell apart. But Erdely wasn’t upset because her 9,000-word piece, “A Rape on Campus,” had falsely accused a UVA fraternity of a gruesome gang-rape of a female student.

Instead, Erdely was worried about her career.

“She started bawling and said, ‘I am going to lose my job,'” Alex Pinkelton, a source of Erdely’s, told Vanity Fair in a new tick-tock about the fallout from the article.

Pinkleton was friends at UVA with a student named Jackie, whose story of a vicious gang attack in Sept. 2012 served as the centerpiece of Erdely’s article.

Jackie told Erdely that as a freshman at UVA, she was gang-raped by seven members of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity during a pledge ritual at a house party. She also claimed that her friends and school administrators failed to help her.

The article drew national attention and stirred widespread outrage after it was published on Nov. 19. UVA students vandalized the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house, forcing members to move out. University president Teresa Sullivan suspended all Greek life activity as the school investigated the article’s claims.

But by early December, Jackie’s friends were telling reporters that her story didn’t add up. They also questioned Erdely’s reporting methods.

According to the Vanity Fair piece, on Dec. 4, Jackie’s friends, including Pinkleton, met with Jackie to tell her that The Washington Post’s T. Rees Shapiro was set to publish a bombshell article which would obliterate her story.

Jackie was defiant, and told Pinkleton and the others who met with her that they were “shitty friends.”

Erdely, who was re-investigating parts of the story, had been in touch with Jackie, and then contacted Pinkleton.

“I need to hear from you if her story was true,” Erdely said, the student recalled.

“And I just said, ‘I don’t think you should have written the article,'” Pinkleton told Vanity Fair. The article continues:

The following morning, December 5, Pinkleton said, she received another call from Erdely. “‘I’m writing the retraction right now. I just need to hear one more time what you think,'” Pinkleton told me. “She started bawling and said, ‘I am going to lose my job.'”

Erdely never did lose her job, even after Rolling Stone retracted the article. She kept the job even after the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism published a report that detailed her and magazine editors’ numerous failures in allowing the shoddy story to go to print. (RELATED: Where In The World Is Disgraced Rolling Stone Reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely?)

The Columbia report faulted Erdely for failing at the basics of journalism. She published the story without even knowing the real name of a fraternity member Jackie claimed coordinated her gang-rape. She also gave the leaders of Phi Kappa Psi no detailed information about Jackie’s allegation. When they were unable to deny that the incident occurred, Erdely portrayed it as an indication of guilt.

Erdely also failed to contact three friends of Jackie’s who she claimed met with her shortly after her alleged rape. Jackie portrayed those friends as callous and uncaring, and Erdely took her word for it. The friends later came forward and cast further doubt on Erdely and Jackie, telling The Post that their friend’s story had changed dramatically over time.

The debacle has put Rolling Stone in a bad spot, however. A UVA dean, Nicole Eramo, is suing Rolling Stone for nearly $8 million for her negative portrayal in the piece. Erdely accused Eramo of failing to help Jackie after she told her about the gang-rape. But as an investigation by local police proved, Eramo sought to help Jackie, but the fabulist refused to go forward with a criminal case against her alleged attackers. Three former Phi Kappa Psi fraternity members are also suing the magazine. (RELATED: Three Members Of Falsely Accused Fraternity Sue Rolling Stone After Fabricated Article)

Erdely has not appeared in print or in the media eye since her article fell apart. She has not returned numerous requests for comment from The Daily Caller since December.
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http://www.dailyprogress.com/opinion/opinion-editorial-no-answers-in-withheld-uva-report/article_2f6d5d56-58ca-11e5-bd4d-8741f6a454b1.html


Opinion/Editorial: No answers in withheld UVa report

The Daily Progress | Posted: Sunday, September 13, 2015 12:00 am

From being accused — perhaps wrongly — of caring more about its public image than about the safety of its students, the University of Virginia now has taken a stance that seems to assert more concern about its students than about its public image.

The decision might appear virtuous on the surface; however, it might not, in fact, best serve either the university or its students.

The university has decided not to release an independent review of its actions surrounding last fall’s devastating Rolling Stone article, in which the university was portrayed as harboring a “rape culture.”

The article soon fell apart as unsubstantiated under the deeper scrutiny of other media and by many of the people directly affected, and a Charlottesville police investigation later found that no evidence existed to support the rape allegations made by the central figure in the story, a UVa student portrayed only as “Jackie.”

In making its decision, the university is relying in part on a letter from a U.S. Department of Education official to Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring. The letter acknowledges the value of “transparency” regarding such a troubling scandal but places a heavier emphasis on student privacy. Maintaining privacy is critical to giving students a sense of emotional security, an assurance that if they report a sexual assault their identities are not at risk of exposure. Without that assurance, they might not report sexual crimes, and a “rape culture” — if such were to exist — might persist in the shadows.

At the same time, release of the report might help members of the public — including the taxpayers who help support UVa — to understand just how well the university is coping with the issue of sexual assaults on campus. The problem is widespread across the country, but UVa is of special concern because it already is being investigated by the Department of Education on how it handles sexual assault investigations.

S. Daniel Carter, director of a national campus safety group, said that the UVa case represents “perhaps the most significant conflict of these two issues I’ve ever seen.”

However, we’re not convinced that both values could not be served.

Even the law firm that conducted the investigation for UVa said that releasing at least the executive summary would not violate privacy rights because of “extensive self-disclosure by the student” herself.

The report could be released with the student’s name redacted. Or other steps could be taken to shield only those portions of the report that would tend to reveal the student’s identity, leaving intact portions of the report that might shed light on UVa’s — rather than the student’s — actions.

It is the university’s response, after all, that remains a focus of public policy. And the more information available to the public, the better for everyone in the long run.

By failing to find a way to honor transparency while protecting student privacy, UVa also might be protecting itself from further scrutiny.
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Sep 10 2015, 10:32 AM
Quote:
 
They also said they have not heard from Jackie since shortly after the story fell apart about nine months ago.


Telling, imho.

Why haven't the media sought her out?

(After all, there was no aspect of the lax players' lives they were unwilling to uncover --including the architecture of their houses.)

We know that hoaxes are quite possible. For example, the McMartin pre-school case was a hoax built on lies. Same with the a couple of other pre-school child abuse cases. Complete hoaxes. There are a multitude of urban legends, none of which are true. There's the case of Allen Gell who was in jail at the time a man was murdered. Yet the State of North Carolina withheld evidence and put forth perjured testimony to prove that Gell killed a man far away from his place of confinement.

News organizations are not without blame either. Look at how much of the media convicted thee innocent lacrosse players in Durham in 2006. There, the people were real, but the story was a total fabrication. Any rookie detective could figure that out in a few minutes of investigation. Yet, large swaths of the media, the DPD, 88 faculty members at Duke, (and many others though not so openly), Duke's own administration, Mike Nifong, Tracy Cline and probably the rest of the DA's staff in Durham all believed a lie told by Crystal. When the evidence started to fall apart, they tried to manufacture evidence like the Gell case. And when that failed, they tried concealment of the exculpatory evidence. But, in every case I've referred to above, there was a real live witness or two willing to lie. What if the Rolling Stone took the next step and manufactured a witness? That would not be without precedent. A reporter at the New York Times did it. Mainly to rip off the NYT Company for expense money, but still he got away with falsification for a while. What if Jackie isn't real? Is that out of the realm of possibility? The story works so much better if Jackie is the perfect victim. And who better to be the perfect victim than a work of fiction? Could it be that Jackie does not exist, thus there is no possible way to locate her? No way for her to refute anything the Rolling Stone wrote about her?

Walt-in-Durham
Edited by Walt-in-Durham, Sep 13 2015, 06:28 AM.
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Sep 10 2015, 08:49 AM
http://www.richmond.com/news/virginia/article_d81721f1-af5b-513a-b6cf-930e741e6129.html

Sex-assault prevention leader leaves U.Va. after Rolling Stone 'hell'

Posted: Wednesday, September 9, 2015 3:30 pm

A University of Virginia graduate who served on the governor’s task force to combat campus sexual violence describes the year after the Rolling Stone debacle as “all hell and hopelessness,” Vanity Fair magazine says in a report on the aftermath of the retracted story about a gang rape.

Emily Renda, a 2014 graduate who worked at the university as program coordinator for sexual-misconduct prevention, will go to law school at the University of California, Berkeley, to get as far away as she can from U.Va., the magazine said.

“I don’t want to say it’s been the worst year of my life, but it has been the worst year of my life,” Renda told Vanity Fair for its October edition.

Renda did not return a request for comment. U.Va. confirmed she left her job in July.

In August 2014, when Gov. Terry McAuliffe announced creation of the task force, she spoke on the Capitol steps about being assaulted her first year at U.Va. She served as chairwoman of the task force’s committee on prevention. But in Vanity Fair’s article “Shadows on the Lawn,” Renda tells writer Sarah Ellison, a U.Va. alumna, that she has now abandoned plans to work with sexual assault victims.

Renda said that when she was contacted by Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely, she referred her to five women, all with different stories. The case of Jackie, the eventual subject of Erdely’s story, was meant to represent the lack of support women often receive from friends and family when they report an assault.

Renda and two other U.Va. students who knew Jackie told Vanity Fair that they were shocked to read details of Jackie’s account that were reported by Rolling Stone last November. Their discussions with her had focused mainly on the responses she received and not on the assault itself, they said.

They also said they have not heard from Jackie since shortly after the story fell apart about nine months ago.
I never thought that I would have a single kind word for that "Jackie" creature and/or the Rolling Stone. But here it is. Emily Renda wanted to devote her life to framing innocent men for rape they did not commit - and now she has decided to change her field of activity. If and when she becomes a lawyer, she most likely will champion some sort of destructive causes, simply because a skunk can not change her stripes - but at least she will give it a break.

And just the fact that she has been victimized by "Jacky" and Erdely makes me feel warm inside: it is always pleasant to watch crocodiles eat each other.
Edited by comelately, Sep 13 2015, 08:29 PM.
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https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/22/feds-say-uva-mishandled-sexual-violence-cases


Feds Say UVa Mishandled Sexual Violence Cases
Submitted by Michael Stratford on September 22, 2015 - 3:00am

The University of Virginia in recent years failed to promptly respond to and investigate reports of sexual violence, including those involving fraternities, the U.S. Department of Education said Monday.

The department’s Office for Civil Rights said its investigation determined that the university did not “promptly and equitably” respond to complaints of sexual violence. As a result, UVa was in violation of the federal antidiscrimination law known as Title IX, the OCR report [1] found.

UVa and the Education Department also reached an agreement Monday to resolve the investigation into the university’s handling of sexual assault complaints. The Title IX inquiry was first opened in June 2011.

In one instance, the OCR report says, the university did not schedule a hearing for nearly five months after the university completed its investigation into a female student's allegation of sexual assault and determined there should be a hearing. Although some of that delay was outside the university’s control, the report said, the university was also responsible for “much of the delay through its own actions.”

Another female student in a separate case ended up dropping her complaint of sexual assault against a male student because the university allowed the male student to bring a cross complaint of sexual assault against her just a day before a preconference hearing to discuss her original complaint was set to take place, the report says. The university acted unfairly, investigators concluded, because it thoroughly investigated the female student’s complaint before allowing it to proceed to the hearing stage while allowing the male student’s 11th-hour cross complaint to be heard at the same hearing without subjecting it to similar scrutiny.

And in many other cases, the report says, the university did not promptly look into information regarding reports of sexual assault when the student making the report declined to formally pursue the matter. Even if a complainant doesn’t want a formal investigation, the Education Department has said, colleges and universities are required under Title IX to look into the report of sexual assault to determine whether it needs to take action to protect the broader community.

OCR investigators said that the university “failed to take appropriate action” during the 2008-9 school year in its handling of 21 complaints of alleged sexual assault, some of which included rape and gang rape. In addition, the university similarly did not promptly investigate two reports of sexual assault in 2013 and 2014 that involved fraternities.

The University of Virginia has been a focal point of the national debate over campus sexual assault in part because of a now-retracted Rolling Stone article [2] that told the story of an alleged brutal gang rape at a fraternity there.

Statements by UVa Dean

The OCR report released Monday pointed to the statements made by a UVa official who figured prominently in the Rolling Stone article last November as providing “a basis for a hostile environment for affected students.” (That official, Associate Dean Nicole Eramo, is now suing [3] the magazine and the reporter who wrote the story for defamation.)

Although the OCR report does not identify her by name, it identified statements made by Eramo in a September 2014 interview broadcast on the university’s radio station [3]. In that interview, she said that the university’s Sexual Misconduct Board, which she chairs, is not comfortable expelling a student when the board is only 51 percent certain that the person is guilty of sexual misconduct.

Asked why a student who admits to sexual misconduct during an informal proceeding is not expelled, Eramo said that one is never 100 percent sure what occurred even in spite of that admission. She also said the accused student’s admission of responsibility should be taken into account in any penalty.

The OCR report said that Eramo’s statements “indicated that the university does not consider expulsion as a possible sanction where a finding of sexual misconduct is based on a preponderance of evidence standard or even where there is no question as to the accused student’s culpability because he or she has admitted to the conduct.”

The report continues: “That the university publicized these views in a campus radio interview communicates the official position of the university that limited sanctions would be imposed for sexual misconduct brought to the university’s attention.”

Students interviewed by OCR said that the university’s failure to impose “serious disciplinary sanctions” led them to believe that the university did not take complaints of sexual misconduct seriously.

The department said the university has since updated its policies, which federal officials now consider adequate. UVa agreed [4] to make a series of changes to its sexual assault policies and procedures in order to resolve the Education Department’s investigation.

For example, the university will review all complaints heard by its sexual misconduct board between the 2011-12 and 2013-14 school years to determine whether they were handled appropriately. The university will also submit to OCR for “review and approval” copies of all reports alleging sexual harassment and sexual violence for the previous and current academic years.

“By signing the resolution agreement, we have reaffirmed our commitment to continue taking steps we believe to be an important part of effective responses to sexual harassment and assault -- urgent and complex societal issues of national importance that are challenging institutions of higher education and beyond,” UVa President Teresa A. Sullivan said in a statement provided by the department. “We have already implemented many of the measures identified in the agreement.”

The agreement comes as the Obama administration has, in recent years, more aggressively investigated colleges and universities over their handling of sexual assault. As of last week, the Office for Civil Rights had opened [5] 163 Title IX sexual violence investigations at 139 colleges and universities.
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http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/uva-ocr/104785

September 21, 2015 by Andy Thomason

UVa Had ‘Basis’ for Sexually Hostile Environment, Education Dept. Finds

[Updated (9/21/2015, 3:10 p.m.) with details from the department's findings.]

After a years-long investigation of sexual assault at the University of Virginia, the U.S. Department of Education announced on Monday that “a basis for a hostile environment” existed at the university as recently as 2012.

Among the department’s findings, enumerated in a 26-page letter:

The university did not have policies compliant with the gender-equity law known as Title IX from 2005 to earlier this year.
From 2008 to 2012, the university did not respond promptly and equitably to many complaints that were not filed as formal complaints.
The basis for a hostile environment existed for students from 2008 to 2012, and the university didn’t eliminate it.
Comments made by the chair of the university’s sexual-misconduct board in a radio broadcast in 2014, in which she explained why the board had not expelled students who admitted responsibility for a sexual assault, contributed to the basis for a hostile environment.

In an agreement with the department’s Office for Civil Rights that settled the investigation, the university did not admit to any of the office’s findings, and did not give up the right to contest them “through all legal or administrative proceedings.”

But in the settlement, also released on Monday, the university agreed to make a series of changes, and to submit them to the office for review. Among them:

The university will notify the department if it makes any changes in its sexual-harassment policy, which has been in place since July.
The university will disseminate its notice on nondiscrimination and give proof to the department by November 1.
By November 1, the university must develop sexual-harassment and sexual-violence training for all students and employees involved in the investigation or resolution of sexual-assault complaints.
The university must administer one or more annual climate assessments to students on issues concerning sexual violence.

In a message to the campus announcing the agreement, the university’s president, Teresa A. Sullivan, stressed that its current sexual-harassment policy had been deemed “exemplary” by the department. “By signing a resolution agreement with OCR, we have agreed to take important steps to continue to improve our efforts in this area,” Ms. Sullivan wrote. “We have already implemented many of the measures identified in the resolution agreement, and we will continue to work to strengthen our efforts.”

The Charlottesville campus has been at the center of the conversation about campus rape ever since a now-debunked exposé on the issue was published last year in Rolling Stone magazine.

Clarification (9/21/2015, 5:30 p.m.): A previous version of this post said the department had found a “hostile environment” at the university. While the letter does refer to the university’s failure “to eliminate a hostile environment,” it characterizes what it found as “the basis for a hostile environment.” According to a university representative, that means the conditions for a hostile environment may have existed for students who experienced sexual violence.

http://www2.ed.gov/documents/press-releases/university-virginia-letter.pdf
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/sep/21/uva-changes-handling-of-sex-assault-reports-after-/

UVa. changes handling of sex assault reports after Title IX probe
The Washington Times http://www.washingtontimes.com

The University of Virginia entered into a settlement Monday with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights after a four-year long investigation, changing the way the school handles reports of sexual violence and harassment, officials said Monday.

OCR began investigating UVa. in 2011 because of the university’s “mixed record” of responding to sexual violence and harassment complaints, and for failing to satisfy its obligations under Title IX, which require providing support to purported rape victims.

UVa. President Teresa Sullivan noted that the school has already implemented some of the measures listed in the settlement agreement.

“By signing the resolution agreement, we have reaffirmed our commitment to continue taking steps we believe to be an important part of effective responses to sexual harassment and assault — urgent and complex societal issues of national importance that are challenging institutions of higher education and beyond,” Ms. Sullivan said in a statement released Monday.

Before today’s settlement, there were 106 higher education institutions under investigation by OCR, but the national media shined a light on the UVA probe in November after Rolling Stone magazine published the now retracted story, “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA.”

The story focused on a college freshman named “Jackie” who told the magazine that UVA officials discouraged her from telling police she was gang-raped. The article created a national outcry, and immediately prompted hostile campus protests including a violent attack on the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house where the purported gang rape occurred.

In the November Rolling Stone piece, OCR Assistant Secretary Catherine Lhamon was quoted as sharply criticizing UVa.’s handling of Jackie’s “rape” — a stark contrast to her comments on Monday in which the Department of Education official praised Ms. Sullivan’s “continuing commitment to comprehensive work to assure a safe learning environment.”

The Rolling Stone article is currently the subject of two libel lawsuits in federal court.

Nicole Eramo, a UVa. dean and administrator filed a $7.5 million libel suit in a Charlottesville-based U.S. District Court in May, and three Phi Kappa Psi fraternity members sued the magazine in a New York-based U.S. District Court in July.

According to the OCR statement, “during academic years 2008-09 through 2011-12, and with respect to three specific concerns identified after the 2011-12 academic year, OCR found UVA to be in violation of Title IX for failing to promptly and equitably respond to certain complaints of sexual violence, including in instances in which the university did not promptly investigate information in cases that involved fraternities. OCR also found a basis for a hostile environment for the affected students and that the university failed to take sufficient steps to eliminate a hostile environment and prevent its recurrence for the portion of the investigation that OCR completed.”

As part of its settlement agreement, UVa. has agreed to develop and implement a tracking system for all reports involving alleged sexual violence and harassment, provide related training to all members of the UVa. community and submit all such complaints and university responses to OCR for review.
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After a years-long investigation of sexual assault at the University of Virginia, the U.S. Department of Education announced on Monday that “a basis for a hostile environment” existed at the university as recently as 2012.


It would seem to me that UVa certainly had a hostile environment for males, and especially for frat members, since a mini-riot ensued over false charges (and the rioters were not punished).



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Quasimodo

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After a years-long investigation of sexual assault at the University of Virginia, the U.S. Department of Education announced on Monday that “a basis for a hostile environment” existed at the university as recently as 2012.


POSTER COMMENT at site:


Quote:
 
The feds have way too much time on their hands. UVa, if anything, should be chastised for playing into this War on Men. UVa, some UVa administrators, Rolling Stone Magazine, and Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a disgraced journalist, are all being sued by the fraternity that was slandered in the false rape story. So what do the feds do? Take actions that give that false rape story credence. Disgraceful behavior buy the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education.
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